New York — IF you happen to have just bought the best salad spinner on the planet, here's some bad news: At the giant International Home & Housewares Show beginning Sunday in Chicago, Oxo International is introducing one that is even better -- and so gorgeous you could actually serve from it.
But if you hate your steamer basket, here's some great news: Oxo has finally tackled the infuriating design of one of the most essential kitchen tools. When you try it, you'll wonder why cooks ever settled for anything clumsier.
And then there's the new Oxo pastry brush, with silicone bristles cut to capture and convey liquids, and the new Oxo kitchen shears, with a special stripper to separate herbs from their stems, and the new Oxo mixing bowls, stainless steel on the inside to retain heat and cold and plastic on the outside to protect the hands.
Every one has been "Oxoized," as company employees say, to add what they variously refer to as the "wow" factor, the "eureka" factor or just the "why give a damn" factor.
Ever since Oxo came out with a Good Grips vegetable peeler in 1990 that changed the way America prepped mashed potatoes, the company has become so known for its hyper-clever takes on everyday things that the wow factor should be increasingly difficult to come by. But spending a few hours at the company's sprawling, sunny home base in the Chelsea Market here, where about 40 employees devote their days to sweating the extremely small stuff, makes it pretty clear that there is almost madness to the method.
God, after all, took a rest on the seventh day. "Oxonians," as they call themselves, can work for years to perfect a single product only to start trying to find something wrong with it as soon as it arrives from the factory. Good is never enough.
"A lot of this is just a culture of people constantly looking for something wrong, not only other people's products but ours as well," said Alex Lee, the company's president, sitting in a room with a Planogram, a model for store displays that hangs floor to ceiling with every one of the 500-some Oxo innovations.
Some of those are revolutionary, some evolutionary, but all come to those four walls in much the same way: all ideas, all the time. You might not want to be married to an Oxonian, many of whom admit they are anal-retentives who would pick the most microscopic nit, but it's hard not to admire what they produce.
Spinner success
