Caus­ing a Disruption

Two Kiwi design­ers are play­ing on the big stage in the US. Words: Frank Nelson

Josh Handy and Sally Clarke at Method Home.

The job title of “Dis­rupter” on Josh Handy’s busi­ness card is per­haps the first indic­a­tion of the edgy, slightly irrev­er­ent nature of some com­pan­ies – and some design­ers – in Cali­for­nia.
“It’s about hav­ing a dis­rupt­ive product,” explains Handy, a New Zea­l­and indus­trial designer now firmly estab­lished on the West Coast of the United States. “You can’t afford to blend in or offer the same exper­i­ence as any­one else.”

Handy and his wife, Sally Clarke, a graphic designer who’s also a Kiwi, both work for Method Products, a young San Fran­cisco com­pany offer­ing around 100 envir­on­ment­ally friendly house­hold clean­ing
and personal-care products. That’s becom­ing an increas­ingly crowded field, as almost every man­u­fac­turer now trum­pets a long list of “green” cre­den­tials. Add acres of super­mar­ket shelves groan­ing under the weight of sus­tain­able, envir­on­ment­ally respons­ible clean­ing products, and Method would seem to have its work cut out.

But the com­pany, with just under 100 staff, a base near Chicago and a small office in Lon­don, is doing remark­ably well, thanks partly to what Clarke calls “a cul­ture of being unconventional” – an approach that worked well for the likes of Google and Yahoo.

“The basic the­ory is that if you fol­low con­ven­tional prac­tices you get con­ven­tional res­ults,” says Handy, who makes it clear that little about this com­pany, from its product for­mu­las to the con­tain­ers they come in, is conventional.

That approach starts at the top. Own­ers Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry, both in their thirties, are not above a little humour­ous hyper­bole, describ­ing their all-natural products as “gentler than a thou­sand puppy licks” and “able to detox tall homes in a single afternoon”.

The com­pany has also recruited a small army of about 20,000 advoc­ates – of whom roughly 2500 are what Handy describes as “hardcore” – who march under the quirky ban­ner “People against dirty”, writ­ing let­ters, blog­ging and gen­er­ally test-driving and pro­mot­ing Method’s products.

Besides being good for the planet, the company’s aim is to make its products beau­ti­ful to look at. “Clean­ing products often spend a lot of time out on coun­ters and are highly vis­ible,” says Handy.
Since we have to live with these products, mostly bottles, why make them ugly, with scream­ing graph­ics, he asks, when they can be sym­path­etic to the home, dec­or­at­ive… and different.

One of Handy’s con­tri­bu­tions in the battle to stand out is Lil Bowl Blu, a toilet-bowl cleaner delib­er­ately designed dif­fer­ently from the ubi­quit­ous toi­let ducks clut­ter­ing mil­lions of bath­rooms.
Incid­ent­ally, Lil Bowl Blu is so green and friendly it’s safe enough to drink. Accord­ing to Handy, com­pany co-founder Ryan has been known to down shots of the toi­let cleaner just to show vis­it­ing journ­al­ists what whole­some ingredi­ents Method uses!

L'il Bowl Blue.

Part of Method’s philo­sophy is to pro­mote the free flow of inform­a­tion, ideas and com­mu­nic­a­tion inside the com­pany, and one res­ult of that, says Clarke, is a greater role for design­ers who are involved at every stage. She says in a tra­di­tional man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pany, design con­sultan­cies are often brought in only at the end of the pro­cess, per­haps for input on some­thing like the label. But at Method, she and Handy are part of the decision-making pro­cess right through from product devel­op­ment. For Handy, the main dif­fer­ence between work­ing in the US and New Zea­l­and is the sheer size of the mar­ket. “You can do things here at a scale you can’t ima­gine in New Zea­l­and or Aus­tralia,” he says.

“New Zea­l­and has some great [design] com­pan­ies but the scope is so lim­ited. This is the mar­ket for design work. You can be really influ­en­tial as a designer here… you just have this huge stage to play on.”

That’s cru­cial for an indus­trial designer like Handy, who sees America’s vast mar­ket­place as vital to his work. “I look at my career in terms of how effect­ive I’m being in chan­ging beha­viours,” he says. “We’re design­ers, not artists. We need solu­tions that pro­voke social change.”

