Umbrella innovation that changes our daily lives (Part 2)

Not overlooking inconveniences or frustrations

– At Marna, you are developing “miscellaneous goods for daily life” that span every aspect of life, from the Shupatto Umbrella, a full-length umbrella to kitchen, bath and bathroom products, cleaning products, shopping bags, and other general goods. When it comes to items for everyday use, such as kitchen tools, how do you find a perspective allowing you to create something different from what has come before?

Ryota Taniguchi (Design Group Manager, Marna Development Department) I think what perhaps runs through everything is the question of whether or not we have been able to observe people’s daily lives. The Shupatto Umbrella is a product that was born out seeing the nuisance that cleaning up wet umbrellas on rainy days caused people. I think it’s the difference between whether you see an inconvenience as something which can’t be helped, simply a matter of course, and disregard it without giving it a second thought, or whether you observe it and sense a particular cause.

– It’s true that people try to fit in with the way things are, or put up with them. Or we tend to think that the problem lies with us because we don’t know how to use the item properly. We are not often aware of it as an issue with the item.

Taniguchi With any product, there are issues that users themselves cannot recognize. However, if you take your time observing people and watch them carefully, you can sometimes discover the problem. For example, if you take a video of a scene from the cooking process using fixed point observation, you may see that there is an issue in a certain place. If you take a bird’s eye view, you’ll notice some unnatural action or something which is not going smoothly. I think these things are important.

– You observe people’s lives every day, don’t you?

Taniguchi First of all, as our fundamental way of thinking, the perspective of seeking whether we can “make something better” in our daily lives right now is key. Since the days of Yoshiki Nagoya, the previous CEO, we have been asked almost every day “Can’t we make it better?”, so I think that kind of mindset has taken root.

– Does that mean that you want to make every aspect of daily life better?

Taniguchi To achieve this, it is essential to observe not only people but also the things in the world today. We carefully analyze what the issues are between things and people and how to make these better. Going on to develop a hypothesis and repeat the process of trial and error is our product development.

– For example, Marna’s Butter Dish with Slicer comes with a dedicated slicer attached, so you can cut the butter as thinly as you need each time you use it. This is a perspective which we would have expected to exist but didn’t. Was it also born out of observation?

Taniguchi If you buy butter from the store in a 150 g or 200 g pack, you’ll either cut it with a knife every time or use a stainless steel cutter which cuts it into the size of butter served at a hotel all at once. The cutter seems convenient, but it actually gives thick slices of butter which don’t melt easily when spread on toast. The development of this product started when we thought about how we could slice it more thinly.

It’s also a nuisance to take out a tool to cut the butter every time, or to store it wrapped in silver foil. So that people can enjoy butter more easily, we affixed a special cutter that can cut butter thinly to the back of the lid. A rubber seal is attached to the lid to prevent odors from spreading and to keep it tightly closed so that the product stays fresh.

Also, butter is used both during cooking and at the dining table, so we wanted to create a simple design that does not stand out even when it is on the dining table.

Marna’s design has changed

– Just like the Shupatto Umbrella, the Butter Dish with Slicer is an unobtrusive design. I feel that they aim for both functionality and beautiful form.

Taniguchi Of course, I think this can only happen when an item fulfills the function for which it was originally designed, but we will go on considering how to achieve a balance with beauty within these parameters. I think that Marna is distinguished by maintaining quality while arranging the appearance so that it fits in with daily life.

As the person in charge of the design team, I ask the product designer to show me the product which they are in the process of developing, and if I feel that the design is “not something which you would expect from Marna,” I sometimes modify it.

– I feel as though Marna’s particular design style became established from a certain point on. Was there anything which prompted this?

Taniguchi I think that was probably 10 years ago, at the time when the current CEO, Go Nagoya, became the head of the Development Department. Until then, our hit products featured convenient and cute designs, as typified by the OSAKANA Kitchen Sponge. This year marks 153 years since the establishment of Marna in 1872, but in Nagoya’s opinion, if Marna were to go on until we reached 200 years, it would be impossible to continue with the same style as before.

Taniguchi Nagoya said that he wanted to create classics that would be loved for decades, and we began to talk frequently about what a classic was. Live Clean was born at that time. That’s to say, it was the beginning of the cleaning tools and storage goods which we are now developing as series. Around this time, we began to place greater emphasis on creating tools that were both highly functional and fitted with people’s daily lives.

– What is this distinctively Marna-like characteristic?

Taniguchi This is what I discussed most often with Nagoya, too. It’s hard to put into words, but Marna’s designs are not only convenient, they also have being “people-friendly” in their DNA. Our founder, Toramatsu Nagoya, developed clothes brushes, and in his words, “Even if the clothes brush itself gets dirty, it will clean the clothes.” In other words, consideration for others is still deeply ingrained, in the sense that we want to make others clean even if we get dirty ourselves.

Taniguchi When I joined the company, I also thought that this mindset was wonderful. In fact, there are many occasions when I feel a thoughtfulness not only towards the end users but also among the employees themselves, and I understand this as the design thinking.

– It’s true that Marna’s products are not angular, but gentle on the hand, and the colors have a soft nuance. The design feels gentle.

Taniguchi The idea is to make a functional product while creating a shape that gives a soft and gentle impression and aiming for something that could become a classic. It was not put into words at the time, but I feel that the bath cleaning tools which were born as the first release of Live Clean were a new starting point for Marna.

