For housewares company Oxo, creating and testing new products requires a lot of stuff. “Our stuff, competitors’ stuff, inspiring stuff, things from other industries. We’re just a giant stockroom of parts and pieces and materials,” says Oxo President Larry Witt.
[Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy Ampersand Architects/Oxo]
Known for its innovative and deceptively simple designs for things like vegetable peelers and salad spinners, Oxo uses all this stuff to figure out where competitors’ products fall short and how previous designs can inform new products. Inspirations range from the internal workings of children’s toys to the click-retract mechanism of a plastic pen. But for all the inspiration this material provided, it eventually became too much.
“We took a look around and realized we were surrounded by stuff,” Witt says. “It was choking us.”
That was about five years ago, and the realization (along with an expiring lease) led Witt to start thinking about a bigger and better office for a company of tinkerers. Working with New York-based Ampersand Architecture, he turned the company’s design prowess inward and began to rethink what a new office could be and how it could address all the clutter and clog.