Water Works

As much as we like to imagine that good product design can single-handedly change the fortunes of a company, achieving “sensual minimalism” required a ruthless company overhaul. “Internally, there was huge resistance,” says Haines of the initial reaction to the Ondus concepts. “People said, ‘We don’t do this kind of design; it’s too innovative, too expensive. We don’t do this technology. How are we going to make it? Where are we going to sell it?’” The new product required Grohe to develop new digital-electronics capabilities and new engineering solutions to figure out how to push water through a flat, elongated tube. The company’s manufacturing plant, in Hemer, Germany, was streamlined, switching from batch- to line-based “pull” manufacturing, which reduced inventory, lead times (from twenty to four days), and the distance traveled by a product during manufacturing (from 1,640 to 656 feet), and increased productivity by 18 percent. Newspaper reports from 2005 recall an intense battle between the new management and IG Metall, the German metalworkers’ union. The union negotiated Grohe’s proposed 1,500 job losses down to 943 and, according to one report, talked the company out of closing its Hemer plant and moving to cheaper facilities in China.

Visting the Hemer factory with a misty-eyed affection for places where stuff gets made, I couldn’t help subscribing to the union’s argument that efficient German manufacturing and meticulous craftsmanship is integral to the Grohe culture. In one section of the plant, robots assembled the ceramic cartridges that go inside the single mixer faucets. On a lower floor, a factory worker was grinding metal by hand, having spotted a defect the robots missed.

But this is no benign industry. Our love of shiny fittings has spawned the practice of electroplating parts in toxic baths of nickel and chromic acid. Flowers says Grohe is investigating alternatives to nickel- and chrome-plating (which produces known carcinogens), but in the near term nothing is likely to replace the tough, anticorrosive properties of these finishes. On the other hand, the company has taken responsibility for—and recognized a design opportunity in—how it distributes water, “our most precious resource” as Haines puts it. With digital controls and a fast thermostat, Flowers argues, you don’t waste water finding the right temperature. For those who prefer not to run water down the drain while they shave or shampoo, there’s a pause button on Ondus. Grohe’s Rainshower Icon collection includes a “dimmer switch” that reduces the flow of water by 40 percent, removing a bit of the guilt from long showers. “We believe that a lot of our technology can teach consumers to reduce consumption,” Flowers says. “Most brands are putting in a restrictor in showers so you have less flow. I never understood this concept. If I have shampoo in my hair, I just keep rinsing and rinsing until the shampoo’s gone. With our showers, you can choose when you want to reduce flow, so you have passive and active states.”

Grohe’s most imaginative example of conservation-minded thinking is its attempt to take on the bottled-water industry. The average four-person family uses approximately 188 gallons of bottled water a year, and it takes the equivalent of seven liters of water to make each one-liter bottle. With Grohe Blue, a faucet is combined with a filtering unit under the sink so that filtered water flows through a separate channel in the neck, activated by a rotating handle. When the filter needs changing, an illuminated blue logo on the handle begins flashing. According to the head of marketing, Gerry Mulvin, who oversees research at the company, the tricky part was developing a filter that could be suited to regional differences in water quality. “We did extensive work designing a filter,” Mulvin says. “If you take out too much, there’s no taste.”

After two days in wintry Düsseldorf, hearing how ideas germinate in Grohe’s glass hothouse, I was struck by the corporate culture the new management has created, in which decisions are made fast and design thinking is prioritized. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the company’s doubled investment in research and development will pay dividends. Grohe calls the industry outlook “somber.” The collapse of real estate markets has decimated the market for fittings, showers, and flushing systems. The other uncertainty is whether Grohe’s embrace of digital technology and water delivery will fly in the United States, where the company still lags behind its rivals for market share. Compared with their European counterparts, Americans are conservative when it comes to bathroom tastes, and there may be a steeper learning curve here for people to accept that digital electronics and water can coexist. As for water conservation, we are a long way from installing water-usage meters in every residence—a requirement in Germany.

Flowers’s response, for now, is to keep throwing new ideas at the market. In Grohe’s capacious design studio, where next year’s designs sat conspicuously hidden beneath white blankets, Flowers allowed me a glance at a concept prototype for a circular shower tray without a visible drain (a discreet circular gutter expels the water). Much like the auto industry, or Philips Design, Grohe deploys experimental showstoppers at trade fairs for their “halo effect” on the surrounding, more manufacturable products. The protoypes of the Digitecture line, unveiled at a fair last year, included “provocations,” as Flowers calls them: modular towel holders, soap dispensers, shelves, televisions, and speakers that plug into the bathroom’s flat-panel system. “That’s the beautiful thing about digital,” he says. “As we transform the bathroom from this functional space for cleaning and grooming into this well-being sanctuary, you can start to introduce, because you have power, different forms of entertainment.”

Before leaving Germany, I traveled to Essen to pay a visit to the Red Dot Design Museum, a former coal-mining structure converted by Foster + Partners into five floors of exhibition space. An entire section of the building had been filled with sleek, award-winning faucets, radiators resembling wall-coverings, and a bath illuminated by blue LED lights beneath the skin. Here, Grohe’s offerings, including the Rainshower Icon showerhead, which won a “Best of the Best” Red Dot award last year, assumed prominent positions. It occurred to me that American bathrooms, with their claw-foot tubs, crystal handles, and ornate fixtures, tend to look to a romantic past of lush plenitude. German bathrooms, by contrast, imagine a postindustrial future of minimal, responsive controls and cautious, managed indulgence.