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The new inventors
[Fri 22/07/2011 10:25:49]
 These days, you would barely raise an eyebrow over someone who used a smart phone or even drove a Smart Car, so it goes without saying that the IQ of design just jumped a few points higher. An enhanced intelligence is permeating every facet of our daily lives and from our kitchen utensils and cars to our homewares and gadgets, we have come to expect brain power to play a major part in inventions, if not the role of the protagonist.
This is a trend Alex Gransbury, founder of Australia’s innovative Dreamfarm, and inventor David Holcomb, who established Chef’n Corporation in the US, have cottoned on to. Curious and quirky yet fun and functional, every product dreamt up by these creative minds is as close as an inanimate object comes to possessing the faculty of intelligence.
Products with brain power
Today’s consumers have been nurtured by this recent surge of ‘smart’ products that often accomplish several things within the one design. Gone are the days when a kitchen utensil played a single role—nowadays, you can find household objects and cooking equipment that tick multiple boxes. By having one versatile product instead of three, consumers can save on storage space, save on cost by purchasing just one item and usually save on time as well. As a retailer, you can’t go wrong by romancing this new breed of customers with design savvy products with brain power that cater to and simplify their busy lives.
“Who wouldn’t want to go to a place where everything has been considered, when there are no fads or gimmicks, just wall-to-wall beautiful, new ideas that solve problems?” Gransbury asks, considering the potential of the ‘smart’ products retailing scene. Earlier this year, Gransbury launched one of Dreamfarm’s smart new inventions—the BBQ Clongs, which take their name from the phrase ‘click-lock sit-up tongs’. While they are similar to your humble household tongs, Dreamfarm’s new and innovative product offers a great deal more.
They feature a spring loaded handle, lock function, an in-built sausage cutter and tips that are designed to pick up small food morsels as well as scrape barbeque trays clean. The handles feature a unique bend that lifts the tips up and away from the bench top, keeping your cooking surface clean and your utensils hygienic. These are the inventions that today’s consumer craves—a tool that accomplishes multiple tasks yet is simple and easy to use.
Holcomb is another clever thinker who has built his Chef’n Corporation on this premise of offering fun products with an element of intelligence. Invented in 1982, his first Garlic Machine was born to answer the need for a product that chopped garlic quickly and finely without it sticking to knives or metal blades or exposing the pungent and long-lasting scent to consumers’ hands.
A genius invention, you simply peel a clove of garlic and place it inside the clear chamber before closing it and running the wheels along a flat surface or bench top. The wheels turn the rotating blades and chop the garlic to an increasingly fine consistency, which the consumer can monitor and tip into a dish when the desired consistency is reached. One of Chef’n Corporation’s most popular products, it has sold vastly in excess of the million unit mark.
.jpg) Solving a problem
It’s been said that if a problem is the question then design is the answer. This rings true for both Holcomb and Gransbury, who believe a product only has a right to exist if it enriches an experience or solves an issue.
“For the consumer, it’s really about trying to solve a problem and make their life easier,” Holcomb says. “All my designs are fun, colourful and most of all clever—they provide solutions to household problems and answers to domestic questions.”
Gransbury agrees and notes with a wry wit that this is a major motivator for all Dreamfarm’s designs. “More often than not product ideas are born from the frustration that things don’t work the way they should,” he says. “Every time I cock my neck back and scream at the sky ‘are you kidding me world?’ there’s a problem there worth solving. If someone’s already solved the problem, I buy their solution. If no one has solved the problem, we do.”
It comes down to the traditional balance between form and function, keeping in mind of course that sometimes the function of more artistic pieces can be to provide aesthetic pleasure. For Chef’n and Dreamfarm, however, their ranges have a more utilitarian focus and a quick glance at their creations sees kitchen utensils and lifestyle products in abundance.
The role of retailers
If designers are shifting into mental fifth gear on one side and if consumers are hungry for clever products on the other, where does that leave retailers? For better and worse, retailers are left smack bang in the middle.
On top of everything else, the role of mediating between designers and consumers has fallen to retailers. Today, you are not just expected to provide the products, your customers now expect you to provide them with an education. Daunting? Definitely. But this also places your store in a position of power. By offering an evocative schedule of in-store events from interactive product demonstrations to exclusive VIP shopper evenings with the designers of your products, you can easily differentiate your store as the primary port of call for consumers who crave an enriched retail experience.
“Most of our retailers are brilliant—they know everything about everything in their store and we love working with them,” Gransbury says. “Our products are inventions so they need more explaining, which is really easy through video so I wish more retailers had televisions playing product videos in store. Customers love them too because they see the product claims being tested.”
While televised product demonstrations are a quick, easy and cost-efficient way to educate consumers and reveal a product’s functionality, interactive demonstrations with designers—or in this case chefs—are a great way to ensure no features are lost in translation between those who design the products and those who use them.
Holcomb agrees, and believes the role of retail has expanded to encompass so much more than it once did. “It’s an educational process,” he says, “it’s the education of the consumer.”
Durability wins the race
For both Holcomb and Gransbury, a product’s durability is one of the most important aspects in maintaining a quality brand image and keeping your customers hooked. “Some people look at this and say, ‘oh, it’s plastic’ but we went to great lengths to make sure it’s plastic that isn’t going to break and that you won’t just throw away,” Holcomb says. “Almost all our products, I guarantee, you can hand down a generation. I’ve seen pepper grinders out there that were our very first pepper grinders and that’s 20 years ago. We don’t make the throw-away stuff.”
This is a sentiment that’s heartily echoed by Gransbury, who designs Dreamfarm’s products with the best available materials to ensure they last a lifetime. If one of your aims as a retailer is to cement your reputation as a purveyor of quality, it goes without saying that having durable pieces on your shelves is a must. When a product goes the way of the rubbish bin, consumers often unconsciously associate the inferior quality of the dubious product in question with your store as a whole, tainting both in the process.
Once upon a time
The power of storytelling should not be underestimated and this extends to the story behind the products as well as the potential for the future stories they are able to create. When you sell a ‘smart’ product you are not just selling a gadget. You are selling your customers a food preparation technique, the ability to produce a gourmet dish, you are saving them time and hassle and most of all you are selling them fine cuisine as an end result.
This all amounts to selling them a true story and promise of an easier lifestyle and the success they are bound to reap in the kitchen when they enter it with your new ‘smart’ product in hand. By seeing products just by their surface attributes you are missing the big picture, though by visualising their potential that is where the magic begins. This is what the designers poured into the products when they created them and this is the reason they went to the lengths to put them into production. Sell this to your customers and they will leave your store feeling inspired and be sure to come back.
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