Designing Success

 
At the most, you want to project an attitude. At the very least, you want them to know this product won't kill them."

Before he started Flying Fish, which is based in Cherry Hill, N.J., founder Gene Muller had worked in advertising. He'd met Bierut on a project and decided to send him a case of beer bottles with blank labels and a note that read, "This space available for good design." He told Bierut that he wanted something fun, something different from the "mountain-range motif" that everyone else seemed to be doing, something that would pop out on the shelf next to a hundred other beers. Bierut sent back several ideas, but the one that Muller liked best was the fish-bone propeller plane. He says the eye-catching imagery not only helped sell his beverage, but the company's merchandise sales (T-shirts, hats, pint glasses, even scrunchies) have been surprisingly strong. "Whenever we go to festivals, we always sell a lot of merchandise," says Muller. "That's been a really nice side benefit."

In some competitive industries, such as the restaurant business, aesthetic appeal is becoming less of an option and more of a necessity. "There are plenty of restaurants with good food. Design is equally as important," says Stephen Starr, a Philadelphia restaurateur whose multiple fine dining enterprises include Morimoto, an ultramodern Japanese restaurant (complete with booths that change color) designed by Karim Rashid. Though Rashid is famous for designing stylish, low-cost home decor items such as trash cans and dish-soap containers, he had never designed a restaurant before. Starr says he chose Rashid because he felt the designer had a great sense of the current Eastern aesthetic. "I wanted something modern and cutting-edge, something you would see in Tokyo today," says Starr, who is opening another Morimoto in New York City this year, this one designed by renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando. While Ando has done restaurants before (as well as churches, shopping malls, and factories), he is best known for the cultural institutions he has designed, including the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum in Japan, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas.

Of course, not everybody's buying the idea that you have to be pretty and spend big bucks to profit. Companies like Newport Furnishings, a Phoenix-based furniture retailer, have enjoyed phenomenal revenue growth by taking the opposite approach. In the case of Newport Furnishings, that meant selling its cheaply priced designer furniture out of a stark, no-frills warehouse. "If you go to a Pottery Barn in the mall, it's really a beautiful presentation. That stuff pretty much sells itself," says founder Chuck Haney. "But there's a big price tag that goes with all of that." And apparently there's room for his strategy--his company has grown 909% since 1998.

Postrel argues that adding flair to your business doesn't have to translate into higher costs and higher prices. Just look at Starwood Hotels, she says. When the company gave its hotels an aesthetic makeover, it kept the same budget but intensely scrutinized its costs. It ended up getting rid of the most expensive piece of furniture in their rooms-- the armoire that most hotels use to hide the television. "They thought, 'Hey, if we get rid of that armoire, we'll have more money to spend on the bed, the chair fabric, or a larger desk," says Postrel. "Better design is not necessarily something that has to be superexpensive. A lot of times it's just a matter of thinking about it."

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