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The masses have delivered for Target, with double-digit sales growth since Graves' products hit the store last year. "Customers really respond to products that involve new thinking and connect with their souls," says Target v.p. Ron Johnson, who launched the Graves line before switching over to Apple's business-development team. Not surprisingly, the department-store chain, based in Minneapolis, Minn., has become the talk of Madison Avenue, not to mention Main Street. And this year, as Target nears the opening of its 1,000th store, Graves has been joined by the doyen of design, Philippe Starck, another Alessi regular, and Target's hometown hipsters, the young design team Blu Dot. Says Dziersk: "This is the principle that began with the Bauhaus: everyone should have access to beautiful things."
We have technology to thank for that access. "We used to wish we had the technology to do things," says Ian Schrager, the man who pioneered the affordable-boutique-hotel trend. "Now technology is giving us things we don't even know how to use yet." London hotel guests in Schrager's St. Martin's Lane can alter the color scheme of their room simply by adjusting a knob next to the bed. Computerization and new materials have made production of just about anything cheaper and more efficient, and quality easier to maintain.
The combination means that form no longer has to follow function for a product to be profitable. Carmakers like Toyota can afford to gamble on a quirky-looking car like the new Echo, jam it with extras and sell it for less than $10,500. Sony miraculously rescued its personal-computer business by introducing the ultraslim Vaio, a silver-and-purple machine that, when you come right down to it, does little more than any other laptop; it just looks and feels a lot better.
Nothing underscores the technological revolution better than plastics, long viewed as cheap and ugly. Not since the early-20th century popularity of Bakelite has plastic been so loved. Polypropylene, for instance, the plastic that has been around since the '50s, can be molded so smooth it is almost sensuous, and it takes dyes like silk. German design firms Authentics and Koziol have made much hay out of plastic's new pizazz. Koziol's spaghetti forks with a smiley face, ice-cream scoops with eyes and the "Tim" dish brush with legs are some of more than 300 "cutensils," as they're known, that flew off shelves of American stores last year.
"I had no doubt these would sell in Chicago, New York and Boston," says Elliott Zivin, president of Koziol's U.S. distributor, Majestic. "But they're selling like crazy in Bogalusa, La., and west Texas." So much so that Zivin is bringing in 100 more plastic "blobjects"--another nickname--this year. Shopping for household items is no longer dutiful; it's part of a person's articulation of his or her personal style. Everything is an accessory. It could be coincidence that manufacturers started to think more about making household products fun not long after men started shouldering some of the burden around the home. It could be.