We want to bring smiles to everyday life

– Muji, for example, has managed to roll out a wide range of products by producing them through an Original Equipment Manufacturing approach without any in-house facilities. At Marna, the baseline is developing and manufacturing the products yourselves, and that’s maybe why you can focus on user-friendliness.

Taniguchi Yes, it’s true that during development, we put a lot of weight not only on function and appearance, but also on usability. The Salt Sugar Container, for example, uses the lever principle to open the lid with a single push, but instead of snapping open, we’ve put a brake on the back to make it open slowly. The fact that we place great importance on the comfort, sound, and even feel when opening is perhaps typical of Marna.

– The container uses a highly airtight seal to prevent salt or sugar from hardening due to changes in humidity. However, since it uses the lever principle, you can open it easily without applying strong force. And that’s not all: it was also designed for comfort of opening, wasn’t it?

Taniguchi Up until then, we had been devising ingenious ideas like these for individual products, but gradually a shared way of thinking emerged, and we laid the foundations for pursuing items as classics. In other words, our design philosophy came together recently.

We have put this into words as six pillars. These are the guidelines that we always go back to when making products. The team in charge of communication design took the lead in getting us all to lay out our ideas about we think is important in creating a product and then putting together the key elements.

The Marna design philosophy: (1) Can be used the way you want to (2) Fits into your hands well (3) Easy to keep clean (4) Simple (5) Has a beautiful appearance (6) Has new perspectives added

Taniguchi We value not only convenience and ease of use, but also being pleasant to the touch and the appearance when put down. And by adding a slightly new perspective, we want to bring small surprises and smiles to everyday life. That’s the idea at the root of our design.

The key to giving shape to this design philosophy is an internal user survey. We do not simply conduct market research; employees also share examples of when we felt something wasn’t working in our daily lives, and we use prototypes to share experiences. Not only the development team but also the sales team and the back office staff participate, and opinions about what could be made better are gathered from various points of view. These repeated efforts lead to the development of products which are unique to Marna.

A forum to show our approach towards design

– Your approach towards sharing your daily lives throughout the company underpins your design philosophy, doesn’t it?

Taniguchi Yes. And the GOOD DESIGN AWARD is one forum to show the results of these efforts to society. The application itself is not our goal; instead, I think there is meaning in being evaluated as evidence of our history of carefully making tools which are useful to daily life.

– At Marna, you have been applying for the GOOD DESIGN AWARD for many years, haven’t you?

Taniguchi For us, the GOOD DESIGN AWARD is a forum to objectively show that we are serious about design. There is a great significance in having the observations and trial and error that have been repeated within the company on a daily basis evaluated from an external perspective, and it also encourages the members of the development team.

Users can also feel that the product has been properly evaluated. However, winning an award is not in itself our goal. Our standard is purely “whether or not we have succeeded in making daily life better,” and the GOOD DESIGN AWARD is a forum where the results can be recognized by a third party.

– In fiscal 2023, the Shupatto Umbrella was selected as one of the BEST 100.

Taniguchi We were very pleased that we were able to review the structure of conventional umbrellas from the essentials, and that our offer to give users the experience of folding umbrellas without getting their hands wet was highly rated. The development team was also proud that a piece of ingenuity which was taken for granted within the company was recognized by the judges as taking a “new and unprecedented perspective.”

– External evaluations can motivate colleagues within a company, can’t they?

Taniguchi I think that is also part of the significance of the GOOD DESIGN AWARD: being objectively recognized as valuable in the eyes of design experts and judges as well as through feedback by users. This gives a boost when we tackle our next challenge.

– Since you achieved this result with a full-length umbrella, an item on which you had never worked before, I feel that the domain of Marna’s development will widen even further from now on. What is your outlook for the future?

Taniguchi I think that daily life will continue to change greatly. The backgrounds of users are becoming increasingly diverse, such as an increase in the numbers of households where both partners are working and single-person households, the aging of the population, and attention to the environment. We want to stay alongside each of these ways of life, working painstakingly to resolve “small inconveniences.”

At the same time, awareness of sustainability is essential. We believe that increasing the number of classics that can be loved and used for a long time, rather than tools that are used up immediately, will lead to a reduction in environmental impact. We would like to take on the challenge of developing sustainable products, including making ingenious modifications to materials and manufacturing methods.

Taniguchi I would also like to spread the concept of “miscellaneous goods for daily life” cultivated in Japan to other countries. The idea of making day-to-day life a little easier ought to resonate across countries and cultures.

While building on the foundations laid by our 150-year history, Marna will always incorporate new perspectives and continue to evolve. Based on our philosophy of “Design for Smile: taking daily life in a good direction,” we hope to create classics that will still be needed in daily life 100 years from now.

– Thank you very much! Hearing you, I realized once again that Marna’s design is a thoughtfulness that has been passed down in your DNA; this is a thoughtfulness towards people and towards society. I am looking forward to seeing what kind of products you produce in the future.

In GOOD DESIGN TANBOU (= exploring), we will deliver interviews and introduce works based on a certain subject. This time, the theme is the “small business paradox.” Small businesses* tend to be at a disadvantage when it comes to market competition, but they may also have advantages such as being able to think freely and make decisions faster. We delve into such a paradox and the good design that is unique to small businesses. *Companies with capital of ¥300 million or less and with 300 or fewer employees