Design That Moves Business: An Unusual Place for Design

By guest authors Charles W. Bush and Kathy Hwang of 3Strand Innovation, a brand, design and business consultancy

When you look for examples of successful design-driven companies, you typically come across names like Apple, P&G and General Electric. You probably haven’t heard much about Crown Stacker, a warehouse stacker company that won a BusinessWeek International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) for its design innovation. We like the Crown Stacker as an example because, really, who thinks about making cool warehouse stackers? And why on earth would a warehouse stacker company care about design?

Crown invested in creating an internal design team to focus on improving their product, a decision that has shown a significant ROI, with a 90% sales increase worldwide after the company’s new models were released.

What’s the big deal, though? It’s not as if the stackers’ new look is revolutionary. The new styling probably took Crown’s products from a dull 1985 DOS computer look to a nicer 1995 Microsoft veneer. Still, they’ve got a striking use of saturated orange to catch your eye, and there’s a nice reveal to the wheels under the forks that beg for closer inspection. Looking at other products in Crown’s industry, you can see that most companies would never think to invest in the design of such an industrial product. Crown is already a good two steps ahead of most other companies out there, and it has reaped tremendous sales benefits from its design investment.

(Examples of warehouse stackers on the market shown above)

But beyond the form factor, Crown’s major innovation is in its handle re-engineering, which differentiated Crown’s product as the first stacker to be controlled with a single hand. It is this dedication to the user’s movement and comfort that gave this stacker a leg up on its competition. Designers will spend much of their time both riding in these contraptions and watching the typical warehouse worker use them for daily tasks. This ability to dive deep into personal experiences with using a stacker allows designers to see opportunities that go beyond a mere facelift to the product. That, mixed with many hours of conceptualizing (drawing, playing, proto-typing and tinkering), may very well have led to that aha! moment of, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could eat my pastrami on rye while lifting hundreds of pounds at once?”

This segment is a part in the series : Design That Moves Business