How Being a Design-Driven Company Will Get You From Good to Great by Hall Russ

Author:Hall, Russ...
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-05-21T23:19:15.458000+00:00

Interface Gets in the Face of Business as Usual

Going “green” is all the rage these days, but one of the first companies to see this light, respond to it, and actually benefit at the bottom line was a company called Interface. With net sales of over a billion dollars a year, although not exactly a household name, Interface is the world’s largest manufacturer of commercialized floor coverings.

If you’ve ever had to have a carpet hauled to a landfill, you know that there’s a whopping fee because of how non-biodegradable carpets are. Interface was generating tons of solid, liquid, and gaseous waste during production, not to mention over 920 million square yards of used carpet being heaved into U.S. landfills annually. Ray C. Anderson, CEO, had an enlightening experience in 1994 when he read The Ecology of Commerce, by Paul Hawken. He was not merely moved; he decided to do something about it, and that something involved design.

Changing the business from one that hadn’t given a second thought to its impact on the environment for over twenty years to one making a conscious effort to clean up its act meant reinventing the carpet-making business to become environmentally friendly and becoming aware of how to make positive changes to its product at every stage of its life cycle.

The company’s design consultant, David Oakey, was one of those reluctant to buy into the new vision. When he gathered up a group of people from all over the company to investigate the notion, they came to some surprising conclusions. Chief among these was that they had been designing their products poorly in the first place. They considered ways to eliminate waste when making the products, like using less fiber. They considered what materials could be recycled and ended up eliminating waste in the manufacturing process. They also put an end product that could be recycled at the front end of their considerations, and that, along with the other steps, serendipitously helped lead to two of the company’s most innovative brands.

With one of the products, Wabi, Oakey had asked his manufacturing people if they could make the pile lower. When he kept insisting it be lower than what they came up with, one technician in an outburst of frustration suggested that if he wanted the pile that low, why didn’t he just turn the carpet upside down. That actually worked! Customers loved the simple, minimal look that fit the growing trend toward hard finishes and away from textiles.

Serendipity can be a real part of how a design-driven culture strikes gold. A similar sort of thing happened with Solenium, another breakaway success for Interface. In a discussion about the success of Wabi, someone said that it was a shame the company couldn’t make carpet out of recycled pop bottles the way it did with Teratex, one of its paneling fabrics. That led to the invigorating question of, Why not? The result was Solenium, a carpet with a fabric’s look and feel with the cleanability of vinyl and the serviceability of replaceable squares.

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