The change Handy and Clarke, par­ents of two young boys, are cur­rently look­ing for is to get toxic chem­ic­als out of people’s homes. “Design is a Tro­jan horse for that… it’s an issue you can be pas­sion­ate about,” he says.

Handy, who’s 40, and Clarke, 39, took the long route from Auck­land to San Fran­cisco, stretch­ing the trip to a dozen years with sig­ni­fic­ant stops along the way to work as design­ers
in Lon­don, New York and Sydney. Born in Wel­ling­ton, Handy atten­ded Auck­land Gram­mar School and earned a degree in mech­an­ical engin­eer­ing at Auck­land Uni­ver­sity before spend­ing 18 months com­plet­ing a mas­ters in indus­trial design in Sydney.

Mean­while, Clarke, who was born in Lon­don and grew up in Auck­land, nailed down a three-year graphic design degree at the then Auck­land Insti­tute of Tech­no­logy before join­ing Curi­ous design con­sultancy to work on brand­ing and packaging.

Handy returned to Auck­land, devel­op­ing bench-top kit­chen and cook­ing appli­ances at Robin­son Indus­tries, but after three years he and Clarke headed to Eng­land to test their design skills in Lon­don.
There, Clarke worked in brand­ing and pack­aging for major super­mar­kets and com­pan­ies such as Nestlé and Cow and Gate, while Handy joined Frazer Design­ers, focus­ing on hand­held, high-tech com­mu­nic­a­tions devices.

Three years later the couple headed for New York where Clarke was design dir­ector with Manhattan-based Corner­stone Stra­tegic Brand­ing, lead­ing a team whose port­fo­lio of food and beauty products included house­hold names such as Per­rier, L’Oréal and Nestlé.

Handy, who ini­tially led design engin­eer­ing at Des­key, embarked on an MBA in design man­age­ment through the Uni­ver­sity of West­min­ster, in Lon­don, adding a busi­ness per­spect­ive to his proven tech­nical and aes­thetic design skills.

Then in late 2000, he moved to the stu­dio of legendary global designer Karim Rashid where, over the next three years, he worked on a num­ber of award-winning pro­jects, includ­ing one for a cli­ent called Method Products. The birth of their first son and linger­ing memor­ies of the 9/11 ter­ror­ist attacks promp­ted Handy and Clarke to leave New York, make a 2003 Christ­mas trip back to New Zea­l­and, then head for Aus­tralia. Rashid says he was sorry to see Handy go.

“What ulti­mately makes a great designer is a per­fect bal­ance of left and right brain. If you are too right brain, you are too artistic, sub­ject­ive and in turn will never get work to the mar­ket­place; if you are too left brain then inev­it­ably you can do com­pet­ent, object­ive but very uncre­at­ive indus­trial design.

“Josh is a nice bal­ance of both and that’s what makes him a great designer that I was sorry to lose. But he went on to work with one of my cli­ents and is con­tinu­ing to shape this world into a more beau­ti­ful, bet­ter place.”

Set­tling in Sydney, Handy joined House­wares Inter­na­tional (HWI), a publicly-traded con­sumer goods whole­saler sup­ply­ing mar­kets in New Zea­l­and, Hong Kong, the US and Canada. Although the com­pany was put­ting out about 2000 new products a year and win­ning design awards, everything was on a frus­trat­ingly smal­ler scale than Handy had grown used to in New York. So after two years, he and Clarke were once more eye­ing the Big Apple.

But mean­while, Handy had again crossed paths with Method Products, meet­ing Eric Ryan at a Chicago trade show, and when Method offered him a job in early 2006, the couple chose San Fran­cisco over New York. By then the pair had a lot of design industry exper­i­ence and cred­ib­il­ity, so it was no sur­prise that within a year Clarke, who ini­tially freel­anced at Method, was offered a full-time pos­i­tion head­ing pack­aging and graphic design.

“New Zeal­anders in Lon­don and the States have a great repu­ta­tion,” says Handy, who thinks a cer­tain instinct for design is almost part of the Kiwi character.

“Grow­ing up, they are always look­ing out­wards at other coun­tries and cul­tures, and are very aware glob­ally. They are par­tic­u­larly attuned to trends and savvy about what’s going on.

“I still think per­haps New Zea­l­and design­ers should travel the world as much as pos­sible but really New Zea­l­and is pretty progressive.”

- From ProDesign 105 with addi­tional images.

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