Brands Create Customers

Home Depot has announced the creation of Orange Works, a new innovation and design venture with Arnell Group to design home products featuring sleek design and enhanced functionality. The products will appear under new Home Depot brands, such as Home Hero (TM). The idea is to boost sales at Home Depot stores with a line of nifty products that you might see in an Ideo link, or in Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools.

Home Depot retail certainly needs a shot in the arm. Sales have been falling.

Design chic in a warehouse?

There’s some precedent for adding a high-style line to otherwise utilitarian offerings. Target has done well with a design line by Michael Graves, which has helped differentiate Target from the bleakscape of Wal-Mart. But Target is an accessible venue from the get go. Home Depot stores are impersonal navigational nightmares. Venturing into a warehouse designed for forklifts to look for objects of design would seem rather daunting, if not implausible.

Innovative home products with design chic would be much more accessible at Home Depot’s Expo Design Centers, where they would fit right in with the stylish kitchens, bathrooms, lighting, appliances, and the like. Unfortunately, the Expo centers don’t have the traffic of the Home Depot warehouses.

Towards an “Apple Store” of home products

The real solution would be neither A or B above. It’s for Home Depot to reinvent home product retail by creating a new venue for high-design, high-functionality home products. This would be an “Apple Store” of home products, expertly designed for customer interaction, showcasing the best-designed tools and home products that any mall tripper might be expected to buy. (No forklifts allowed.) It would also be a premier “gift store for guys.”

Arnell Group could certainly handle the design end. The key issue is whether Home Depot would be ready to take this next step up in retail.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 11:24 am and is filed under Brand Innovation, Retail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.