Switching it up… Remember when we interviewed Paul Loebach? He had the fun idea to interview us about our business for the site.
Design Glut on Design Glut… Super meta.
“I was contacted by Design Glut for an interview a few months ago, and I’ve been a dedicated fan of their products and weblog ever since. Upon our meeting I was instantly fascinated by these charming ladies’ design story, and I thought if anyone would make for an amazing interview, it’s Liz and Kegan. So for this very special guest feature the tables have turned- and I bring you the founders of Design Glut generously sharing the inner workings of what makes their operation tick. Enjoy!”
Thanks Paul! Be sure to check out his work here.
Paul: So how did the Design Glut blog come about?
Kegan: We were bored. We had a really slow period in our studio last summer and didn’t have much work to do and the website needed a revamp.
Liz: It was more of a portfolio website, at that point, which wasn’t really working out. We went through different ideas to try something new: event calendars, covering events, editorials, pictures that we liked – each day there was a different thing that we wanted to include in our website. But the one thing that really worked was the interviews.
K. We started having so much fun meeting people and hearing their stories. At first we mostly just convinced people we already knew to sit down with us and talk.
L. Then there was a turning point; it stopped being people we already knew. We started contacting people we really admired. Harry Allen and David Weeks were some of the first established people we interviewed who we didn’t already know- that’s when we felt like we were actually becoming journalists.
Liz and Kegan in the Design Glut office [image via New York Magazine]
Is it ever hard to get interviews with well-known people?
L. Some people that I would liked to have met didn’t respond to our request. But we are always surprised how getting a response doesn’t seem to have any correlation to how famous someone is.
Design Glut is a great example of how someone can leverage a design background to build a successful product business. How much time, percentage-wise, would you say you spend on the business vs. the design side of development? Be honest.
K. 90/10.
L. Shipping and emailing take up the bulk of our time. In the beginning we had trouble getting back to our creative sides after spending all day doing the business stuff, because it’s such a different part of the brain.
K. As a small business, all these balls are up in the air and you can’t drop anything. But it’s gotten much easier now, and all those mundane tasks have gotten more streamlined as part of our routine.
In your experience, is self-production more profitable than licensing?
L. Yes. For licensing to work, you have to have a bunch of products out. Then it adds up – but the royalties for a single product are very small. For a designer just starting out, I think it’s a lot easier to be profitable with one product if you do it yourself, rather than if you have a licensing deal. But you have to do a crapload more work, so it’s kind of a trade off. You can’t really have a day job if you need to go to the post office every day to ship your product.
Promo photo shoot outtake
How do you find a manufacturer to make your products?
K. Google.
L. We usually Google a manufacturing process, email ten of manufacturers, and get three responses back. Of those, one will be affordable. There’s always just one. We never really have to make a choice.
K. It would be nice sometimes if we could! Then once we have a manufacturer to work with, we try to do an initial smaller run of 100 pieces and see how those sell. We learned that as we went along. In the beginning, right of the bat we’d have 2000 pieces made.
L. We were crazy. Our first two products were the Egg Pants and the Hookmaker, and we got thousands of them made right away. I would never do that now…
But the Egg Pants were a huge success, right?
L. Egg Pants were kind of a perfect first product – by completely dumb luck. They’re tiny, they’re super light-weight, you can drop them and they won’t break, and they have this cuteness that everyone likes. All those things together meant that the product took off. So this huge success in the beginning led us to believing that selling our products would be really easy. “Let’s just start a company and make stuff and sell it!” From there, it took a long time, pretty much the last two years, to get back to consciously being able to design products that are smart as opposed to stumbling into it.
Packaging Egg Pants in the studio
So you got a thousand Egg Pants made at once? Where did you put them?
L. Luckily, Egg Pants are really small. Even 2,000 of those didn’t take up that much space – I was warehousing them in my bedroom.
K. But 2,400 Hookmakers… Luckily the Hookmakers weren’t shipped to us until we had a larger studio space. Otherwise it would have been a disaster – and it was already a mess. We had to receive pallets to a residential address. We were literally breaking the pallets down on the sidewalk and loading them into the basement of our building, where we weren’t even supposed to store things.
L. …and each pallet was 1000 pounds!
That must have been a big financial investment.
K. It was a huge financial investment. For the amount of money that goes into bringing one product to market, you have to be really sure that it’s a product you want to go with. And you have to find that money somewhere.
So how do you figure out how much something should cost?
L. Trial and Error. I remember pricing Egg Pants for the first time – I just had no clue. I asked people and nobody had any idea either. Now we know that stores will mark up the price 2-3 times from the wholesale price you sell to them at. I don’t know why that isn’t common knowledge; it should be. I think a lot of designers play a lot more with value and see what they can get for their objects, but we try to price things as low as we can. Our goal is to make conceptual design accessible.
K. For the cost of a product, there’s a lot of things you don’t think about at first: The bag that it goes in, the stickers, the box, the wrapping paper, the bubble wrap, the ink, the printing… The things that just cost a few cents add up really quickly.
L. That’s become part of our design process. It relieves a lot of stress down the line.
Liz and Kegan hard at work in the office.
How did you guys link up with overseas manufacturing?
K. The Hookmaker is the only thing we’ve done overseas so far. We had a factory recommended by a friend of ours. I don’t know how we would have found one on our own.
L. People that we’ve interviewed who are looking for overseas manufacturers seem to go over and look at factories themselves and find the one that’s right for them.
K. I would love to manufacture everything here, but if you want to sell products at a reasonable price point, or if you want to use a certain process, you sometimes have to go overseas. Each product we do involves a new process, so we figure out what’s best overall.
Can you recall a business mistake you made that you would never want anyone else to repeat?
L. Every single one of our mistakes has taught us something. I can’t think of any mistakes I wouldn’t repeat. I guess that’s how I am. If I don’t see a silver lining, I have to find it.
K. Having pallets delivered to the house was a pretty big mistake.
L. The vinyl!
K. Oh my god, the vinyl. When we did ICFF last year, we wanted a black background in our booth, but you can’t paint the walls unless you pay a fee for refinishing, which would have been like $600. So to get around that, we had the genius idea of getting solid 4’ x 8’ sheets of vinyl and sticking them to the wall. We started putting it up and it started bubbling and wrinkling like crazy. Every single person that peeked in our booth was asking if we needed help. I was about to have an utter meltdown. We still paid like $500 for the vinyl and it looked so bad. We were completely miserable.
So what’s the moral of the story?
K. Don’t try to apply large sheets of vinyl!
Liz and Kegan at their very first show, the DesignBoom Mart, in 2007
[image via Metropolis Magazine]
There’s an old adage that says you shouldn’t go into business with your friends. What would you guys say about that?
K. Well, we were business partners first and later we became friends.
L. At first we didn’t know each other at all. At Pratt, we had senior studio together and one day Kegan happened to tell me about the DesignBoom Mart at ICFF. I applied for it and we decided to split the table. Neither one of us was a “plays-well-with-others” type of person. We were both kind of surprised how well we worked together. So we figured we should probably keep the partnership going! Neither of us was looking for a business partner and I think that’s why it worked so well.
K. I’m sure that in any company with more than one person, inevitably there’s going to be some drama- but we’ve been really surprised how much other people expect there to be drama between us. It was funny how friends, family, even strangers would dig for it – they wanted to hear the drama!
L: Yeah, there isn’t much drama at Design Glut – but we joke about making stuff up and giving people want they want!