David and James with Eva Zeisel

Can you walk us through your process?

The process, when it works at its best, is almost subconscious. We talk a lot with Eva (Zeisel) about beauty and I once asked her how she makes something “beautiful.” And she said, “I stay out of the way.”

We start with a general idea, but stay open to lots of wandering. For the “8.5” collection, a beginning thought was 50’s Italian with a little Danish Modern thrown in. But ideas seep in from maybe ten other things we love, and then there probably ten more things we didn’t even realize are influencing us. It all gets boiled down and refined, and we stand back enough to let the good things rise.

The “8.5″ collection

Do you sketch first, or do you just make things?

I sketch more – Jim sketches a little, he mostly makes cut paper silhouettes. They’re more substantial – let you know what the form will be like. Once we map out the collection, James turns plaster models. We refine them if needed, make molds, and then make samples.

How did you get started with ceramics?

James and I always gravitated towards art. We’ve known each other since high school. I started taking ceramics it in college. James did too at the same undergrad. and we both ended up majoring in it. Then I went to Cranbrook to continue studying ceramics and sculpture and Jim went to Alfred. After school we had to figure out what to do next. We knew we wanted to move to New York, so we came here and set up a ceramics studio.

The “Eva” collection

What was your first studio like?

It was maybe 500 sq ft, if that. Our first slip tank was a big, plastic olive barrel we found on 1st Avenue. We made a slipcasting table out of 2×4s with 5-gallon buckets underneath. We borrowed a friend’s wheel to make models. It was as low-tech as you can get. While in school Jim got a student loan to buy our first kiln, and we brought it here in a uhaul.

We thought we would start a production line to make money, and then have time to make our own individual art. But it took off and we never had time for the art. But we loved collaborating on the production work and realized if we made it as personal as our art it could be as satisfying – and much more special.

How would you describe what you were making?

Production at the time, late 80s/early 90s, was really coming from a craft and wheel-based aesthetic, for lack of a better term. It seemed like most of the production being done if it was cast, was still trying to mimic the look of a thrown pot. The pieces would generally be kind of wonky, and the forms weren’t so considered, and it was all about surface – everything got stripes or polka dots or something like that painted on under a clear glaze.

We had a more industrial aesthetic. We collected a lot of early-to-mid 20th century stuff. Ohio was great for that, because so much of it was made there. Our work has always been primarily about form, and a single glaze to finish and accentuate that.

At that time it was a bit of an uphill battle to educate our customers. People would ask, “Why is it handmade?” They found it a little confusing, because our work is not really about showing the hand so much, even though it’s all there. I think people have gotten used to the idea now.

The “C-thru” collection

Who were your first customers?

When James was in graduate school, he made work of an interior designer’s shop on the Upper East Side. After we set up our studio in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) we got an order from Bergdorf Goodman. That order let us quit out jobs and work in the studio full-time.

What was the hardest part about turning this into a business?

Now I think, “Oh, it was easy.” But it wasn’t, it was loads of hard work. But we were young and naive and had nothing to lose — we were just art students thinking, “Why not?” If I had to say what was difficult about starting, it was just that we had to do it all ourselves. We didn’t have any help. But I wouldn’t do it any other way.

Do you still make everything yourselves, or have you worked with factories?

When we started we wanted to do it all ourselves, and then very quickly we were asked to design for Dansk. We worked with them for about four years which was a great learning experience and a good way to get more ideas out into the world. At the time we were producing a dinnerware line in our studio and licensed it to them. It was nice to expand upon the collection and not have to worry about producing it ourselves. We’ve done that along the way – designed for other companies.

We tried to source production for ourselves at one point. We looked all over the US to find good production. In 1998 we designed the C-thru pieces, the ones with the holes through them, to be produced in a factory. But the samples we received were terrible (and we’re picky) so we concentrated instead on sourcing blown glass and soft goods and later prints.

