Milton Glaser’s Grand User Experience
By: Ellen M. Shapiro
Tags: Shopping, UX, Milton Glaser, Retail Design, Design

Milton Glaser’s Grand User Experience

If your supermarket has a cheese section, a bakery, and fresh fish and herbs, thank Milton Glaser and his client, Sir James Goldsmith. The late designer’s legacy included a $500 million redesign of Grand Union. The total redesign of the supermarket experience did not last forever, but the innovations did.

Model by Milton Glaser, Inc,, c. 1992. Recently reconstructed by Mirko Ilic.

For London-based financier Sir James Goldsmith (1933–1997), buying and selling companies on the world market — oil companies and industrial corporations — was all in a day’s work. In 1978, he bought the Grand Union Company, an American supermarket chain headquartered in Wayne, New Jersey. He then asked Milton Glaser, whose work in interiors, exhibitions, identity, posters, publications, and restaurant design was already world-famous, to “redefine the supermarket category.” Thus began an odyssey that took Goldsmith and Glaser to the food halls of London and Berlin and the open-air markets of Italy — and became one of the most remarkable stories in design history. “Our concept was to present food in a different, engaging way,” Glaser told me, “to break the up-and-down-the-aisles traffic pattern with piazza-like spaces, to take the customer on a voyage.” As each phase of the redesign program fell into place, fusty old Grand Union stores began sprouting a crisp new brand identity, charming store signage, new specialty departments, and nifty packages for everything from jam to cat food.

On June 26, Milton Glaser died at age 91. His work for Grand Union is an important part of his artistic, business, and personal legacy, perhaps as significant as his “I [Heart] NY” logo and Dylan poster. Personal because it brought together his interests in food, marketing, social issues, and town planning — and ultimately helped revolutionize the way supermarkets are designed. To find out how it all came about, I met with Glaser in his Murray Hill, New York, brownstone office. A slightly different version of the interview that follows was originally published in the September 1992 issue of Communication Arts magazine. At the time, the term “user experience” hadn’t been invented. But that’s exactly what Glaser succeeded in doing: to change the entire experience of grocery shopping for the user. And his unique voice—his wit, outsize personality and total belief in himself—certainly shines through.

Q: Shapiro: When I moved about fifteen miles north of New York City, one of the thrills of our new neighborhood was the full-blown Grand Union with its imported cheese selection, fresh seafood, quality produce, even excellent breads. Tell me, how did all this get started?

A: Glaser: It all started in 1978 shortly before New York Magazine, which I’d founded with Clay Felker, was sold to Rupert Murdoch. Clay and I were not happy about Murdoch and attempted to find another buyer. At a dinner party, we were introduced to Sir James Goldsmith, who unfortunately wasn’t interested in buying New York. But six months later, he called me out of the blue to redesign L’Express, the leading news magazine in France. I redesigned it, and the relaunch was a big success. Then he asked me, “Do you know anything about supermarkets? I have this chain. Why don’t you invent a new supermarket for me?” I answered, “I know absolutely nothing about supermarkets.” He said, “Good. When can you begin?”

‘Absolutely nothing’ isn’t exactly true, is it, at least about food? There was “The Underground Gourmet” (a column in New York Magazine and guidebooks describing inexpensive New York restaurants, coauthored by you and artist/food critic Jerome Snyder), The Cook’s Catalog, your kitchen featured in various interior design publications . . .

Glaser: And ventures with Burt Wolf and James Beard and Joe Baum. Well, over the next three months, we did a series of sketches, insights, of what we thought a supermarket should be like. We started with a New Jersey store — an existing space. Within a year, we went from concept to fully realized store. In three months sketches were done, another three months for detailed drawings, three months for construction. It was an enormous success. Our concepts were to open up and use the space generously and to present food in a different, engaging way; to break the monotonous up-and-down-the-aisles traffic pattern with piazza-like spaces. In other words, to keep the customer interested throughout the voyage, making shopping a kind of adventure, not unlike an editorial journey through a magazine.

What was working with Sir James like?

Glaser: We wouldn’t have lasted a week without him. At the back of his mind was revolutionary change in all the assumptions of the supermarket business. I haven’t met anyone like Jimmy before or since. He was the consummate marketer, a gambler; he risked everything at the roll of the dice. He wanted to see how far he could push it, and was involved in every detail. This was especially interesting because, at the time, he owned Diamond International and several oil companies; Grand Union was less than 10 percent of his holdings. I would have never done the project without him and my personal enjoyment of the relationship. It was marvelously satisfying. I loved seeing him charm and muscle his way through the world. He raged against “industrial filth,” his term for processed food, against pseudo-bread, fake dairy products.

