The Washing Machine That Ate My Sari – Mistakes in Cross-Cultural Design

Interactions magazine Lovely piece on the need for local product design, focusing on a couple of notable case studies, like a Whirlpool washing machine that sold poorly in India as it had a disturbing tendency to shred saris.

The Fallacy of the Global Platform
As part of an aggressive global strategy, the Whirlpool Corporation designed a single, stripped-down washing-machine platform for emerging markets. Dubbed the “World Washer,” it was launched in Brazil, Mexico, China, and India, with slight feature design and styling modifications for each market to reflect local tastes. Exterior accents were added for China, for instance, where washing machines sit right in the living room and are something of a status symbol. “Delicate” was relabeled “Sari Cycle” on the Indian model.

The washing machine ended up doing very well for the company-everywhere but India. Sales in South India were particularly abysmal.

With tens of millions of dollars at risk, Whirlpool dispatched a team to the subcontinent to find out what went wrong. They finally realized what was going into the machines-traditional South Indian clothing such as lungis, dupattas, mundus, angavestrams… and, of course, saris. Little more than sheets of very fine cotton or silk, six to nine yards long, the garments were getting caught, entangled, and shredded in the millimeter-wide gap between the machine’s agitator and drum.

That single millimeter forced Whirlpool to completely restructure their business model and abandon their joint venture, in addition to designing a new washing machine for India. It took the company years to recoup their losses and regain significant market share in the subcontinent [6].

Because its designers did not broadly, deeply, and fundamentally understand specific target markets, the World Washer failed to live up to its name. The basic mistake Whirlpool made-in a variant of not understanding its target market-was to assume that needs are the same across emerging markets.

The World Washer had been given a single, generalized, emerging-market reference point by designers with limited understanding and direct experience of the customs and modes of dress in South India. They did not ask the right questions of target users-if they talked to them at all. So critical details, like the thickness and dimensions of the clothes that would be washed, went unnoticed.