Everything, Including the Kitchen Sink: Inside Kohler's In-House Agency
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It’s a bright, modern space with the trappings of an agency: glass-walled conference rooms, shelves lined with art, and design publications and past work on display. There’s a social media listening room, the requisite video and photo editing bays. In the production studio, a photographer leans into her shot, making sure it’s just so, getting the lighting just right on today’s model: a gleaming porcelain sink. There’s also a couch made from a bathtub.
This is the agency within Kohler Co., the company known for plumbing fixtures made and marketed with “The Bold Look of Kohler.” Tucked away in bucolic Kohler, Wisc., the shop has been luring talent over the past few years from Publicis, GSD&M and other agencies to leave behind the city-life grind for a population that hovers around 2,100, excluding the deer and wild turkeys.
A newer addition to 144-year-old Kohler is a sleek, Gensler-designed building called The Beacon, opened in 2012. The modern space, a sharp contrast from the company’s turn-of-the-20th-century factories a short drive away, is where more than 150 people handle nearly all marketing functions for the privately held company, which according to Forbes has annual revenue of $6 billion.
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