[David Freedman, the project manager at Milton Glaser, Inc., joined the conversation.]

Freedman: He was incensed that there was no fresh bread and fish in the supermarket, but that a bakery and a fish market could be located right next door.

Glaser: When the experts said, “You can’t do it,” he flew into a rage. Suddenly there was fresh fish, and not necessarily because the store managers or the corporate planning department wanted it. Our relationship with Jimmy was unprecedented in my professional career. Generally, we were encouraged to suggest everything we wanted. The corporate structure that kept things from happening was aborted. People disappeared who were unwilling or incapable of getting behind the new plan; everyone who remained got behind it with enthusiasm. Although Jimmy was open-minded, he didn’t always agree with every detail we suggested. But he wholeheartedly embraced our philosophy: that the store must be on the customer’s side, not on management’s side.

What kind of presentations did you show?

Glaser: We put together a marvelous industrial design staff under Murry Gelberg and Larry Porcelli. For several years, fifteen to twenty people — about 60 percent of our staff — were working full-time on the project. Every day was a Grand Union day. After fourteen years, we wound down. But first you do an ideal model, plug in all the things you’d like. Then you deal with real constraints, like the number of running feet of shelf space for cheese.

Freedman: We created six prototypes, elements of which were applied to several dozen stores, that demonstrated ideas like fresh herb bars, fresh-squeezed juice bars, a ripening shelf that indicates which fruits and vegetables are ready to eat, and custom lighting. The lighting was tricky because it had to illuminate the meat, fish, and produce without speeding up spoilage.

Glaser: We knew that consumers are interested in nutrition, freshness, and whole grains, and that supermarkets weren’t there yet. This gave Grand Union an opportunity to respond to a market that was not being appropriately serviced. Getting in sync with the consumer required rethinking of a form. Food retailing is a conservative business, and margins are so small that a small mistake can mean enormous losses. The entire business operates by stealing tiny ideas from each other. All executives constantly tour the competition. One store puts up a candy stand; within days, all the others know that $1,800 worth of candy was sold.

You’re Americans, shoppers, food lovers, designers. It makes sense. Who else could intuitively predict what the public would go for?

Glaser: If it hadn’t worked, Goldsmith is the person who would have suffered. We might have gotten a slight dent in our reputation; he could have lost it all. And we weren’t always perfectly on target.

Freedman: Most of the prototypes were successful. A few bombed. Sir James said that if we didn’t fail some of the time, we weren’t trying hard enough.

Glaser: They hired a research firm to find out what customers were looking for. Grand Union started out at the bottom of the category called “Best Liked.” I was intrigued by the “Best Liked” characteristics, and found out that in that category consumers shopped at your store more often and bought more when they were there. Grand Union, however, started off at the top of “Most Convenient.” They’d been making their living off good locations because they’d simply gotten there first. So my thinking was if we could move them to the top of “Best Liked,” they’d have everything.

What did you have to do to get them there?

Glaser: All our design judgments grew out of answering that question. We changed the lighting. We gave shoppers nutrition information. We changed the spaces so people weren’t forced to go up and down endless aisles in a proscribed direction.

“Quite simply, we tried to make shoppers feel good. It was shocking that these things were not at the top of management’s or retailers’ consideration.”

Let’s take as an example the Grand Union in my former neighborhood, La Guardia Place, which serves Greenwich Village and SoHo. Unfortunately, even after the renovation — which helped a lot — shopping there could be an unpleasant experience. It had to do with the piles of boxes in the aisles, the dented cans, the endless checkout lines, the surly employees.

Glaser: You’re talking about commitment to training and the attitudes of personnel. It’s a morale problem, a labor problem. Early on, almost before anything else had been done, I came up with a button for the checkers to wear: “Ask Me. I’m Here to Help.” This is an example of benign social engineering that encourages people to be responsive.

Was Sir James happy that his designer got involved in social issues?

Glaser: Yes. At a regular presentation meeting, I showed a mock-up of the “Ask Me” button, and he said, “Let’s do this.” Other things were more difficult. It took two years to get the signs off the windows. You know how the windows of most supermarkets are papered over by “sale” posters, ‘Two for $1.39?’ The first thing you learn about retailing is to provide visual access. I said, “Your customers have already come to the bloody place to shop. It makes no sense to cover up the windows.”

You really talked to management like that?

Glaser: Yeah. The nice thing was that we felt we were dealing with peers. On the other hand, we could be a real pain in the butt.

But they did it.

