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In 1999, a new kettle changed everything. It was blue, bold, and sold at Targetnot in a design boutique, not in a museum shop, and not in a luxury department store. This wasnt just a new product launch, though. It was the beginning of a seismic shift in how design, retail, and brand partnerships operate. This was the first time a high-end design firm joined hands with a mass market retailer. Suddenly, Design for All wasnt our tagline; it was a new strategic ethos. Today, nearly every major retailer has experimented with design collaborations. But despite the proliferation of partnerships, only a select few have truly moved the needle. Why? Because great collaborations dont start with a product. They start with a shared philosophy and deep strategy. The blueprint: What we learned at Target Michael Graves Designs groundbreaking partnership with Target wasnt successful just because the products were beautiful and affordable. It worked because both organizations came to the table fully committed with complementary strengths: Target had retail scale and marketing mastery; MGD brought world class design and user empathy. Together, we created something neither could have done alone. This wasnt about “us and them;” it was about we and together. We were both going to Design for All. MGD wasnt a vendor. Our designers became extensions of Target, embedded within their merchandising, sourcing, product development, and marketing workflows. That cross-functional integration was radical at the time. Today, its more widely understood as essential. Collaboration is a structure, not a slogan At Michael Graves Design, weve taken what we learned and turned it into a method that we use with all partners. Our Direct-to-Retail Partnership Guide outlines a rigorous, multi-phase approach, from early benchmarking and ethnographic research to final prototype approvals and packaging integration. Often, MGDs role is to demonstrate to siloed organizations the importance of cross-functional collaboration throughout the entire product development process. This approach leads to enhanced efficiency, broad cultural buy-in, and authentic innovation. Five key elements of our process include: Shared discovery: We start by collaborating with our partners merchant teams to identify product categories and individual items ripe for innovation, using methods like in-store interviews and ethnographic research to recognize product opportunity gaps. We involve marketing teams in the consumer research to ensure that the consumers voice makes its way into marketing messaging. Integrated ideation: Retail merchant teams weigh in on the hero products and feature sets for each category, becoming the primary focus for our ideation and presentation. To make selections among alternative design directions, we use mood boards, sketching, 3D modeling, 3D printing, and renderings. Collaborative vendor engagement: All product designs change during the design-for-manufacture (DFM) phase, driven by manufacturing optimization methods. Design deliverables include detailed 2D and 3D documentation, specification packets, and brand books to eliminate ambiguity; but once the factories get involved, designs always evolve. As the design partner, we ensure design intent and innovation is maintained. Ideally, we loop in vendors and factories early, to partner in feasibility and optimization, and account for factory capabilities, tariff efficiency, vendor matrix, and other factors. With early engagement, factories become true partners, open to experimentation and spurring innovation. End-to-end packaging and messaging: From dielines to social media standards, we ensure the design voice carries through every marketing touchpoint, the true genius of so many national retailers. This process works because its designed around learning, trust, cocreation, and an established division of responsibility, emphasizing each partys truest strengths. Retail today: The stakes are higher than ever Retail today is hypercompetitive. Consumers want products featuring original design and functional enhancements reflecting their own values. This is a high standard, which means standing out is harder and more important now. Legacy retailers are not just competing with one another; theyre competing with direct-to-consumer brands, Amazon, and global marketplaces that redefine convenience and choice. This is why design collaborations remain essential for retailers. When done right, exclusive design collections carry meaning beyond price. They create items that shoppers cant find anywhere else, brand differentiation, drive repeat foot traffic, and foster deep emotional connections with consumers. Thats where a direct-to-retail design collaboration becomes a powerful strategic asset. It delivers the prestige of a national brand with the economic structure of a private label. Design brands bring national brand cache, elevated aesthetics, and the cultural relevance of good design, while enabling factory direct sourcing that supports retailer margin goals. It allows retailers to tell the marketing story with gusto. This hybrid model provides retailers with tools to build customer experiences that are both inspiring and financially sound. What most collaborations get wrong Too many collaborations fail because theyre either surface-level PR plays or hierarchical vendor relationships dressed up as partnerships. A true design partnership means sharing a vision and committing to it, listening to each others expertise, and building something together across all departments for both partners. It also means that a design partner is not a vendor in the traditional sense. They are an extension of the merchant and product development team. It is a modern model where external creativity and strategic insight enhance efficiency and relevance. That requires a new mindset, especially for legacy retailers accustomed to more transactional models. Design for All, still As consumer expectations evolve and the retail landscape transforms again, the question isnt whether to collaborate. Its how. And the answer, we believe, still lies in the art of the direct-to-retail design partnership, because when design and retail truly partner, something remarkable happens. Ben Wintner is CEO of Michael Graves Design.
