Running Through the Legs of Goliath

The very next day, Ryan and Lowry took the first step to building the company's structure, hiring Alastair Dorward as CEO. Dorward, who had been consulting for Ryan and Lowry, had previously run Covent Garden soup company, a privately owned business worth about $40 million when he left--he had turned down Ryan for a job there, in fact. Now, he started to woo investors while "the boys," as they are still called within the company, worked on the products and sales--which continues to be how they divvy up their roles. Lowry, who runs the product side, can come across as very much the confident executive, but, as he tips his chair, taps his knuckles and toes, and runs his hands back and forth along the edges of tables, you get the sense that not far beneath that veneer is a kid who accidentally blew up his starter chem set. Ryan, meanwhile, with his pale skin, Nordic features, and blond hair pulled forward in a studiedly unkempt style, looks as if he should be fronting a skinny-tie band in London rather than heading up Method's marketing. And yet, he is totally obsessed with branding, and at every opportunity he will ask near strangers for their impressions of Method.

Fresh from their success at Mollie Stone's, Lowry and Ryan continued the ambush-the-manager approach with independent San Francisco stores; with that sales data in hand, they then went after bigger chains, getting meetings with regional buyers at Ralphs and Albertsons, both of which also took on the products. But the next rung Lowry and Ryan needed to climb, one that would turn Method into a stable, sustainable company, was the conquest of a mass market retail chain. Target was the target.

The boys sent an e-mail to Rashid: "Are you our design genius?"

At the time, in the summer of 2001, Ryan was working to make the design of Method's products more startling. Yes, they'd custom-made the spray-cleaner bottle, but it didn't look that different from what was already on the market. Researching industrial design, he'd become enthralled with the work of Karim Rashid, a New Yorker whose high-end chairs and housewares had made their way into the modern art collections of several museums. So Ryan and Lowry, like lovestruck tweens, spent days composing the perfect e-mail to Rashid: "The design goal is to reinvent the banal dish soap that looks like a relic of the 1950s and sits on every sink across the landscape of America. We want you to approach it not as a packaging assignment but from a product perspective to create an object for the kitchen that is as iconic as a salt and pepper shaker....We will bring fashion and function to a tired category that almost every American interacts with on a daily basis. Anybody can make perfume look good, but it takes a real design genius to find a way to reinvent soap. Are you our design genius?"

Rashid gets about 15 pitches a week, from start-ups and established companies alike, but this one intrigued him. He'd long been preaching the "democratization" of design--that even banal items should look good--and this was a chance to put that into practice. "At first," says Rashid, "I was a little skeptical, only because they would be competing against the P&Gs of the world. It doesn't matter if you have a brilliant idea if you can't build a market very quickly." But after he quizzed them on their strategies for manufacturing, quality standards, shipping, filling, chemical makeup, and several other matters, he decided to come onboard as chief creative officer.

His first assignment was to create a dish-soap bottle. He turned the existing bottles upside down, literally, so the liquid came out the bottom. He worked with Lowry to find colored liquids and put them into translucent bottles so they glowed purple, green, orange, or blue. He removed product claims and almost all text from the label. To hold dishwashing liquid, he created a shape dubbed the "bowling pin," with a bulbous head sitting on an inverted cone. "That one product, not only did it combine innovation with regard to packaging but also with the scent, and it was convenient because it had the inverted bottle," says Mintel's McClain. "Word got out."

This was about the time Target was launching mod advertising campaigns and signing on designers like Michael Graves to give the store verve and to differentiate it from Wal-Mart. Through a friend at an ad agency, Ryan got word to Target's marketing people in late fall '01 that Method had a deal with Karim Rashid. And so, flouting standard protocol and risking alienating the buyers, Method dangled Rashid in front of the marketers: You give us your buyers--who'd previously ignored Method's entreaties--and we'll bring Karim. And it worked.

The fabulous Rashid, standing six foot four and wearing an all-white suit, enchanted the Target team with his mockups of the products; Ryan, Lowry, and Dorward backed him up with sales figures, press clips, and a PowerPoint on Method's approach. "Everybody understood the vision and the product," Rashid says. After a few weeks of haggling over how many units, the pricing, and the merchandising, Target agreed to test-launch Method's dish soap and spray cleaners in 200 Bay Area and Chicago stores.

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