Designer Interview: Josh Handy, Method Products Inc.
Josh Handy
Q&A with Josh Handy, creative director of industrial design for Method Products Inc.
By Jennifer Kwok, EditorHow did you get involved with package design and Method?
When I first met Method, I was working for a designer named Karim Rashid in New York. I was the head of product design for him for about three-and-a-half years. Method came to Karim with a design job, and Karim and I created Method’s sort of iconic bottom-dispensing dish soap bottle. That was actually one of the first packaging jobs that I ever did. I didn’t really do packaging before then. I was much more doing general industrial design for all sorts of different clients. After that, we did a lot of jobs for Method.
Then my wife and I had a kid. We were living in New York, and we kind of freaked out and thought that we couldn’t raise a child in that city. I’m originally from New Zealand, so we decided that we would move to Sydney, Australia, because it was close to New Zealand and we would have been closer to our parents so that they could visit. We figured that Sydney was still a big city, so we could find jobs. (My wife also works in design, and she also works at Method now.) We thought that it would be the best of both worlds. So we went to Sydney, and it turned out to be a little bit of a disaster. We were there for about two years before we decided to move back to the States.
During that time, about a year into our stay in Sydney, I traveled quite a bit and bumped into the Method guys at a trade show in Chicago. We got to talking, and at that stage, Method had just gotten to the point in size in which it could think about employing a full-time designer.
I had decided that I wanted to leave Australia, and I had been applying for jobs back in the States with different people, but none of them were panning out. But I did get to go to an interview in San Francisco for another job, and while I was there, I rang up Eric Ryan, one of the founders of Method. I got to my hotel room, and about an hour later he picked me up. We were out on this boat in the harbor zooming around and drinking beer, and I was telling him about how I was looking forward to moving back to New York for this job I was interviewing for. And after the boat ride, we went back to his place and had a BBQ with some friends, and I was thinking to myself, “Man, San Francisco isn’t that bad.”
The next day I had my interview, and I totally bombed it. I think I did everything wrong, and subsequently didn’t get the job. I was so distressed, and I was talking to my wife back in Sydney about it. I told her, “You know, San Francisco is not a bad place, and Method is a good company—we should go and work for those guys.” And I rang Eric up and said, “Hey, about that job, remember?” And one thing led to another and about a year later after getting all the visas and things sorted out, we moved to San Francisco. That was about two-and-a-half years ago. So it’s been a bit of a long journey.
Why do you like Method as a company in terms of design?
Well, Method is very rare amongst consumer product companies. The reason is that the way it was founded, they put forth two guiding principals for the way that the company was going to operate. We call them style and substance. Look at the two founders. We have Eric [Ryan] and Adam [Lowry]. Eric is the marketing guy, so he’s the style guy, and Adam is an environmental scientist, so he’s the substance guy. And what this did as the company got bigger was to make sure that design had an equal emphasis as substance as the company grew. In many companies, design is considered a service to marketing. At Method, design is a partner with marketing. New product ideas and product strategies are just as likely to come out of the design department as they are to come from the marketing department.
When I first saw Method’s packages in Target stores, I was surprised that they were so sophisticated for the mass market. What are some specific goals that Method has when it designs packaging?
We’re a relatively small company, and we’re competing against companies that are thousands of times bigger and that spend thousands of times more money on advertising. So what we decided was that our packaging was going to be our advertising. We’re never going to do television ads or anything like that—they just cost way too much money. So we rely on our packaging to get people engaged in the product at shelf. We talk about things having curbside appeal—the idea that you can walk down the supermarket isle and something will catch your eye about a Method product. You pick it up. You have a look at it. You’re intrigued. You flip over the back of the package and read about the product if you want, or you just put it straight into your cart and buy it. You get home and you put the package out on your counter.
We have this other term that we use, “counter-worthy.” We try to make our packages counter-worthy so that you can leave them out. Your friend might come over and ask, “Hey, what’s that?” And you can say, “This is my cool soap,” or, if you’ve read about Method, you can say, “This is my environmentally friendly soap.” And so we try to get word of mouth going, and we try to make the packages as interesting and as engaging as possible so that people will talk about them, talk about them with their friends, and so people will write about them. And that’s kind of our form of marketing. We make the packages work really hard, to try and be different from everyone else’s and to try to be “disruptive” on shelves.
How would you describe company’s design aesthetic?
Basically, I try to make it simple and iconic. We’re also trying to narrow it down now to be more organic and fluid and feminine—all of those little things. But generally, we start from the function of a product. The function decides the form of what a package is going to look like, and we try to tweak the form so that we can get people to make an emotional connection with the package.
