Why GoodCook is ‘a sleeping giant that’s waking up’ with its rebrand

The kitchenware brand GoodCook has been a mainstay since launching in grocery stores in 1987, then expanding to channels including big box retailers, drugstores, and online. But consumers with its tools rattling around in their kitchen drawers may not even register the GoodCook name. Instead, a peeler may be just a utilitarian tool—the memory of watching it travel down the supermarket checkout conveyor belt alongside the ingredients for carrot cake long forgotten.

“It isn’t a brand historically that was consciously sought after by name,” Karen Schnelwar, SVP of brand strategy and marketing at Bradshaw Home, which owns GoodCook, said. “It was, ‘right place, right time.’”

The brand assumed many guises, with subbrands that were exclusive to certain retailers including GoodCook Pro, GoodCook Ready, and GoodCook Touch.

“There were subbrands upon subbrands upon subbrands that were created for individual retailers,” she said. To consumers, such an array of names, designs, and packaging may have looked more like a mishmash than a coherent brand.

“It wasn’t registering in hearts and minds, and it was diluting the brand’s presence,” Schnelwar said.

Schnelwar, who served more than four years as VP of global brand strategy and marketing at Oxo, said Oxo, with its ergonomic design and grippy rubber accents, has the advantage of not being genericized by consumers.

“You could go into a drawer with your eyes closed, and you know when you’re picking up something Oxo,” Schnelwar said. “GoodCook didn’t have an industrial-design visual brand language—until now.”

GoodCook recently began rolling out a comprehensive rebranding effort. Along with redesigning its logo and packaging, it unveiled 160 new and redesigned tools and gadgets. Its roughly 1,800 other products that haven’t been redesigned are hitting shelves in new packaging under—sayonara, subbrands—the single GoodCook label.

“To come to life as one brand with one point of view was long overdue,” Schnelwar said. “We, the brand, didn’t want to risk being stuck in the middle in Nowheresville.”

New recipe: The dominant color in GoodCook packaging has switched from red, which Schnelwar said is common in the category, to blue.

“There was a conscious decision to go blue because it was unclaimed visual space,” she said.

The logo, previously a fairly standard lowercase sans serif, is still lowercase, but now the letters are serif and more rounded.

“The typeface was inspired by cookbooks,” she said. “It’s meant to just be this inviting, accessible, warm lowercase expression.”

She also said the new products have more unified design elements, echoing what she’d described about Oxo products.

“There is actually consistent hand feel, like shape and proportion,” Schnelwar said. “For handled goods, there’s consistency that wasn’t there before.”

Across the redesign, shades of gray unify the handles, she said, while the broader assortment uses a “palette that cues product usage,” including a salad spinner with green details and a citrus squeezer in lemony yellow.

“For GoodCook, it was high time to clean things up and make a cohesive brand statement,” she said.

The brand even has a bit of swagger after the overhaul.

“We talk about evolution versus revolution,” she said. “This is revolution by design.”

Everyday people: The brand is focused on everyday cooks rather than those who gravitate only to the most elite and expensive kitchen brands.

“We think our stuff is good enough for gourmands,” Schnelwar said, “but we’re not going to target gourmands because their personality and identity is cooking-based, and their tools are like jewels.”

Instead, its target is those who “enjoy cooking, but it’s not their whole personality,” she said. “They like good stuff in the kitchen that’s going to get the job done. So it’s a very pragmatic, down-to-earth target.”

Asked for a brand that occupies a similar position in another category, her answer came quickly.

“Toyota,” she said. “They’re really good cars that do a good job. They’re not a badge brand, but they’re a reliable brand.”

As GoodCook rolls out its new identity alongside its redesigned and new products, it’s striving to remain a kitchen staple—only now, one consumers recognize.

“GoodCook is a sleeping giant that’s waking up,” Schnelwar said.