Bath Accessories
When I started working at Creative Bath Products, Inc, the company was already well established. They had a large showroom in New York on 5th Avenue and produced 60% of the plastic and acrylic bathroom accessories sold on the US market. That was in 2005, and there was little awareness about plastics and recycling. My work, however, had nothing to do their core production, it was instead to start a new division: CreativeWare Home. For that division, everything was still to be done, and I was responsible for all aspects of design and production of all the product lines. The mission was to design simple, functional, appealing and cost-effective quality bathroom storage solutions for a broad market, essentially sold through large department stores.
While I had just obtained my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Industrial Design from the Cleveland Institute of Art and Design, it was clear that I would need more than just design skills for this mission, and my previous studies in business, material science and public speaking served me well. I was starting from nothing and it was exhilarating. With the VP, we decided the general design direction we were going to take, knowing that the market would remain that of large department stores, increasing our offering to our existing clients and allowing us to keep the current distribution channels, and I started designing. Over two years, I created and presented 11 product lines as well as 4 concept lines, every single item was entirely my design.
A thorough marketing research includes a review of the market. As a designer, I am always wary of looking at competition, as I have to be careful to not accidentally see a design and later, unconsciously incorporate it in my own designs; but as a design director, this was an essential part of my work. I noticed that the collections from competitors had essentially been tubular, and in order to stand out, we thought of doing something more edgy, built out of square stock. Square stock is challenging in that it is difficult to bend while keeping the square profile, that said, it is also more elegant than tubular structures even when they are chromed. For this collection, I was inspired by the Art Deco period, compatible with the materials and the surrounding neighborhood close to the 5th avenue showroom.
The CreativeWare bathroom lines each comprised a toilet paper holder, a lotion butler and a towel holder. I searched for a way to optimize the toilet roll change while keeping it elegant. The solution I came up with does away with any superfluous mechanism, thereby simplifying construction, reducing costs and simplifying the end customer’s experience. When the roll is attached, the holder appears as a single aesthetic line, without any opening, whereas in fact it is a very easy change no matter the size of the roll, which can also easily be stored underneath.
For every item, we started with the retail price. Calculating from that, I would find the material costs, production costs, shipping costs, profit margin at every level, and work within these constraints. Container costs were fixed, and it was up to me to maximize the number of items per container, and reducing the shipping cost per item, thus package optimizing also became a very important part of my design process. In this particular case, I designed the three pieces in order for them to nestle into each other and be able to fit two sets of three items in a single box.
Once I was done with the design, I sent it to production for sample study, and feedback. When making any design I always take into account the materials and production methods. After this part, there was still much work to do. I created the entire catalog, including descriptions, various options for each product along with a corresponding reference system, which I devised. I decided to make it into a binder (which grew into over 100 pages) instead of a large book in order to have the flexibility to make changes and not need to reprint it and resend it all. For the same reason, I placed the pricing at the end of the binder, an easy lookup with the corresponding reference numbers.
Keeping the bottom-line profit through optimizing shipping containers meant that several of the items had to be built at home by the customers and I included instructions in several languages (English, Spanish and French) to address the North American market. In the instructions, I included assembly explanations, along with cleaning and safety recommendations, when necessary.
There were still the marketing campaigns, and the presentations to our clients’ buyers. While I had studied and practiced public speaking, even co-founded my university’s public speaking club as a chapter of internationally renowned Toastmaster’s club, it is only once we find ourselves in a high stakes situation that we truly know how we fare as a public speaker, especially in front of key stakeholders. The presentations were very successful and the products I designed were sold at Bed Bath & Beyond®, Anna’s Linens®, K-Mart®, Walmart®, Sam’s Club® and Target®.
It was wonderful to see my designs in stores throughout the country and I was even happier to see that they sold really well. The first two years, our division made several million dollars in sales. I had to smile when even over fifteen years later, I saw that the products which I had designed, such as the Deco line, were still being distributed. For my point of view, it showed that through my research and intuition, I had understood the market and had been able to design and provide for it. This was a very successful first endeavor, and it proved accurate also in other industries.