The Truth About Forks and Spoons

At the WalMart on Dufferin Street in downtown Toronto, the Gourmet Settings flatware cuts a commanding figure on the shelves. At $30 for twenty pieces, it is among the most expensive cutlery in this discount paradise--and looks it: the elegant, oversize forms hover beneath clear plastic, and the clean lines of the package typography stand out among the blaring, blabbering boxes of the competition. Eight different styles--with slick names like Oxford, Savoy, Metro, and Loft--are arranged neatly on two shelves: the modern, hipper Urban Settings on top, and the more traditionally styled "Classic Settings" below. The package colors were chosen because they look good under florescent lights. The tines of the forks are specially angled to better pick up peas; the handles of the spoons are reinforced so they don’t bend in a hard pint of ice cream. Even their position on the shelf between the Scooby Doo dishes (to the left) and the cheaper flatware (to the right) is carefully diagrammed by a "planogram"--and precisely repeated at 1,600 other Wal-Marts in the United States and 175 in Canada.

This flatware is, in every sense, design for the masses: good industrial design distributed at a scale that would make a Scandinavian country blush. Wal-Mart is, after all, is the world’s largest retailer, with 100 million customers a week and $191 billion in sales a year. Eighty-five percent of Americans shop at Wal-Mart, and Gourmet Settings--with the help of the holistic processes of Toronto-based industrial designer Helen Kerr and graphic designers Alison Hahn and Nigel Smith--is hoping at least a few of them are in the market for forks. By focusing on design from start to finish they have essentially cracked the code of high-quality cheap flatware, and in the process produced a startling reflection of our contemporary marketplace. "I believe the customers for this product are more fashion-conscious than what is assumed to be our typical customer," says Wal-Mart buyer Bruce Gillispie. "They have a true appreciation for strength in design but can't afford to pay the premium that specialty and department stores have often expected for goods of this type." In its details, the story of these forks says a lot about what we buy, and the legacy of Modern design.

Hildy Abrams, President of Gourmet Setting, is not bashful about her forks, nor those of her competitors. "The product is superb for the price," she says, more insistent than bragging. "In a way, we feel that we’ve raised the bar on the industry standard. We said to everybody else, ‘You’ve been getting away with murder with all this cheap shit you’ve been producing and charging a lot of money for it. Shame! You’re the bad guys!’" I met with her at her office in Richmond Hill, Ontario--an intensely generic, if cosmopolitan, example of suburban sprawl outside Toronto. During our conversation, half the office’s staff of 12 was hanging framed prints of Mediterranean watercolors: Gourmet Settings was just moving in. Earlier that week, they had left cramped quarters up the block, the surest sign I could gather that business was good for this small private company. The forks had hit the shelves at Wal-Mart stores two months earlier. A different line for Target--a bit savvier, a bit hipper--followed soon after.

It was eerie being there at the source of all those millions of forks. In her recent book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, social commentator Barbara Ehrenreich observes, while working at WalMart, that "there is no alternative to the megascale corporate order, from which every form of local creativity and initiative has been abolished by distant home offices." And here in a low, featureless building on a street of low, featureless buildings was one of those distant home offices, the place where the 800-number rings, and the orders are given that march the forks from the factory in Southeastern China, to the shelves of a thousand Wal-Marts, to the mouths of millions. I suspect they make measuring cups down the block, and plastic flowers across the street--not the name-brand Nikes, Sonys, or General Electrics of the world, but the vast undertow ofstuff that doesn’t seem to really come from anywhere, but really comes from here--Richmond Hill, Dayton, or Fort Worth--the very same places that Wal-Marts sprout from the ground.

With her partner, Steve Barnes, Abrams started Gourmet Settings in 1994 with a plan to specialize in inexpensive stainless-steel flatware. "We looked around the whole market, and we thought there was a big gap between upstairs and downstairs. There was great stuff in the department stores, but basically cheap shit in the Zellers and WalMarts of the world." Abrams says the word shit with a grimace, as if her competitor’s forks tasted like it. "We thought we could make a difference."

At the time, Gourmet Settings was doing "market goods," meaning, as Abrams explained, "You go to the Orient, scout out factories, and try and buy enough so that they just sell it to you." Most cheap flatware is market goods. The flatware isn't designed, only the box is. "The added value was that we packaged it in a good way," Abrams says. "And while what we were doing then was nothing compared to what it is now, we were always sort of ahead of the industry. Our philosophy in the business has always been to go after the big boys," which for flatware primarily means Oneida, a 120-year-old company that did $515 million in sales last year, 68 percent of it in flatware. At WalMart, most of the flatware on the shelves is made by them, based on Victorian patterns.

"We wanted to differentiate ourselves," Abrams says, "and the ultimate way to differentiate yourself is to do something you can call your own." So Gourmet Settings went looking for a designer. "But you can’t look up ‘flatware designer’ in the yellow pages. By the time we found Helen, we’d been through an architect, a jewelry designer, and a few graphic artists--and it was very discouraging. I also met a few industrial designers who had zero inspiration."

When Gourmet Settings approached industrial designer Helen Kerr about doing a line of flatware for WalMart, she had never been in the store before. "I couldn’t think of a reason to go," Kerr says. "I’m a total snob about design and I really like beautiful things. Then we started this project and I had to go, so I went into the stores and was shocked! I just assumed that everything in the store was going to be terrible, and it’s not." We were sitting in the corner conference room of Kerr and Company’s office on the ninth floor of a loft building at the corner of Spadina and Adelaide--ground zero for the Toronto design community. The building is filled with architects, designers, and media companies--including Hahn Smith Design, the firm that created the flatware’s packaging and whose principal, Nigel Smith, is Kerr’s husband. From the window, several half-finished luxury loft condominiums were visible, with names like MoZo (Modern Living Zone), District, and Upper East Side--an insistent skyline of millennial Modernism. "As I began the whole process I realized there must be other people shopping at WalMart besides what we think of as the typical WalMart shopper, and they’re probably a large segment," Kerr says. "So if they’re in the store anyway, and they have the perspective that this is a place to buy stuff, you could offer them something beautiful. It had to be at a very reasonable price, it had to be high quality, but the people were there to buy it."

