A bad thing no matter how you stack it!
BY MIKE MARKOVSKY
Special to The Wholesaler
In “the more-the-merrier” post-World War II days, “plenty” was simply not enough. Excess became the norm. Cars were subjected to bigger and bigger fins, breakfast cereals proliferated to the point that they usually take up an entire aisle in the grocery store and Crayola crayons are no good unless there are 164 color variations in each box. You get the idea -- heck, we even have over 700 different brands of bottled water from which to choose here in the good old U.S.A.! And, about half of those bottled water brands are nothing more than filtered tap water!
But, things are slowly starting to change. The cost to manufacture, ship and stock all of the possible variations of the products we use every day is staggering, the differences often miniscule and the resulting end product price is no longer something the average purchaser is willing to bear.
Forward-thinking manufacturers are assisting product distributors by taking steps to rationalize their product offerings, reducing redundancies and consolidating models and functions via advanced new product designs. All of this is aimed at sku reduction, making the process of selecting and using a specific category of product easier than it is today.
So, what about the possibility of combining functions into a single product in the interest of reducing skus? Case in point: For about 60 years, the safety industry has offered industrial and commercial specifiers both eyewashes and eye/face washes. The initial product design was an eyewash, which folklore says was a product using two bubbler heads from drinking fountains mounted opposing each other at the edge of a sink. That way they could be used to spray twin streams up toward each other -- approximating what we all know as the McDonald’s arch. Users would place their face down into the streams and simultaneously irrigate both eyes. Later designs added a multitude of different smaller orifices aimed in much the same pattern, thereby irrigating both eyes and rinsing off surrounding face tissue concurrently. This was called the eye and face wash. As happens frequently, the original product designation -- eyewash -- was the name that mostly “stuck” in the minds of specifiers. The common request was, “I need an eyewash.” This verbiage came to also cover what, in actuality, was the need for an eye and face wash, as well.
For decades now, the safety industry has offered multiple products that essentially serve the same purpose; both loosely called the same thing -- an eyewash. Do we need both? In fact, there are applications where water pressure is insufficient in -- let’s say -- an older building, where an eyewash is the only solution that will work.
So, what do we do? Well, there are ways around this particular challenge: Consider finding eyewash and eye/face wash products that are easily field-configurable as either product variation.
Many specifiers believe that the time has come for more attention to be paid to the variations that exist in our model lineups, simply because those outdated models were never eliminated when better products were brought to market. And, the time has come to design products that serve the greatest multiple of possible applications. SKU proliferation is a price that the marketplace can no longer absorb -- it’s about time to change the paradigm of design!!
Mike Markovsky is vice president-marketing for the Haws Corporation, located in Sparks, Nev. He can be reached at 775/353-8378 or michaelm@hawsco.com. Haws Corporation designs, manufactures and distributes drinking fountains and emergency equipment.