Glaser: They did it. Grand Union became arguably the best supermarket chain in America. This came about through tremendous investment. Millions of dollars went into retrofitting old stores, new fittings and fixtures, plus opening brand new stores. No other supermarket chain has made this kind of capital or development expenditure.

How did you approach the packaging?

Glaser: Like all things in this office, we’re not merely interested in the decorative side. The traditional idea of private labeling was to provide low-cost alternatives to national brands; for example, slightly smaller kidney beans at 20 percent less cost. Our new position was to have the best, most competitive product. The slogan, “As good or better than national brands at a better price” went into the company manuals.

So they changed the quality of the products, not just the labels.

Glaser: Yes. If you bought Grand Union cream cheese and thought it was rotten, you’d think all Grand Union products were rotten. You can’t deceive the public. The quality was improved, and we designed within categories to compare with the brand leaders.

Freedman: We brought together staples like flour and sugar with an identity within an identity, kind of a homey Pennsylvania-Dutch look. All the baking materials that people keep out on their counters — spices, salt, chocolate chips — were within this group. And perceptions have changed. People know you can get really good stuff under private label.

How much of our perceptions are based on advertising? I wonder if in the choice of something like catsup — and it’s Del Monte versus Heinz — we’re more swayed by the commercials than the package? But then when the shopper sees your great-looking, private-label catsup with its big red tomato costing significantly less than either of them, that’s the one to choose, right?

Glaser: There’s no doubt that television gives an advantage to the brands. Packaging is only a way of identifying what you’ve already received many messages about. Private labels can sit next to the brand leaders and say, “We, too, promise you quality.”

[Later, I spoke on the phone with William A. Louttit, who was Grand Union’s executive vice president and chief operating officer during the redesign and took over a key role in the project after Goldsmith’s death.]

Q: When Sir James Goldsmith took over, was it a scenario out of “Other People’s Money,” the off-Broadway show that lampooned hostile takeovers?

A: Louttit: Not at all. He was a third party who bought the controlling interest in the company before he had a high public profile, and we really didn’t know much about him. [I’d already worked there for a time] and many of us in management didn’t have a strong opinion one way or the other, but waited to see what changes would take place.

In your view, what was he trying to accomplish?

Louttit: Goldsmith looked at food retailing in Europe and the United States and recognized that there was a big void in the fresh food area, that the American supermarket was pretty much a manufacturer’s outlet for packaged product. Most U.S.supermarkets were simple buildings with no warmth whatsoever, fluorescent lighting, maybe walls painted with red and blue stripes. He wanted to change all that. With Milton, he led us to the first phase of the revolution in style and decor. The next phase was the products themselves. Then we took another look at the stores and said, “This is all wonderful, but we still aren’t offering clearly superior perishable products to the customer.” Milton got very involved in that, also. We took big steps forward in terms of quality and had phenomenal improvements in both sales and profit.

As I understand it, the capital investment was unprecedented in the industry.

Louttit: It was unprecedented in the industry in terms of the amount of money spent in proportion to the total sales of the company. We spent $125 million in one year, which was more than 4 percent of sales. That was twice our cash flow, an infusion of capital into the company from Goldsmith. It was both his identification of the opportunity and his support of the capital program.

If the resistance wasn’t a money problem, was it a worry that the public wasn’t going to appreciate all these changes, that only a few gourmets are interested in fresh fish and pretty packaging and so forth?

Louttit: We had approximately eight hundred stores at the time in the New York tri-state area, plus the Carolinas, Florida, Texas, and Washington, DC, some in not-so-affluent neighborhoods.

So you questioned whether one design concept was going to serve everybody?

Louttit: Right. Question number one was, “Is this going to be equally effective everywhere?” Question two was, “How do we get from our old format to this new format?” And then there was the, “All of these things have been tried before and haven’t worked” mentality. Yet, if you examine Goldsmith’s concepts, many of them aren’t profitable in and of themselves, but they add tremendous appeal to a store and attract customers who buy other items.

What was the consumer reaction to the redesign?

Louttit: The reaction was outstanding. We got lots of letters. We have a very thorough method of evaluating our customer comments and we break them down into all different categories, compliments, and complaints. But the financials are the true measure of success. We saw that the business in a single store could double when it went from a standard supermarket to the new- paradigm food market. In the upper-income areas, it was better than that, even during the recession.

Were you present at Glaser’s presentations?

Louttit: Milton came to most of our store planning committee meetings, and he’s just a wonderful person to work with. He combines artistic ability with fundamental common sense and a realistic approach to practical business matters. He doesn’t have his head in the clouds and isn’t daydreaming about what could be; he talks about what we can do and how it will work. In the early days, I had no idea what his skills or reputation were, and I was just amazed how well an individual with so much artistic ability was able to fit in and work with an old-line organization like ours.