Currently we make our Studio lines here in our LIC studio and the pieces in the Applied line are sourced. We continued to do research and last year went to China and found a small studio that has great quality, and their porcelain is just insanely beautiful and white. It’s funny, we brought it back and I was comparing it to a little Nymphenburg piece we have. And said to James, “Hmmm, the Nymphenburg’s kind of gray…”

The “Applied” collection

Hahahaha!

It was funny. That studio finally made sourced work possible – we knew we could do very high quality pieces there.

What advice do you have for someone who wants to work for themselves like you guys do?

1. You have to be really, really dedicated, and you have to be completely honest, sincere and truthful about what you make. If you’re making something you don’t like or something that is derivative or something just for the money, it’s not going to be satisfying, and I think it shows in the work. Someone else can always make it cheaper so you have to make it unique.

2. Make your pieces more expensive than you think. And don’t be afraid to make expensive things. A good expensive thing will find its market. You can make 5 expensive teapots, or you can make 100 less expensive teapots, and in the end maybe you’ll make about the same profit.

It’s very hard to know how to price things.

All my friends who make things say, “I can’t afford my own work.” The makers get to use and love and live with their pieces, but they’re not exactly their own customer. It’s hard to remember that. We had a friend in a next door studio who worked at Bergdorf Goodman, and we would walk a piece over and ask, “How much would this be?” She would say, “$600″ when we had been thinking, maybe $80?

All through undergraduate school my dad nagged, “Don’t you think you should take some business classes?” And my response was, “No – I’m an artist, I don’t need business classes!” And then suddenly it was, “Ugh, I wish I had taken business classes.” But I think we just used our common sense and learned along the way. We’ve grown slowly and steadily – it’s worked out!

The gorgeous KleinReid studio in Long Island City

Shake-a-leg salt and pepper shakers

How did Perch start? Did you know you were starting a company? You had a ceramics background, right?

Yeah, I have an undergrad in art, and I did some ceramics there. But I was specifically not into the sort of handmade quality of just throwing pots and hand-building, so I was really turned off from that. And so I spent the next couple years doing furniture, which led me to go to Pratt, to study furniture. So I thought I was going to be doing furniture. But everybody thinks they’re going to be doing furniture!

It’s so true!

It’s the dream, you know, which doesn’t really work very well in reality. But I took a slipcasting class there, and it was kind of like, “Oh, OK, this is ceramics but in a way that I can understand it.” It’s just so much cleaner, and you can have mass-produced stuff. I think I kind of always wanted to be involved in something more mass-produced, rather than just being an artist.

I’ve always been a little entrepreneurial, so I figured at some point it would lead to something. I worked for David Weeks for a long time. And so while I was working for him, I had a studio and I just started making stuff. I named my studio “Perch” because I still thought I was going to do furniture.

Basket bowl

Right – like things you would perch on.

Exactly. I really liked stools, and I had also made a birdfeeder, and I needed a name. Perch kind of covered a couple different things. It just kind of started… I just started selling things. I guess it happened pretty naturally. But I can’t say that I just stumbled into it. I did want to find something that I could make a business out of.

What has been the hardest part to learn about design as a business?

I’ve kind of focused my work to be things that wouldn’t be mass-produced on a bigger level. One of the problems is keeping a distinction between my stuff and other ceramic objects. You can obviously go to IKEA or West Elm and get nicely designed ceramics. The production processes of my pieces doesn’t lend them to full-on mass production. Sometimes they have a handmade quality, or sometimes it’s just the way things are fired. Those are subtleties that maybe only other industrial designers would notice.

Sometimes it’s tempting to just do something really simple, but there’s almost no point. I’d have to sell that vase for $70 or something, and you could buy almost the same thing for much, much less at one of the big stores.

Petite tray tray

Could you talk a little bit about sustainability and local production?

That’s the other challenge. I sort of fell into that naturally as well. The eco-friendly thing happened more because I don’t want to work around toxic materials. I knew that if this was going to be a life-long thing, the materials had to be something that I felt comfortable working with every day.

