![]() The robot that tests salad spinners, for example, pushes down the plunger 200,000 times. The room is filled with handmade cycle-testing rigs: soldered-together robots, run off Raspberry Pis, that endlessly push and prod and spin OXO products to see what it takes to make them break. She even noted that when a new OXO product gets poor reviews-it happens!-the company will often issue a speedy redesign, seemingly in response to the review.ĭown on the mezzanine level of its giant warehouse building, OXO maintains a torture chamber for kitchenware, a workshop to fulfill the company’s need for incessant product testing. “They’re not just putting stuff out there and letting it lie,” she said. But Lisa McManus, too, pointed to this aspect of OXO’s culture as crucial. ![]() When I heard this, I thought, Well, surely this isn’t that unusual. The innovation, added in the spinner’s fourth iteration, launched in 2016. Years into the life of the spinner, one of OXO’s most popular products, a designer brought in a bicycle brake, which angled slightly in toward the direction of the spin. “It would really vibrate when it ran into the ring,” Mor said. In the first few versions of the spinner, the brake was a round nub, like a pencil eraser. “There was a big problem with it squeaking,” he said. He showed me the prototype’s push-button brake, another OXO innovation. Mack Mor, the head engineer, is an affable mix of bro and dork, with a backward baseball cap and a predilection for enthusiastic monologues about physical principles. These days, the process is simpler: A sextet of 3D printers next to the OXO office bathrooms allows engineers to quickly generate components, making for quicker and more precise design. In the days of the spinner prototype, engineers hand-carved plastic parts or paid specialized workshops to machine them. I lifted the spinner prototype out of the Tiffany box, on which someone had handwritten, “ORIGINAL SALAD SPINNER PROTO DO NOT THROW OUT!” Its lead screw, liberated from the child’s spinning top that inspired its designer, still works, sending the basket merrily whirring in its plastic bowl. “It’s like what you hear about 3M in the old days: ‘Huh, what if I stick this to that?’ ” “There’s a real spirit of play and discovery” to OXO’s innovations, Rosner agreed. “I’m absolutely obsessed,” declared Helen Rosner, the New Yorker magazine food writer.ĭown on the mezzanine level of their giant warehouse building, OXO maintains a torture chamber for kitchenware. (“They don’t have any say!” a top editor there insisted to me.) Nearly 150,000 people follow OXO on Instagram, where the company’s not-particularly-exciting photos of neatly organized pantries full of OXO Pop storage containers garner comments like “They keep food so fresh and look amazing!” Its products also inspire fierce devotion among chefs and culinary experts. OXO rules America’s Test Kitchen picks, too, to the point it makes readers suspicious ATK is in cahoots with the brand. ![]() OXO is so dominant in the kitchen-gadget space that the consumer-recommendation site Wirecutter features a blog post simply listing the 42 OXO products that top its various category rankings. 1 kitchen gadget company in market share, according to market research firm the NPD Group. These days, OXO-pronounced “ox-oh,” not “oh-ex-oh”-is the No. The near-fanatical devotion the company inspires three decades later is a little harder. And it’s succeeded, without ever substantially changing its iconic look-so iconic that the company’s initial vegetable peeler, with its “Good Grips” handle, is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. OXO brought universal design into the mainstream: Its products were meant to be welcoming, accessible, and easy to use for customers of differing abilities and confidence levels. Founded in 1990, it was the brainchild of a housewares mogul who was inspired to create a new kind of product (legend has it) by the struggles of his arthritic wife to peel an apple. ![]() ![]() If you’ve ever stocked a first apartment’s kitchen, or searched the internet for the perfect measuring cup, or asked a friend “Why is your ice-cream scoop better than mine?,” you know OXO. Maybe not, but don’t tell that to the people who love OXO. OXO, with its embrace of dutiful, functional design and every-cook utility, certainly wasn’t Tiffany. But to see this humble prototype-Frankenstein’d out of a child’s toy top and some hand-carved plastic, dull with age-swaddled inside a gorgeous Tiffany box made me laugh. OXO revolutionized the salad spinner, to be sure. ![]()
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