Well, he used the phrase “pain in the butt” to describe himself, in terms of making suggestions some executives were not all that keen on.

Louttit: Some people characterized him as worse than that. But I thought he was progressive, clear-thinking, and not only one of the best graphic communicators I’ve ever met, but also one of the clearest verbal communicators. In meetings, there was plenty of give-and-take, and he didn’t back off if he believed he was on the right track. Some people thought he came up with crazy ideas, but that’s what we expected. He worked with us as a member of our team, not as an outsider, and helped us improve things we were doing as well as put new propositions on the table. In the beginning, there was some resistance to a few things like the pet food packaging (using half a cat’s face each on two packages that line up on the shelf), but we got everybody out of the way and let Milton do his stuff, and it was great for us.

Some people in our profession think graphic designers are valuable enough to be paid as much as major league ballplayers. Others are sure we’ll always be undervalued and our work thought of as decoration. When you talk about sales doubling, I wonder if the former isn’t true more often than we’re given credit for.

Louttit: Grand Union has enjoyed two major benefits. We not only attract more customers, the customers who come into our stores buy more product.

And your private label products often look more appealing than the nationally advertised brands.

Louttit: That’s what can happen. Our objective in private label is to match the national brand quality, and if we can’t find a supplier who can do that on a particular item, we just won’t carry that item. For example, we renamed our cola Penguin Cola because we didn’t want our name on something that wasn’t clearly equal to the national brand. This is something that Milton proposed and has been very involved in, not just from a design point of view, but from an actual strategic direction. And the package designs are all his firm’s, with very little input from anybody here.

No matter how good a designer might be, clients sometimes behave in ways characterized by designers as nit-picking: “We don’t like this typeface. Isn’t that color a little too bright? Aren’t there too many polka dots per square inch?” What would you say to management in other industries? How would you describe the most successful way to work with a designer?

Louttit: I’d say, to the greatest degree possible, make the design part of the internal processes. Retail companies have many processes by which they operate — meetings, internal communications. The designer needs to understand the mechanics of the organization in order to become effective within it. He also needs to get to know the people. The more people in Grand Union Milton knew, the better he was able to function. When he was kind of an outsider in the first few years, there was resistance. We got him heavily involved in the organization, in the processes, and got him working with the people. He could see when they had a valid reason for objecting to something, and they could see the real beauty of his ideas.

: : :

[By 2014, when I put together my C.A. “Clients and Designers” articles for the Allworth Press book, The Graphic Designer’s Guide to Clients, Goldsmith had long sold his Grand Union assets, and the company and individual stores had been bought and sold a dizzying number of times. After a bankruptcy and reorganization, Milton Glaser’s design was completely dismantled.

I followed up with Glaser to get his reaction.]

Q: I’ve watched with dismay as Grand Union stores returned to the standard configuration of long aisles, and innovations like the herb bars and cheese shops disappeared. What happened?

A: Glaser: They went through a series of leveraged buyouts after Goldsmith, the guiding force, decided to cash out all of his businesses and become an ecologist. He owned forests. He was worth a billion bucks.

What would you say to people who, noting the return to the old paradigms and ultimately the bankruptcy, would call the Grand Union redesign a failure?

Glaser: We managed to move the company from the bottom of consumer preferences to second. Everything was working. Goldsmith intelligently sold it all at the top of its form. Then there was a series of purchases, new owners. None of the new owners were interested in investing, so the company got weaker and weaker and lost its vitality and its customers. Eventually, there was a financial collapse.

Which had nothing to do with the design program . . .

Glaser: Everything we did caught on across the entire supermarket industry! Everything we introduced that worked was immediately replicated. A new generation of supermarket owners moved in our direction. They brought in fresh fish, fresh herbs. They’re doing it now at the Food Emporiums, the A&Ps.

“This isn’t the story of the demise of Grand Union! It brought about a change in the whole supermarket industry!”

Do you have any advice for young designers who would like to develop working relationships with their clients along the lines of yours with Goldsmith?

Glaser: Generalities are nonsense. These are very individual occurrences. Goldsmith and I liked each other. There was personal chemistry. With every client, you have to accommodate yourself. What is it that you want? What is it that the client wants? Your concepts should address the client’s concerns, but ultimately, you should do what’s pleasing to you and that is of high quality.

The moral of the story: There are two. One: if you really believe in something (and know what you’re doing), don’t back off. The client may come around. Two: Things change. A design program in which you invested many, many hours of work and love may be dismantled. It’s not your fault.