Spend fifteen minutes listening to Kerr, and you’ll find yourself getting excited about forks. They are, like jewelry, subject to the smallest nuances of sculpting, yet they require both structure and function. A single design inherently has five variations--knife, dinner fork, soup spoon, salad fork, and teaspoon--and must be precisely repeatable millions of times. They are more intimate than clothing ("you put this stuff in your mouth!" Abrams says) but as rigid as steel. And although we use them three times a day, every day (as Abrams is fond of saying) we seem surprisingly unprepared to pass judgement on these forks as anything but forks. As design, they confound. For the month this flatware sat on my desk, I watched visitor after visitor pick the pieces up and scratch their chins. One woman, a dealer in modern furniture, said only, "They’re big." The depth of the industry standard keeps us numb to the possibilities. Perhaps it is because this flatware--unlike the work of the Graveses, Starcks, and Rashids of the world--has no austere ambition to be a self-justifying work of art. The process may be poetry, but the end result is--in the words of Gourmet Settings’ cheeky promotional materials--"just a fork."

"One of the problems with design in general is the public perception is that we make things look pretty," Kerr said. "That’s so far from what we do. It’s a piece of what we do, but what we do is make things possible, and we solve problems in a really integrated way."

To make these particular forks, Kerr and her colleagues worked closely with a factory in China, traveling there as many as six times in a single year. They brought with them technical drawings with every millimeter defined--more like drawings for a chair, Kerr explained, then the "little squiggly things" typical for flatware. "When the factory sent back the samples they were completely different, so we said, ‘No actually, you really have to follow the drawings.’" Employees there called Kerr "the Dragon Lady." The quality of flatware depends on the kind of polish, whether it’s forged from hot or cold steel, the transitions from thick to thin, and--as Kerr insists--"Do you like it? Does it feel nice in your hand?" Flatware is stamped from steel, like a cookie cutter, but you can roll dough out and use it again--steel you can’t. By fitting the greatest number of pieces on a single sheet of steel, Kerr kept costs down, and minimized waste. The result is flatware whose specifications--the quality of the steel, the finish, the thickness--match those for sets that retail for three times as much.

For the packaging, Kerr and Hahn Smith Design worked with a factory in Hong Kong, sending proof after proof across the ocean by FedEx and email until it was--to their eyes--just right. "And why not?" Kerr asks. "Just because it’s a box for Wal-Mart doesn’t mean it’s of any less value and shouldn’t have the same attention to detail." When they’re not designing flatware packages, Hahn Smith Design works top-shelf graphic design jobs like the Whitney Museum’s American Century exhibition, theHarvard Design Magazine’s template, and books for Dia, MoMA, Rizzoli, Monacelli, and the Cooper Hewitt. The flatware’s package copy includes lines like "Slowly slide sleeve sideways to feel fantastic flatware finish." Alison Hahn spent time "polishing and buffing--the type that is" until the package design reflected the quality of the product it held. The overall concept was "to let the product speak clearly and speak for itself," she says. So although most of the flatware packages on the shelves at Wal-Mart are cardboard boxes dripping with type, Hahn Smith attempted something more restrained: a lowercase sans-serif typeface on a clear plastic sheath that slides open for easy access to the flatware. The design is neither revolutionary nor campy, retro nor avant-garde. It’s the stainless steel of graphic design--there to convey the flavor of the forks, not provide its own.

It was at my second meeting with Kerr, a couple of days before she was to leave for France to "research" a new line of French flatware ("Eating is such a cultural habit!" she purrs), that I began to appreciate how sincere she is about forks. For the last few weeks, I had been using the cutlery Kerr had given me at our last meeting and, sure enough, it had brought a little joy to my daily routine. And although that joy was only partly sensual, it certainly wasn’t material--there is no cachet in Wal-Mart flatware. What thrilled me more was that I knew where my forks came from. Among the flotsam and jetsam that surrounded me were these forks with a known provenance. I had spent time with them and their designers, and heard their story--and the fact that they had a story, a consistently conceived life from start to finish, made me realize that these forks might somehow be more forkish than others, somehow closer to the ideal of a fork. It was as if Kerr has discovered, to paraphrase Louis Kahn, what the fork wants to be. When I asked Kerr about this heightenedforkness she responded in a way that made it seem like this idea had occurred to her long before. "That’s one of the things that really matters to us," she said, "that the object in and of itself needs to be as right as it can possibly be."

That Saturday at the Wal-Mart on Dufferin Street, I walked the aisles wondering how many of the objects there were "as right as they can possibly be": the Tupperware, Dustbusters, allergy medicines, hockey sticks, water filters, Palm Pilots, Fruit Rollups, and razor blades. The abundance was magnificent, but the stink of plastic and the glare of florescent lights a bit sickening. Wal-Mart is not a holistic shopping experience--Rem Koolhaas has yet to design a single store--and yet the place was packed. All across the continent, the cashiers waved their wands and their registers beeped: $500 million in sales today.

Earlier that week, Kerr had spoken to me about what it meant to design flatware for Wal-Mart. "It’s about the bigger ideas of why I became a designer," she says. "I wanted to make stuff for real people. It’s the whole idea of being able to make fantastic stuff without a huge elitist price tag. If you really think about the materials and processes involved in it, you can mass produce things and make them available to everybody--which is kind of what the origins of Modernism were all about."