Category:
E-Commerce
Could it be that the anti-woke movement has become so organized and influential that brands are now building strategies around it? If weve reached that point, then woke-baiting could emerge as a cheap but effective way for companies with stagnant growth to draw attention and change their fortunes. Anti-woke people increasingly seem to vote with their dollars more than woke people. We just saw it go down with Cracker Barrel in August. When Cracker Barrel changed its logoand removed an elderly man sitting judgily in a chairTrump weighed in and it affected the stock. Cracker Barrel and Budweiser: A case study One could argue that Cracker Barrel used woke-baiting as a marketing strategy, though Im not. I do not know what was said in Cracker Barrel meeting rooms about any plan to wokefy the new logo, nor if the executives had any idea that Donald Trump Jr. and President Trump would publicly weigh in on their decisions. They got a Billion Dollars worth of free publicity if they play their cards right. Very tricky to do, but a great opportunity, the president wrote after Trump Jr. spotlighted the companys logo switch on August 20th, shortly after the market closed. The stock market hated the new supposedly DEI-driven logo. Before Trump Jr. made his comments, the stock closed at $59.02. But on August 21, the day after the Trumps criticized the logo, Cracker Barrels stock dropped over 7% to $54.80. Anti-woke people did the same thing when Budweiser featured transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in its ad. The company lost an estimated $27 billion over this. Or consider Target reporting its first quarterly sales drop in 6 years after the 2023 anti-woke response to the retailers Pride clothing collection. The company has faced extended struggles with the CEO recently resigning and the stock down 37% in the last year. Woke consumers dont speak with their money What these instances have in common is proving that anti-woke people arent afraid to speak with their dollarswhether in the stock market or in the grocery store aisleto make their point heard. But woke people dont act in the same way. If woke people wanted to support wokeness, they could do the same thing and vote with their dollars. Woke people could have bought Budweiser beers after the Dylan Mulvaney ad. Woke people could have bought Cracker Barrel stock after the initial logo change. But they didnt. In fact, when Cracker Barrel announced it would change the logo back to the original, anti-woke people again made their voices heard in the stock market, and by the close of that day the stock was at $62.33, or 5.6% higher than before the logo change. If woke consumers dont consistently support causes with their dollars, why would marketers feel any incentive to further those causes? At a certain point, woke-baiting may become the only rational reason to lean into what many in this country believe to be important progress. Because when brands appear to act in earnest, they often end up being left out to dry. To me, it raises the question: Why do these causes seem so important to some in the political sphere, yet they dont appear willing to, say, buy Budweiser stock to actively support the ideals they champion? Take Cracker Barrel as an example. If its recent marketing move was intentional woke-baiting, it worked. By sparking outrage, the company generated headlines, conversations, and relevance at a time when its sales have been stagnant. Now, its unlikely that Jensen Huang of NVIDIA will be dabbling in any woke-baiting gambits anytime soon. But the broader takeaway for executives might be this: For companies with flat growth, a risky, lightning-in-a-bottle strategyprovoking media, influencers, and even politicians through woke-baitingcould be worth the gamble to capture attention and, ultimately, increase company value. George Kailas is CEO of Prospero.ai.
Category:
E-Commerce
Creativity has never been in higher demand, yet agency margins are collapsing. An industry built on the promise of differentiation risks drifting into a sea of sameness, squeezed by automation, technology, and efficiencies. The paradox is clear: As creative agencies are becoming commodities, they are falling victim to the very market forces clients pay them to escape. From my vantage point, the only way out is innovation. Transient advantage: The new norm I was recently introduced to the work of Columbia professor Rita McGrath, whose 2013 essay on transient advantage in Harvard Business Review helped crystallize what Id already been feeling in our industry. Her premise is simple but urgent: Advantages no longer last. What once endured for decades may last only months. Success doesnt come from defending a moat, but from riding a wavespotting opportunities early, scaling them quickly, and having the discipline to abandon what no longer serves. McGrath frames innovation as a cycle: launch, ramp up, exploit, reconfigure, disengage. Repeat. In practice, when growth slows the instinct is to cut. Trim overhead, automate tasks, streamline workflows. But you cant cost-cut your way to relevance. Cuts may buy time, but they dont build a future. Brands that made innovation an operating model Chewy began as a pet-supply e-commerce site. But margins in retail are razor-thin. So they moved into care, not just commercelaunching televets, pet insurance, and vet clinics. By owning the pet lifecycle, Chewy expanded beyond boxes of kibble into services. A24 could have remained just an indie studio. Instead it built a direct-to-consumer engine. AAA24 turns films into membership, merch, and magazines. Content fuels commerce, commerce fuels community, and the flywheel spins. MUBI carved out a space in streaming by fusing curation with vertical integration. Beyond its niche platform, it acquired The Match Factory, expanded festival acquisitions, and added theatrical distribution. MUBI is more than a streamerits a self-sustaining ecosystem of discovery and distribution. Each of these companies refused to mistake early success for permanence. They reinvented themselves before the tide went out. Scale hurts, independence helps Large holding companies are engineered to squeeze every last drop from an old model, not retire it. Investors punish operating model shifts. Systems designed for predictability deter reinvention. Independent companies, by contrast, can pivot faster, test freely, and shed legacy models when they no longer serve. Agility beats scale in a world of transient advantage. A call to action At MOCEAN, were making innovation our operating model. Weve launched an Office of Innovation with dedicated leadership, time, and resources to continually test, scale, and retire approaches as the market evolves. Thats also why Im attending the Fast Company Innovation Festival, joining leaders across industries who are wrestling with the same challenge: How to escape commoditization when the old playbooks no longer apply. From where I sit, the era of permanent advantage is gone. Reinvention must be systemic, not cosmetic. Independent agencies like MOCEAN have both the freedom and the responsibility to show what that looks like. Because in the end, the choice is simple: innovation or irrelevance. Michael McIntyre is CEO of MOCEAN.
Category:
E-Commerce
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