Now the Glide itself is an interesting product, an interesting artifact,
but it's the package that I want to talk about for a minute.
It's a particularly clever [SOUND] design.
Here's the original Glide floss package.
And it has what's called a living hinge, which is a molded-in plastic hinge,
and then the package itself is hinged so that the entire package,
or most of the package here, is a single injection molded part that has
been designed in a way that it can come out of the mold relatively easily and
can fold up [SOUND] in order to form the product package.
My guess is that the manufacturing cost of this package Is just a few pennies,
a few cents, pennies on a US dollar, and so very, very inexpensive.
And this is an example of a design concept for a package,
for a product, that is primarily about cost, about low manufacturing cost.
The third motive for a great concept is what I call the wow factor,
and I want to give you an example of that.
This is the measuring cup sold, produced and sold by the housewares company, OXO.
OXO is Is primarily known for its ergonomic grips and
housewares that are easy to use, kitchen utensils that are easy to use.
Measuring cups have not changed much in probably 100 years,
but OXO has a nice innovation here which is that,
if you'll notice here, there's a beveled edge here,
essentially a shelf on the inside of the cup.
It's angled at 45 degrees, and
it has the units of measure printed on that shelf.
And what that means is that, let's say you needed to
pour 500 cc's of oil,
you'd pour it like this and you could look down at the shelf
from the top without having to hold it like this in order to read the measure.
So measuring cups are a relatively low involvement artifact for most people,
but this shelf feature, which addresses a gap in
the user experience about how difficult it is to hold and measure at the same time,
is a clever element of the design, which gives, what I'll call, some wow factor.
Now the wow factor is valuable for at least two reasons.
First, in a commercial context, if you have some wow,
then you typically also can achieve some intellectual property
protection usually in the form of a patent,
which provides some barrier to competitors replicating your design.
But the other reason, maybe even the more important reason,
is that if you've got some wow in your design,
then it gives you something to talk about.
It can get the user excited about the product,
it can attract the user's attention, and in a commercial setting,
it allows for this product to distinguish itself from the other competing
alternatives that the user is faced with when making a purchase decision.
So wow is usually an important attribute, but
still secondary typically to meeting the needs and to having low cost.