Sharp's Way of Reshaping Television

By Toko Sekiguchi/Tokyo

When Sharp Corp. wowed the world with its flat-screen liquid-crystal-display (LCD) television in 2001, it wasn't just a technological breakthrough. It was a step away from the box. "For the first time ever, television gave way to design," says Michio Ogawa, a senior member of the design team that created Sharp's pioneering Aquos line. "Flat panels turned the television from an eyesore when it's not turned on to an interior-design fashion statement."

LCD technology has always been Sharp's strength. It was the first company to mass-produce the LCD calculator, and has been a leader in displays for gadgets like cell phones, camcorders and portable videogame consoles. But Sharp's success in the flat-screen world is the result of its willingness to marry elegant design to its technical skill by using teams that broke the rules of traditional Japanese business.

In the late 1990s, Sharp's president, Katsuhiko Machida, was determined to shed the company's image as a mere parts provider, so he approached industrial designer Toshiyuki Kita for help. "Our goal was to create not just a flat TV but a completely new product," says Masatsugu Teragawa, Sharp's corporate audiovisual director. "It had to look nothing like what we know TV to look like."

In a rare move for a Japanese manufacturer, Machida blended Kita and Sharp's design teams from the initial stages of development. "Japanese management tends to think that designers are completely ignorant of business strategies," says Takekazu Inoue, senior consultant of brand and design strategies at the Japan Research Institute. "A bunch of doodlers who are only expected to create pretty packages."

The first line of Kita Aquos--a sleek, metallic-silver flat screen with two soft, round bulges at the bottom for speakers, set on a boomerang-footed pedestal--won a shelfful of design awards and a place in European museums like the Pompidou.

Its design edge--and the company's manufacturing capacity--helped Sharp dominate the $80 billion flat-panel market for years, with more than 16 million Aquos screens sold since 2001. But competitors rushed in, and by 2005, Sharp had fallen behind Sony and Samsung. Consumers have benefited: three out of four TVs sold in the U.S. are now flat panels, and prices for 25-in.-to-29-in. models have dropped 72% in the past three years, according to DisplaySearch.

That pressure has pitted manufacturers against one another to come up with thinner, lighter, cleaner LCDs. Sharp plans to build a $3.4 billion factory near Osaka to produce bigger screens more efficiently. Yet, Teragawa says, as flat screens grew in popularity, the products became virtually indistinguishable from one another.

So Sharp decided to reinvest in design, creating a special team just to develop a new display for the U.S. and Europe, where demand is strongest. In April a few dozen designers quietly cleaned out their desks in Sharp's main design office in rural Tochigi prefecture and set up shop in a central-Tokyo building that used to house a high-security government agency.

Sharp opted not to use American or European designers for those markets. "We wanted to deliver a made-in-Japan value that could come only from Japanese designers," says Taisuke Saeki, who heads Sharp's audiovisual-design department. Still, the company wanted to adapt to a local aesthetic. Research showed that Westerners prefer vivid, crisp, dynamic design, while Japanese look for seamless precision and an organic feel. Think of it as the difference between a Cadillac and a Prius.

To reinvent the Aquos, Saeki encouraged the industrial designers to explore their new urban environment, but they were all required to attend a daily morning assembly. There are no in-house design competitions; team members build on their individual expertise in fields such as architecture, color coordination and interior design. They might sport faux-hawks, but Sharp's designers are decisively Japanese in their collaborative creativity.

The first U.S.-Europe Aquos line was revealed this summer: a bold, shiny piano-black finish with sharp corners and the slight allure of a curve at the bottom, partially exposing the speakers. The Japanese model is matte silver with softer edges. The team's job doesn't end there. Sharp's designers are forecasting not just design trends for the next line but also LCD-production capacity, panel size and availability. "All this fuss over just a TV? For now, perhaps just a TV. But not for long," says Saeki. For the team that made television beautiful, the picture is getting bigger.