And while I definitely feel passionately about having things made locally, that’s also just the way it naturally happened. At one point I sourced some things out – they were being manufactured elsewhere in the US, and I just thought the quality was awful. My stores actually would not take the pieces that they made, and said, “We like the ones that you make better.” So that was a big decision, to decide, “Alright, If I’m going to do this, apparently I’M doing it.”

That’s what you offer as a company, if you’re doing it yourself – better quality than everyone else.

Exactly. It just looks different. It doesn’t look like a mug made in China.

Plantorb planter

There’s definitely a common language between all of your pieces. It’s kind of whimsical, but it’s also kind of minimalist and modern.

I think there’s something about shapes sort of relating to people in a way. Maybe this is something that’s grown out of experience, a little bit, but I feel like with a lot of my things people just really like the shape. And they kind of want it. It’s kind of an emotional thing. Maybe a shape somehow, when you see it, feels familiar and comfortable. It just sort of speaks to you on a level that you sort of want it in your life or something. That’s my goal; that’s what I try to do.

Speaking of goals, what else would you like to happen with Perch?

Obviously, since the economy is what it is, it has been sort of a creative time business-wise to really re-evaluate everything. It’s nice to be able to go back to the studio and figure out what is going to be of more value to somebody at this point. We’ve found that the higher-end stuff is selling more right now, which is very good.

One of my goals – I’ve been wanting to do a lot of tile stuff. I just got this big job doing tiles for a client, and that’s been something I’ve always wanted to try.

Rabbit pitcher

How do you deal with pricing your work? Has that been a hard thing?

It’s really hard. I feel like one of the reasons that I was successful in the first couple years is because I priced my stuff reasonably. I tend to think that the perfect price for something is probably halfway between wholesale and retail. You have to take a little bit less than you think you should get, and the stores have to be able to charge a little bit more. So it feels like an expensive item when somebody’s buying it, and it also feels like, “Oh, I can’t believe I’m only making that much for that piece.” Right in the middle would be perfect, but both you and the customer have to bend a little.

How have you built up your store network?

Mostly from the trade shows. I just do the New York Gift Show, that’s it. And word of mouth – blogs, the internet, people just write to me and say that they’ve seen something. That’s becoming bigger and bigger. I get more sales now, I think, from online word-of-mouth than even at the trade shows. But the necessary evil that we’ve realized is you have to be there. If you’re not there you kind of fall off the grid.

Any advice for other entrepreneurs?

I would say don’t get discouraged about this time, in the market. It is actually good, because people are really thinking about what they’re purchasing and people are starting to appreciate good design. They’re going to understand paying a little bit more for something that is made here, or something that is just a higher quality object in whatever way. So be patient and be smart about your designs. Try to think about adding value.

A container for one thing

MINT Inc.
601 W. 26th St.
Suite 1820A
New York, NY 10001
www.mintnyc.com

How did MINT begin?

I was working at Smart Design, and Tony and Alberto, who are the other guys in MINT, were subletting space in the Smart office. We were all there in that space.

Alberto designed the Hug salt and pepper shakers as a personal exploration before we decided to start MINT. No client, he just had the idea so he made these little models. Simultaneously, and unrelatedly, I was also working on a personal design exploration, which was a mortar and pestle. I made a model of it in our rapid prototyping machine that we had there. Alberto was walking past and he saw it and thought it was great. Then he showed me his salt and pepper shakers.

We sat there and looked at them and thought that they were related, that they worked well together. So we decided to try to make more designs and see if we could start a little company.

When did you first launch the products, or show them to other people?

Right after the mortar and pestle and the salt and pepper shakers, I designed a salad bowl design called the Ensalada. It was related to the design of the mortar and pestle in that it has full-contacting surfaces. I made a model of it, and we took those three products to Umbra. At the time we weren’t sure that we wanted to start manufacturing these things ourselves. At first, the idea was just to license the designs to established companies for a royalty.

Umbra rejected the salt and pepper shakers.

No!

Yeah, they said that it was too cute and not Umbra-like. We also took them to the Museum of Modern Art. We showed them to buyers I knew there, and they didn’t like them either.

