Marketing December 8, 2006, 11:22AM EST

OXO, Remade in Japan

The housewares maker made its name using Universal Design principles—but it found some of those didn't travel well when it looked East

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It was 2003, and Alex Lee knew he had an issue on his hands. On the surface, OXO, the 13-year-old housewares company he had helmed for nearly 10 years, seemed to be doing just fine. Its iconic "Good Grips" line of ergonomically designed kitchen tools had solidified the company's identity as a design pioneer.

And its mantra of Universal Design, promoting products designed to be usable by the largest number of people, from children to senior citizens, was widely acclaimed and supported by robust sales. Design magazines and organizations loved the brand, bestowing positive press and awards left, right, and center.

Yet Lee knew that in order to keep the tide moving in the correct direction, he needed to take action. "Design awards are all well and good, but they don't necessarily correlate to sales," he says.

Extending the Brand

"I look at the growth of the company as a 3D matrix," Lee says. "Firstly, we need to take our universal design philosophy and apply it to as many categories as are relevant. Secondly, we need to expand and grow channels to make them as diverse as possible. And thirdly, we have to take what we've done locally and apply it to other markets."

Extending the brand's initially kitchen-centric product range to other rooms in the house (there are now 11 categories, including hardware and gardening) and increasing distribution to include big guns such as Lowe's (LOW) and Bed, Bath & Beyond, as well as over 1,000 national mom and pop stores, fulfilled the first two parts of his matrix. But in the last category, he confesses, OXO was falling short.

"We're a small, young company and we'd suffered from the typical American syndrome," Lee admits. "There's the idea that our backyard is so huge that we don't have to bother with anywhere else. I'll never forget traveling in the South Pacific and going into the general store of a town with a population of maybe 2,000 people. It stocked a product by [competitor] Zyliss. And I remember thinking, 'How in the world are they here?' Well, if you're a Swiss company and your market is smaller than New York City, that's how. It was time for us to pay attention."

Aging Population

In the three years since then, that's exactly what OXO has done. And its means of entering the scene as a global player present an insightful case study for international expansion. Not least because OXO manages to remain a company that thinks and acts like a boutique firm, despite its 55 employees and the fact that its owner is Helen of Troy (HELE), also licenser of the likes of Vidal Sassoon, Revlon, and Brut.

First up was a decision on where exactly to focus their global intentions. Instinctively wanting to avoid a peppering approach of randomly scattering the globe with OXO products, and despite the 13 hour time difference from their head office in Manhattan to Tokyo, they chose to focus on the Japanese market. Not least because, as Lee describes it, the Asian housewares market is much less entrenched than Europe, with its century old brands.

There was another factor, too: The largest slice of the Japanese population pie is Baby Boomers over the age of 60—OXO's core audience. In fact, the average age in Japan is 10 years older than in the U.S.

Not a Good Fit

"Japan has even more urgent need for products that are comfortable and easy to use by people with hand strength or dexterity problems," Lee says. "Equally, just as in the Western world, that generation doesn't want products that look or feel like geriatric tools. They want to feel that they're active. The market fit our model and philosophy perfectly."

What wasn't perfect, however, was the feedback from the market when OXO tried to introduce regular U.S. products into Japan. In fact, the response was almost unremittingly negative. Many of their products were laughed out of the room for being too big.