inside the studio: method products

Check out this great article giving us all a peek into the method offices, and how they work!

Inside The Studio: method Products - the dieline

Our first glimpse inside the walls of Method Products proved to be somewhat of a surprise. Method’s close proximity to the city’s financial center gave us the impression we were about to walk into a rigid and sterile office space. Those feelings were soon expelled, as we entered a space that was casual and full of quirky touches. We met with Josh Handy and Sally Clarke, VP of Industrial Design and Design Director of Packaging, respectively. Both native New Zealanders, their accents came through as we touched on everything from their careers at Method, creative processes, and of course – working together as a married couple.

How did you get involved at Method?

Josh Handy: “I met Adam and Eric, the two founders, when I was working in New York at Karim Rashid Studio. This was back in 2000-2001 and they sat down across the table for Karim and me and said, ‘we want to change the world of cleaning. We want you to design a dish soap for us, and we want it to be the most revolutionary dish soap every created.’

We thought, this sounds all right. ‘How much money do you have?’

‘Uh, none.’

‘So what sort of distribution do you have?’

‘None’

Karim and I were kind of like, ‘uh-huh uh-huh, yeah see you later’

He and I had a chat afterwards and we thought; we’ll spend three days on it. We will try to get some shares off them -because at the time it was the dot.com boom, everyone was going for equity and talking start ups. We thought, what the hell, we’ll take a punt on it. We worked on it and we came up with the idea for the upside down dish soap. They took that design and took it to Target and Target said ‘We love it, let’s do it but you have to be on the shelves in 16 weeks.’”

Oh my gosh…

“They had to be there on the shelves in 16 weeks, so it was crazy trying to get the formula done. The bottle needed to be sourced, manufactured, tested, and all of that stuff. It was a nightmare and it turned out to be a bit of a disaster, because the bottles started to leak. And they were all on the top shelf. There are great Method legends of people going around and wiping down Target stores, getting all the soap off the leaky bottles! [Laughs] That kind of set the brand off.”

[After a brief move to Australia Josh had a chance encounter with one of Method’s founders]

“I bumped into Eric at a trade show in Chicago while I was there for my Australian job and we got to talking. He was like ‘You should come work for me.’ This is the short story, there’s a much longer story which is kind of fun. [Laughs] So we kind of made that happen.

So about 4 and a half, almost 5 years ago, we turned up here in San Francisco to work for Method. There were like 35 people. Its been a bit of a ride ever since..."

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