This is so weird to hear.

When we went to Umbra, they did like the Ensalada bowl and they took that design and manufactured it, paying us a royalty. It’s still an Umbra product and we still get royalties from it. Now, we wouldn’t take that approach. We manufacture everything ourselves and we don’t submit our designs to companies seeking royalties. In the beginning, when our company was just getting going, we didn’t know what direction we wanted to take it yet.

Then we decided that since the mortar and pestle and the salt and pepper shakers were both made out of ceramic, we could manufacture them ourselves. There aren’t a whole lot of barriers to entry as far as spending money on tooling for that manufacturing process. We just said, ‘okay, you know what, let’s make a run of these and then incorporate our business and try to sell them ourselves’. We each put $5,000 down. At this point, Tony Baxter got involved. He worked with Alberto in their other consulting company called Curev ID. We had 2,000 of the salt and pepper shakers made.

We went back to the MoMA and submitted it again. We told them we had stock and they decided that they would try it, even though, as far as I can remember, they didn’t really think it was all that great.

They were skeptical?

Yeah. Luckily, though, they tried it and all of a sudden it became this huge hit. They sold all of them and then they reordered, and they sold all of those. It was a monster hit right from the start. We couldn’t make them fast enough. We went from our first order, which was the manufacturer’s minimum order quantity of 2000 pieces, to ordering them 20,000 pieces at a time. We sell through them quickly– about 25-30,000 each year.

Why do you think they didn’t get it?

The people who are experts in design seem to hold onto this idea of modernism– that things have to be austere and minimal, and that form follows function. The Hug salt and pepper shakers don’t really adhere to that. They’ve got this emotional component. It’s not austere, it’s not about minimalism, because it goes to another level with these black and white forms hugging each other. It’s a statement, and it’s romantic. It has all these emotional connotations that are totally unrelated to modernism. And it appeals to people who aren’t design experts. It appeals universally.

I’ve seen knock-offs of the Hug salt and paper shakers floating around. Are any of your products patented? Have you tried to shut that down?

All of our stuff is patented. We’ve tried to shut it down, but it’s very expensive to do. Our lawyer tried to serve one company that we know is knocking it off in China. It’s very difficult to take legal action against them since they’re all the way over there. They make counterfeits that look identical to ours, right down to the packaging. We go after the American retailers who are selling the fakes and they stop selling them. But it’s a lot of work to get people so stop doing it.

What have you learned since starting MINT?

As a designer, you’re in a really bad position when take a design that you do one spec on around and show it to companies. In a way you’re kind of begging them to make it, and to give you a little royalty. The money that you get from royalties is usually disappointing. They give you something small, like 2% of net sales. You wind up getting checks once a quarter, for $100 or something pathetic.

And it’s hard to even get to that point. There are a few companies, like Magis, who designers look up to because they’re so design-focused. If you try to approach them, you’ll find that you are one of many, many, many designers who are doing the same thing. That makes it hard to get their attention.

MINT allows us to put whatever cool little idea we have into reality. And it’s really hard to do that any other way.

We found with MINT that taking a small risk on the product, manufacturing it, and warehousing a quantity of it, instantly set us apart. It dramatically narrows the field of competition. Carrying stock and managing the logistics of it is a step that most designers won’t take. So when you do take it, all of a sudden things became very easy. We found, when we started Mint, that it wasn’t hard to get our products into a lot of stores. We found that the sales pitch was easy. We asked the little design boutiques if they’d like to buy this, and they said yes!

What do you consider to be your greatest achievement with MINT?

Definitely the strength of the Mint brand. I’m always amazed how strong it is as a brand. People know it, everywhere. And it’s a really small little venture, just the three of us. I’m proud of the fact that we’ve managed such global penetration.

Is MINT still coming out with new products? Are you guys still throwing ideas around?

Yeah, I just finished a new piece called Bud. It’s a vase for a single flower, but it looks like a terracotta flower pot. It’s a simple idea.