One of the things that I like about Method’s packaging is that I feel that someone has really thought about the design for me.
The other thing that we realized is that these types of packages live in people’s houses for months, and that they’re on display. The last thing you want is for your bathroom or your kitchen to look like a supermarket isle, with your packages selling, “50% more!” or “Now includes blah blah!” You just don’t need that as a consumer. That works on shelf to get you to buy the products perhaps. But at home, why do you need these messages all over your packaging? You really want packaging to be as simple as possible and to not stress you out, to not try to sell to you in your home. I actually did this thing in my bathroom the other day in which I counted all of the brands that we had on display. It turned out to be something like 37 brands that I could see, just by standing in the doorway of my bathroom. And I thought, “That’s just wrong. You shouldn’t have any on display.” So we try to keep the branding as minimal as possible. We try to keep the products as décor-friendly as possible.
What are some of your challenges in designing for the mass-market—cost-constraints, shelf space, etc.?
As a designer today, I think that you’ve got a lot of designers designing $5,000 couches and the like. I think that’s cool and all, but if you really want be impactful and affect people’s lives, you’ve got to be designing at the mass level.
I think that one of the major challenges that we have is that because we’re a mass brand and we’re green, it’s difficult to get paid for being green. For instance, one of the things we did recently is to move all of our PET bottles to 100% recycled plastic (RPET). It’s kind of a real cradle-to-cradle solution, and we had to do a lot of technical work to get it to work properly, but consumers don’t really know that the packaging has become greener. There are some people who will know, but most won’t. It’s technically challenging and more expensive and not something that we would typically get paid for on shelf.
As a small company, are you more nimble and able to make those changes more easily?
I think yes, but also if something goes wrong, we’re more exposed than a big company. There is a risk to doing stuff like that, and we tread kind of carefully. But some of things, like being green, we just do because it’s the right thing to do. But they are expensive to do.
On Method’s new body wash packaging:
The body wash is in a bottle with a flip-top cap. It’s got some beautiful graphics on it. It looks really good. It’s also 100% recycled plastic packaging. Again, it’s cradle-to-cradle, in the sense that it’s made from old bottles. So it kind of completes that cycle. It’s RPET, a mixture of PCR and postindustrial waste. We tried 100% PCR plastic, but the coloring was too brown, so we’re backing off 100% PCR—at least for personal care. For some of our products, 100% PCR works great. We just can’t get a good source for PCR yet. It’s coming, and we know it’s coming, but at the moment, the source plastic for PCR is still too dirty.
You guys really like the clear package colors to show off the color of the product, don’t you?
It’s such a colorful brand. A lot of the people identify with the colors first for Method, so we want to make sure that that keeps coming through.
Aren’t a lot of people are coloring their PCR containers darker to make up for those color variations?
Yes, we looked at that, but the problem is that colored PET doesn’t get recycled. It gets pulled out at recycling centers and put into landfills because it pollutes the clear recycling stream. So in most cases, we’re trying to get it out of our business and stay away from it.
Is the RPET recyclable?
Yes, of course.
Can you describe Method’s kids’ and babies’ lines?
In the baby line, my favorite package is the one with the washcup cap included on the bottle. I have two little boys, and my insight there was that every home I’ve been to in which families have kids, they always have that piece of Tupperware or an old plastic cup in the bathroom that they use to wash their kids’ hair with. And my thought when we were designing the egg-shape cap was that it would kind of cool if we could include a washcup in the packaging. It became the cap that goes over the top of the pump. So rather than just getting a bottle, you’re getting a wash system that has storage built into it. It’s almost like getting a washcup for free.
My favorite package in the kids’ line is the little otter-shaped bottle. You basically squeeze the bottle and soap comes out of its butt. I remember showing it to my kids, and they thought that it was the most hysterical thing.
I noticed that the kids’ and the babies’ lines aren’t overly cute.
The insight there is that really it’s the parent who chooses to buy a product, so you want a package that speaks to them and their own level of sophistication. The baby line is supposed to be sophisticated and really speak to the parents but still also have the nurturing side to it. When you get to the four-, five-, six-, ten-years-old that might like the otter bottle, it’s again one of these things that you want to be fun and engaging but also leave room for them to imagine what kind of creature the bottle’s shape is.
We wanted both lines to be contemporary, rather than showcasing some kind of hokey, licensed character. Do something that’s a bit cool, a bit anime, a bit contemporary. If you come from a certain background, you’d get that. But you don’t have to get it to “get” it.
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