Method’s vice president of industrial design Josh Handy took our most recent issue under his wing as our first-ever guest editor. Here's what he had to say.

Methodis a scrappy little soap company based in San Francisco. Our mission is to create a happy, healthy home-cleaning revolution. We participate in product categories where our competitors are hundreds of times the size of us and spend billions of dollars a year on marketing. Our only way to prosper in this asymmetric marketplace is to make every marketing dollar work like 10, and focus our energies on winning at shelf, then winning at home. Design is a key strategy we use to level this playing field.

For this issue of BrandPackaging, I’ve asked key people from Method’s Brand Experience team to talk about different aspects of the design process and how it relates back to the organization and the Method brand. We are different from most consumer products companies in that we have disproportionally invested in design and see it as a core strategic asset. However, no one at Method actually has the moniker “designer” in their official title. This is because we’ve realized that design isn’t a department or a person, but a way of thinking when approaching tricky problems.
 
You will hear our design-led methodology echoed in all the articles in this issue. We’ve worked hard to ensure that transparency, communication, collaboration and iteration-all characteristics of “design thinking”-are embedded into all of our processes to ensure a tightly integrated brand and a resilient, responsive organization that punches above its weight.
 
- Josh Handy