Could you tell me a little about your design consultancy, Scott Henderson Inc.?

I actually spend more time doing my consulting work than working on MINT. As a designer, I like to work on a variety things. The consulting lets me do housewares, medical products, consumer electronics, computer design… Stuff like that. I think if I was only doing these clever, intellectual statements for the gift
industry, it would be too much. I would get bored of it.

Cake/Make
160 Van Brunt Street
Brooklyn, NY 11231
718.797.9182
Cake
Make

How did the group of you start working together?

Originally there were five of us – we all met at Pratt during grad school. After school most of us were freelancing. In 2000, Kevin got a project from a housewares client. It was too big to handle alone, so he assembled the group. We got together, once or twice a week, ate pizza in our living rooms and developed twelve products to pitch to the client. We hoped they would pick one or two to go forward with, but they ended up picking ten!

All of a sudden we had a whole new set of problems. They were paying us, but we had a huge about of work to do and didn’t have a real work space. So we moved here. It was good timing, Red Hook was was just turning, and we got 5000 square feet. Make was officially a business.

What led you to form Cake?

We started consulting for housewares companies, but we were also coming up with ideas on our own. Cake became our outlet for our own products. We decided to do shows, and went to ICFF with prototypes. We didn’t completely know what we were doing, you never do… Our consultancy work was very mass market focused, while the pieces for Cake are meant to sell in boutiques, and are inspired by form exploration and various things we like. Cake is about pieces that are fun for us. It’s the type of thing that can go into hibernation for a while, but new people will continue to discover it and love it.

As far as Make goes, who was your first big, breakthrough client?

Well, obviously there was the client which led us to form Make… But another big breakthrough client was a guy who had an aerospace company in New Jersey. He’d gotten a DARPA contract to develop a technology that allowed people to climb up walls like Spiderman. After the technology was proved to work, he had an idea for a soap dish utilizing the same pressure/suction system. He brought us this really scary contraption, which we though was pretty cool, and we ended up expanding it into a whole line of home products.

We helped name the company, worked on packaging, really everything. The end product was this modular bathroom system where the starter piece retailed around 16 dollars. He ended up selling a few hundred thousand pieces. I’m pretty sure it’s still available at Linens’N’Things and Home Depot.

What has been the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome?

Getting new clients is a big one. You have to constantly be out there, finding new business, in order to keep it all going.

Do you have any advice for designers looking to band together and start something?

You have to be tenacious, get out there, be on the phone, and follow up – in a nice way. Talk to people. If you send in your resume, follow up with a phone call. I get stuff all the time; I just don’t have to time to get back to everyone. You also can’t get discouraged. People are going to reject you – you’ve need to get past that. Develop a thicker skin.

Reiko Kaneko
www.reikokaneko.co.uk/

image via NOTCOT

Where did you go to school, for what, and when did you graduate?

I went to Central Saint Martins, and graduated in 2005.

How did you transition from design school into the world of manufacturing and selling objects?

The real starting point for me was being approached by Beyond the Valley, a London boutique store promoting offbeat and graduate designs. They took my handmade products on – notably the Egg soldier cup. I used to line up the little soldiers and nearly poison myself with the resin fumes to put them together at home.

To my huge surprise, they sold well which got me thinking; perhaps I could do this whole manufacturing and selling business. Finding manufacturers was the hardest thing but steady part time work kept me going.

I met you at ICFF this year, where you had a table in the Designboom Mart. How did coming to NY for the show benefit you?

The mart was a great experience – there was a real buzz about that little area of the trade show. It was beneficial in terms of retail contacts as well as meeting great people whose work I’ve always admired.

How has the Internet helped you, as an indie designer?

It’s a massive help. Selling directly to individual customers is great. Online blogs also up your web presence, work as a public portfolio, and put great retailers in touch.

What are three pieces of advice you would give to new designers looking to start manufacturing and selling their products?

Stick with it if you decide to go the whole hog. Start small and don’t overstock. And don’t watch TV.