Still, for the self-professed design junkie, temptation is never far off. Marchant admits that even after 20 years of studying what design can and cannot do, he is still occasionally lured by beauty into costly experimentation. "Just recently a designer convinced me to go with a cart modification that was visual, magical, and, sadly, a hell of lot less profitable," he says. "But that passion is never about numbers. Sometimes you just have to let go."
Tahl Raz is a reporter at Inc.
Too Cool for School
Design is the Zeppo Marx of management disciplines -- the one that everyone seems to forget. For nearly two decades Richard Boland and Fred Collopy understood that design -- along with intelligence and choice -- comprise the three fundamental pillars of business problem solving (an argument first made by Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon in the 1970s). Yet for nearly two decades they kept design on the back burner.
Then Frank Gehry came along and gave their cause a boost.
Gehry, of course, is arguably the world's most famous contemporary architect, whose inspired, often controversial work includes the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. In 1996, Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, commissioned him to design a new home for the Weatherhead School of Management, where both Collopy and Boland teach. As the project progressed, faculty members with whom Gehry consulted discovered they weren't just getting a building; they were also getting a master class in good management.
What fascinated the professors was the architect's creatively destructive approach to design. "Gehry would present ideas, preliminary sketches, and models, and the faculty would think, 'That's the building," says Boland. "Then later he'd come back with a completely different model, and they would say, 'Oh, goodness, now we're doing something else.' It started to dawn on us that in management we've got this rush to closure, to put one idea out there and push it forward, define it, and work out all the details. Gehry would put an idea out there, get a reaction, then chuck it and do something else."
The $62-million Peter B. Lewis Building opened in June. The inaugural workshop taking place beneath its undulating stainless-steel roof was "Managing as Designing: Creating a New Vocabulary for Management Education and Research." The event -- organized by Boland and Collopy and attended by academics, designers, and managers from around the world -- explored ways of strengthening design thinking in business-school teaching and as an area of research.
"The problem with managers today is they do the first damn thing that pops into their heads," says Boland, who hopes to finally enshrine design in Weatherhead's curriculum. "There's a whole level of reflectiveness absent in traditional management that we can find in design."
The Leader of the Pack
In December 2000, during a meeting at the office of Smart Design, in Manhattan, Richard Krulik finally exploded. The CEO of luggage manufacturer Briggs & Riley was trying to explain his company's ethos to the design firm. But with Briggs & Riley's survival at stake, Krulik found himself failing to do what the company was failing to do in the marketplace: convey the superiority of its products. Grabbing a tote bag, Krulik threw it to the ground and began to stomp on it. "This thing can withstand 500 pounds of pressure," he yelled. "Really, this is a beautiful product! It's like nothing else out there!"
Krulik's company, U.S. Luggage, had acquired the bankrupt brand earlier that year, but the company was still in trouble. Nearly 1,000 travel stores once carried the line, but that number had dropped to 400. Krulik was banking on the International Travelgoods, Leather & Accessories Show in March 2001 to revive the company's reputation. Briggs & Riley was going to unveil something huge. But the CEO didn't know what.
The Smart Design team had three months to devise an answer. They prowled luggage stores, which graphic-design director Paul Hamburger recalls as dispiriting "seas of black leather." But he notes, "Here in this me-too environment was the real opportunity: frustrated consumers needed help navigating what they were buying."
So instead of designing new products, the Smart Design team created a point-of-sale system that sorted luggage into different categories (garment bags, totes, carry-ons), each with color-coded hangtags that corresponded to a reference chart placed invitingly nearby. "We asked, 'What if you could buy luggage the same way you buy dinner in a Chinese restaurant, where you can order different entrÉes to make a meal?" says Hamburger.
The designers devised a novel identity system of icons and photographs for the hangtags. The icons -- thumbnail drawings of a cube with a pull-out handle or a rectangle with a hook at the top, for example -- explain wordlessly how a piece of luggage will be used. The photos (see the examples below) suggest origins and destinations and all the points in between where traveling people come to rest.
Briggs & Riley's new labeling was a hit. Since the trade show, the number of stores carrying its products has nearly doubled, as has the average purchase per store visit. "If we convey the breadth of our line and how it works together, what was once a one-piece sale for $300 becomes a three-piece sale at $600," says Krulik.
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