Simplehuman’s principal products, stainless steel kitchen garbage cans, cost $39.99 to $179.99 and have 5- to 10-year warranties. Simplehuman’s designs have won awards, including the Industrial Designers Society of America’s silver and bronze awards. They are sold next to the $1,999 coffee makers and $299.95 toasters by retailers like Williams-Sonoma, which will feature Simplehuman’s garbage cans in a two-page display, with an editorial paean to the company, in the fall catalog.

In short, they are receptacles for cash as well as trash. With sales of $33 million last year, Simplehuman is projecting sales of $55 million for 2004.

Mr. Yang is not alone. Two European companies, Leifheit and Brabantia, make versions of what the housewares industry now calls “upscale trash cans.” OXO International, the Good Grips kitchen utensil company, introduced a trash can in March, to arrive in stores in September.

“It’s a new challenge, a moment of truth for this type of product,” said Ravi Sawhney, the founder of RKS Design in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and the head juror for the 2004 Industrial Designers Society of America awards. “I have mixed feelings about it. How rich can you make the experience of putting trash in a receptacle?”

Mr. Sawhney explained that consumers appreciative of design were now appreciably cynical about its much-heralded pervasiveness.

“Imagine going in for surgery,” he said. “And the surgery room is highly designed — Philippe Starck — beautiful. I would never in a million years allow them to do surgery on me. I would be so skeptical about a lack of substance, from all those highly designed knickknacks in my kitchen.”

With the help of NameLab Inc., a San Francisco-based communications specialist that names products and companies (including Acura and Compaq), CanWorks became Simplehuman in 2002, because of Mr. Yang’s conviction that the accuracy of a brand’s identity could corner a particular market — in Simplehuman’s case, the kitchen renovators and cooking enthusiasts who were the design-driven demographic behind other houseware successes like Williams-Sonoma.

Michael Barr, president of NameLab, said of the decision to make “Simplehuman” a single word, “It’s taking two natural language words and making them a `thing’ — making the brand name itself a design object.”
…
Sally Geller, senior buyer for Williams-Sonoma’s catalogs and Internet site, where Mr. Yang’s garbage cans are sold, explained that the brand, as well as the garbage can, was what made Simplehuman appropriate for her customers.

“If they had been CanWorks, we probably wouldn’t have tagged it,” she said, referring to identifying the products by name in the catalog. “If they had been called `Porsche Trash Cans’ we would have been suspect too — more hype than function.”