All About Yves

By: Linda TischlerWed Dec 19, 2007 at 8:23 AM

Not long ago, Yves Béhar was a self-described "slumlord" to cover his rent. Now he's a superstar.

Loewy, the father of industrial design, was the guy responsible for updating the iconic contour bottle in the mid-1950s, as well as everything from the graphic design on Coke's steel can to the look of its vending machines and coolers. The man is still idolized at the company; indeed, this gathering honored Loewy's daughter, who was in the audience.

Béhar had been invited by Coke's VP of design, David Butler, to speak broadly about design's role in a global enterprise. "I wanted them to get back to thinking across all functions of the business, from a logo to a bottle to a dispenser to a fountain," Béhar says. "And I wanted them to ask themselves if they'd allow themselves, today, to let somebody have such a wide-ranging impact on their brand--to lead them by design.

Béhar, founder of the San Francisco design firm fuseproject, had his answer six weeks later: Coke hired him.

"We're working with Yves on several macro packaging initiatives where we can move the needle not just in terms of sustainability, but in adding something back to the planet," says Butler, who's responsible for driving Coke's global growth through design. He has turned to Béhar, he says, to help build a true companywide design culture, from merchandising strategy to the integration of new technology to new types of drinks and ways to dispense them.

Despite the rhetoric now in vogue across the corporate landscape, that kind of full-throttle engagement, in which design plays a role in everything the customer sees and feels, exists in only a handful of companies, Apple, Target, Procter & Gamble, and Nike among them. Béhar himself estimates that only about 1% of American companies really dig in on design, and that the rest "will be left in the dust by companies that do. Over time, they will fail to connect to consumers in a relevant way and become obsolete."

Those are strong words, especially from someone who has never struggled with running a mammoth global business. But Béhar, 40, may be on to something. A three-year study of more than 40 Fortune 500 companies by the research firm Peer Insight found that companies focused on customer-experience design outperformed the S&P 500 by a 10-to-1 margin from 2000 to 2005. Certainly Béhar's track record at conceiving and launching breakthrough products gives him an unusual degree of credibility: Fuseproject, founded only eight years ago, has won more International Design Excellence Awards in the past five years than any other design shop save Ideo, the industry bigfoot--remarkable given fuseproject's staff of 28 (versus Ideo's 500). He's the man behind Aliph's best-selling Jawbone headset, Herman Miller's groundbreaking Leaf LED lamp, a line of lifestyle goods for Mini, the reinvention of Birkenstocks, a bench for Bernhardt's Global Edition, a chandelier for Swarovski, and the news-making $100 laptop with MIT's Nicholas Negroponte. He has projects in the works for such tony Italian firms as Cassina, Alessi, and Danese, and such mainstream American firms as Kodak and Microsoft (plus new work for Herman Miller ). He even has a line of dog accessories he dreamed up with a group of his students from the California College of the Arts.

And now he has the ear of the design decision makers at Coke, Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, and other giants. "I hired Yves because he's a game changer," says Chris Hacker, who was recently appointed chief design officer at J&J. "He has the ability to strip something down to its basic functional logic and then apply a set of emotional and aesthetic considerations to create something unique. It's an art."

Béhar's ability to anticipate--and incarnate--consumer lust routinely brings executives to his door, saying, "We want to be the Apple of our industry." And Béhar has an impertinent question for them, too: "Do you have the guts?"