Over the last year, Target has been rolling out their new “in-house” brand of home products called up&up. And I’m obsessed with them.
Somehow Target has managed to laser in on multiple areas of interest for me and came up with a killer combination.
First of all, I like good, consistent design. I really like the packaging for these products. They all feature copious white space, the arrow with the knocked out logo, a clean lock up of bold and thin sans serif typography, plus simple, bold cut-out photography. The quatity is clearly spelled out in a box with rounded corners in the lower right hand corner, and the details consistently laid out along the bottom. I think they did a great job with the packaging on these. The only potential issue is with the pharmaceutical products. The generic Benedryl anti-itch cream tube looks a lot like the Hydrocortisone anti-itch cream. Depending on how bad the itch is, I could see getting them confused.
Second of all, they have jacked directly into my collector gene. The idea of having a shelf full of matching products is compelling to me. The visual clutter of different boxes and packages fades away with the colorful-arrows-on-white look of these. Collect them all and your drawers and shelves will look great! There are over 800 products in the line – spanning more than 40 categories – including household, healthcare, beauty, baby, and personal care. What a great look for a modern home. I mean, look at the collection of products on the left and on the right in the target banner below. On the left you have a random collection of logos – some good, many terrible. They are designed to stand out on the shelf, but often look terrible in the home. With up&up, you get a consistent, clean look. It’s fun to see how many of the common things you buy everyday could benefit from this treatment.
Just to be clear, I’d be perfectly happy in other aspects of my life buying all of my products from one company. I’d get my clothes from Patagonia, power tools from Bosch, cars from VW, and – of course – dinnerware from Dansk. Things can’t really work out that way in practicality, but the idea that you have a collection of items all envisioned by the same mind – or at least brand – is a compelling one.
The last of the trilogy of awesomeness for up&up is the high quality and low prices. I can’t pass up a bargain but hate poor quality. Besides the look, the banner above emphasizes you could save up to $27 with that shopping basket. I don’t know if all of their products are the quality equivalent of the brand name, but the ones I have used are quite good and they have not let me down in either general quality or product design (where it matters, like for a toothbrush). They also match the “premium” level of brand name products. Their paper towels match the quality of the better brands, not the cheap thin ones that fall apart instantly.
No matter how much cheaper they are, I’d buy these products anyways. They are easy on the eyes, and you don’t feel like you are buying into the American consumer myth of brand – when generic is just as good or better. It feels more pure, more consistent, and focuses more on what the products are, not what their brand represents.
Generic product design come a long way. I remember when generic products came out in the 70s and store shelves were full of plan labels “beer”, “peas”, “rice”. I thought they were cool back then but they felt cheap – and they were indeed low quality. I didn’t know why I liked them (being a kid), but looking back I think the simplicity and consistency of the package appealed to me. The movie “Repo Man” painted a bleak future of generic products, but it seems that up&up has turned that around.
Now we’re at a point where many of the products that everyone uses everyday are commodities, all the same, and only differentiated by marketing. In cases where the “user experience” is vastly different between products (like cell phones or cameras or shoes) I say by all means choose the best of the best even if you have to pay a little more. But when Advil is the same as generic ibuprofen, it’s time to simplify and decide what is really important, and see how these things fit into your life.
