Your offices are pretty amazing. Were you in charge of briefing Maya Lin? How different from your everyday work is it to work with an architect?
She was actually commissioned before I joined the company but yes, I was essentially the client. I’m an industrial designer by training so I know how to give a brief and take the brief and I was basically the editor and the project cheerleader. It’s very intuitive for me. What I actually find more odd is that I’m an industrial designer and the head of marketing.

What is your own background?
I’m an industrial designer by training. My father and grandfather were both graphic designers so I learned that through them. I’ve spent most of my career managing the creative process within companies like Steuben Glass, while I worked at Estee Lauder for a while doing packaging for the Aramis division. Before I came to Aveda I had my own business in California doing both design consulting and marketing. I joined Aveda as head of design, as the creative director for the company. Then the head of marketing left and rather than go outside they asked me to do both. Which is daunting and fun.

That’s two huge jobs in one. It’s not that simple, is it?
Well on the one hand it’s not, but on the other it really is very simple, because I have great people in both groups who do their jobs very well. What I do is fly at 40,000 feet and say ‘this is the path we’re going to take.’ Many creative directors end up being very hands on designers, but even though I’m capable of being a designer, I’m far more of an editor. But I’m much better at saying ‘this is a good solution’. It’s more about strategy and taste and making sure we’re heading in the right direction. I’m a big believer in letting people who know what they’re doing do what they do.

How do you feel about the whole ‘science’ of branding that has exploded in the past 20 years or so? You say you work intuitively, so what’s your take on that?
I think branding is a problem solving exercise, as I think all design activities are problem solving exercises. With branding, the problem is how you convey what a company stands for and where it’s coming from to a public who may not know that. That’s a problem, and figuring out how to solve that problem is the task of the creative and marketing group. So while I think the idea of ‘Branding’ is 20 years old, it really goes back hundreds of years. It’s about making the identities for things or companies clear to the public they want to talk to. I think we’re more scientific about it now, but I don’t really like the idea of the science of branding. That puts too much of a ‘if you do this, this will happen’ kind of quality onto it and I think it’s far more intuitive than that.

It tempers creativity, doesn’t it? If you have to justify it?
Totally. I look at companies that I admire from a branding point of view and they seem far more effortless than companies that try too hard. I could give you examples of companies that both do and don’t do it well but I don’t want to go on the record talking about other brands.

Can any brand have successful branding?
There are two things that make a brand. The presence of what people put out there — how a company puts out its face. And the other part is how the other side responds to it. You could do great work but see it fall flat in the market place because people don’t get it or they’re not interested in it or they plain don’t care about it.

But does that mean it’s still great work?
By great work I mean technically beautiful. I had a professor once who said you could sell bad design with a great presentation and you could sell great design with a great presentation. But if the presentation wasn’t good then great design isn’t going anywhere. The twist of that is you can have a plain old crappy product that’s not what it ought to be that’s all gussied up in a way that tries to make it make sense and it won’t work. Even if the design is great, if the idea isn’t there then it won’t work. Half of our battle is won by the fact that as a company, Aveda is perceived in the marketplace to be interesting to people. All we need to do — said in capital letters! — is make sure they keep seeing it and understanding the intuitive levels of what it’s all about.

Aveda obviously has environmental aspects steeped into its culture; it comes across very clearly in everything you do. What do you say about those companies that have decided that having a responsible environmental attitude is obviously a good brand value to tap into?
I think they can get away with it once: it’s the old ‘fool me once’ attitude. I think we’re already seeing the fall off of that kind of idea: companies that try to put out an environmentally responsible attitude without backing it up won’t be around long term. It becomes obvious that they’re fakes and sooner or later they’ll make a mistake that causes people to realize it.

And the flipside is that if they genuinely do have those attitudes then that’s great.
Yes, exactly. I spoke at an AIGA conference the other day and my whole goal was to proselytize and to get the designers in the room to think that it was a good thing to be environmentally responsible. It’s part of why I’m here. It’s part of my personal mission, to get other people to respond that way.

So what are the sticking points? Why don’t people get it?
The sticking points are that the boss of their company is more interested in making money and doesn’t care for it. What I said to the AIGA audience was ‘be subversive’. This guy came up to me afterwards, he works for a real estate company somewhere — I won’t be too specific — he creates a huge amount of print material and he was bemoaning the fact that he couldn’t be more environmentally responsible. And I said ‘you’re wrong. All you need to do is not tell anyone, just do it. Don’t print it on the back of the thing that you’ve printed on recycled paper’.

Isn’t it more expensive?
No. not any more. Sometimes our packaging even costs less because we’re using recycled material that is readily available. There are savings to be had: sometimes we make a package even thinner than we might have done before and we use less material, which makes it cheaper because we’re using less tonnes of stuff. It’s not about cost, it really isn’t. But you know what? Even when it is about cost, the consumer is ready to pay if you tell the story properly. People come to us and buy $18 shampoo for a couple of reasons. One, because it makes them feel good and their stylist told them to buy it and you do what your stylist tells you. But the other reason is that it gives them the feeling that they did something good.

