Michael Bierut, Jessica Helfand|Audio
December 31, 2009
S5E8: Todd Waterbury
Todd Waterbury is chief creative officer of Target.
Waterbury has seen Target through the launch of owned brands such as Cat & Jack, a line of children’s clothing that grew into a $2 billion business in a year, and Smartly, a line of household essentials that is meant to be affordable without compromising on design or efficacy. When talking about Smartly, he talked how consumers balance desire and reality:
I think that there’s always a relationship between an initial emotional expectation that you have looking at an object or seeing something and the expectation of what might be necessary to have that in your life. And when you then see that object in relation to the price, the surprise is the fact that it is available in a way where you feel like you can have it.
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Jessica Helfand is an artist and writer based in New England. A former critic at Yale School of Art and one of the founding editors of Design Observer, she is the author of several books on visual culture including Self Reliance, Design: The Invention of Desire, and Face: A Visual Odyssey.