OXO, Remade in Japan

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A salad spinner, one of OXO's best sellers in the U.S., was unceremoniously rejected as "restaurant-sized." Regular nylon kitchen serving tools were declared entirely unsuitable. One-size kitchen tools, as it happens, do not fit all.

Holding Patterns

So OXO hired Japanese native Hideyo Hayami, a former management consultant, to work as the New York-based country manager for Japan and to act as an aide and translator between the two cultures. Hosting informal groups of Japanese friends and families, Hayami quickly identified some serious, but not insurmountable, problems.

"Most Westerners hold a spatula like a tennis racket when they stir, flip, or cook," says Lee. "But the Japanese women we observed cooking all held it like a pen. Clearly the design of the tool had to be entirely rethought." A set of six adjusted nylon server designs was released for the Japanese market only, along with precision tongs and angled measuring cups. Lee declines to share sales figures but says that the redesigns have "paid off nicely."

Meanwhile, the salad spinner was redesigned to be 35% smaller than the original. It's now the brand's No. 1 seller in Japan—and, unexpectedly, it has also proven a hit within the U.S., where the design exposed an entirely unexpected layer of demand.

Culture-Driven Products

The realization that the two cultures demanded such diverse design and strategic thinking subsequently led OXO to reevaluate its own business strategy. Ironic, really, that a company which made its name on principles of "Universal Design" should be so bluntly confronted with the reality that "universal" doesn't mean "global".

Despite the success of the tweaked designs and their longstanding collaborations with U.S. design companies such as Smart Design, TODA, and others, "There were certain products that an American design firm could never understand," he says. "We could educate them, but some things are very culture driven."

So OXO commissioned Form to work on some dry-food containers, and Leading Edge Design and its rock star Japanese head, Shunji Yamanaka, to work on a teakettle and a grater, in development since 2003 and going into stores now. Already the winner of a Japanese Industrial Design Promotion Organization Award the grater is designed to deal with the radish-like daikon, a condiment almost omnipresent at Japanese dinner tables (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/25/06, "The Best Designs from Japan").

Lost in Translation

The grater features a practical, tactile container base along with plastic grating teeth, and the hope is that it will become as stalwart an object in the Japanese kitchen as the potato peeler has proven to be in the West.

The idea that Japanese-prompted design developments could find an additional market within the U.S. did not go unnoticed, another irony given the distinct lack of interest in U.S. designs from the East. It's not so appropriate in the case of the daikon grater, which has to date met resistance from within the U.S. sales force (indeed, this reviewer's attempts to grate her own condiment of choice, Vermont cheddar, were unremittingly disastrous).

Hopes are higher for Form's dry food containers, which were designed for the Japanese market but which will initially be launched in the U.S. market next year. Lee already describes them as "our biggest item ever".

Fail-Safe Venture

Slowly but surely, the expansion continues. As of September, OXO has its own Tokyo office, where four employees handle distribution, sales, and marketing. "It's difficult to be a brand in Japan unless you have an office there," says Lee. Product development is still overseen by the New York office, with early morning/late night video conferencing taking the place of face-to-face meetings with the various design partners.

"Everything is a challenge, everything is new," Lee concludes. "Our Japanese experiment is an evolution. We've been doing well enough to take this kind of venture and we haven't bet the farm on it. If we fail, there are enough growing pieces of the company to compensate." All the same, you get the feeling that failure is not an option.

Helen Walters is the editor of Innovation and Design at BusinessWeek .

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