How do you maintain the balance between putting out something that is truly a quality product and something that caters to your desire to be environmentally responsible?
We never separate those two. Never. We always make things that are responsible. We start there and we work hard to make sure that the products we make are highly functional and do what they’re supposed to. The old paradigm about Earth Friendly products was that they didn’t work very well. The reality is that there’s enough science now, and we’ve actually put a name to it — Green Chemistry. We’re working very hard to make highly efficacious products in a highly responsible way. We try to develop products that are highly functional and very scientific though made from natural materials and yet environmentally responsible because we’re harvesting the material in the right way and we’re making sure we’re using organic ingredients. There are all kinds of steps in the process. When we develop a product we have a Mission Aligned Ingredient Review form. The mission is what we believe about the company, and unlike many other companies we really believe in our mission and act upon it. The MAIR lists all the ingredients in a product and all the sources of those products. Many times our president and or our herbalist or myself will send a product back because it has too much stuff in it that doesn’t align with how we are as a company.

So how is the company actually set up? Who’s where and doing what?
The company was founded by Horst Rechelbacher, a hairdresser, in Minneapolis and our factory and primary business offices are still there. This New York office is the creative office, we have the design group and public relations here, while the marketing teams and packaging design teams are split between the two. We go back and forth when we need to but we have video conferencing too so we’re not travelling all the time.

What’s the composition of the design team itself?
We do virtually everything internally. We have done some outsourcing of a few projects but not a significant amount. I like the idea of having a design team that functions as the visual eyes and hands of the company, which means that our image is far more consistent, unlike a lot of companies that have a lot of external agencies when the image can drift off. When we do have an outside group do things, they tend to be smaller groups or individuals who we envelop. It’s the right way to do it — we show them the way.

The other aspect of that is that because of the mission and the rules that we have you have to learn how to design for what we do. We’re better off having a captive group of people to teach the rules to. The worst way to approach environmental design is to impose it after the design is done. The best way is to start with the idea that it needs to be environmentally responsible, and that’s a whole lot easier when you’ve already done it. When people start they’re like ‘wait a minute. Recycled what? What’s PCR again?’ We couldn’t do that every time, we’d waste so much time. This is much more short hand even though it probably doesn’t seem it because we have a staff.

How many people are in the design team?
It’s around 25, split between four groups of people: a graphic design group that manages all collateral, advertising, brochures and catalogues. The second is a packaging group, which does everything from a single bottle of shampoo to a holiday program. The third group is visual merchandising for stores and salons and the fourth group is the store design group, which manages the retail environment that we do, again both in stores and salons. Then there’s the 40 people in marketing.

Do you have creative directors within the individual departments?
There’s a leader within each group and they’re responsible for the folks who work with them. We’re a very close knit group of people; we spend a lot of time together.

You talk about the parameters of designing for Aveda. Can you elaborate?
There are three or four things we always think about. One is the material: how can we innovate on the material? The second is process: the notion of not over processing things. You’ll never see a hotstamp on an Aveda product. We think hot stamping is wasteful, putting metal into a material that isn’t metal and making it less recyclable. We also think about further down the road: what’s the waste stream? Then there are 13 rules before we design anything. They include questions such as ‘can we do without it? Is the product designed to minimize waste? Is it designed to be durable and multi functional? Is reuse practical and encouraged? Is it made with post consumer recycled (PCR) or reclaimed materials? Can it be made with less toxic materials?’ And then at the end of every process I always ask ‘do we really need it?’ There are times when we go through a process and someone will say ‘we don’t really need that’ and we’ll take it back. That’s why our packaging is so simple.

It’s not entirely about the aesthetics. The old paradigm of natural companies was ‘it’s ugly but we like it’. We’re trying to change that paradigm to have both an aesthetic responsibility along with a social and environmental agenda. You can do both. We have this conundrum about the two sides of our business: one side is a fashion company; let’s remember that our business is with hairdressers who are all about fashion. But we’re also a company with a sense of moral principles: we have this fight between those two sides but it’s an interesting fight.

How does it play out?
Different people represent different sides of that, it balances out very well. We recently did 27 fashion shows where we were the primary provider of hair services for models. It was very cool. Aveda is doing fashion shows for Tommy Hilfiger and Vera Wang. It’s very possible to be cool and be environmentally responsible.

You just had your major internal presentation of plans for the year ahead. What were you telling everyone? And what do you consider are the major challenges ahead?
It’s a way to show where we’re headed and we started with a hair show. We are in the salon business, we primarily sell product in 7000 salons, it’s about 70% of our business so we wanted to make sure that the sales force understood that we understood that it’s about hair. We showed the new products in that context. The biggest challenge is to explain the company with messages that are clear, concise and appealing. Then continuing to provide products that people want to have that are cool.

And how do you approach advertising at Aveda?
Primarily we do print advertising, done to two separate audiences. There’s the beauty press like Allure, Vanity Fair and Self magazines. Then there is a whole group of consumers who are in our camp but who maybe don’t have an understanding of who we are and what we stand for. I call them affinity customers: people who if they don’t know about us should know about us. For example, readers of Yoga Journal. People who do yoga have a higher tendency to have a sensibility for where we’re coming from than people who don’t. The classic way of marketing is to take the biggest magazine and get the biggest bang for your buck. My attitude was that we should target magazines. We’re only in 7000 salons, we have a smaller customer base than Chanel — let’s talk to them directly. So we took out ads in magazines with a consumer who will more than likely be our consumer too. The data from our next customer counts was fascinating — there’s an 800 number associated with every ad and when you call it records which magazine that came from. Within 30 days, the number of calls from Yoga Journal (as a percentage of the readership of the magazine) meant it zoomed to the top. It immediately resonated with people.

But we won’t stop with the main magazines too, as obviously there are consumers who just love the way Aveda smells and don’t care at all about the environmental side of things. I like them too. If we get through to them one day that they should recycle then great but I don’t think we should exclude one audience to the detriment of the other.