What is your design philosophy, and what are you hoping to do with your work?

Bruce: We both teach, so Materious happens on the side, but it’s a big part of what we do. We’re most interested in projects that really say something, get some kind of debate going, but can still exist in a marketplace. The product form becomes the carrier for this message. Our work ranges from more commercial to more discursive. We’re probably more interested in the discursive stuff, but for us, that line is really interesting. Can you have something that’s discursive, critical, and still have it exist in the marketplace where more people have access to it? That’s the challenge.

How has teaching informed your design, and how has doing your own design work informed teaching?

Stephanie: It’s interesting to do both – it keeps you in different mindsets.

B: It keeps you fresh. We’re vetting a lot of the ideas for the book that we’re working on, the discursive design book, through the classroom. It forces us to articulate what we mean by this and figure out all the nitty gritty bits of it.

S: The structure and the language for the book came from the classroom, and trying to talk to students about what they’re doing. They’re not necessarily interested in solely doing commercial work. We both teach grad studios, and a lot of students don’t realize they can do non-commercial things. It’s interesting to be an advocate for that, and to put a language behind it.

Bruce, the program where you teach is pretty new, right?

B: Yeah. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, it’s not an industrial design program, it’s designed objects. It’s a nice opportunity to begin to rethink what design should be in the 21st century. We’re teaching the four fields of design: commercial, responsible, discursive, and experimental. A traditional industrial design program would focus mostly on the commercial aspect.

Progeny | 2005 | parent & child coat rack | prototype

How did you guys find each other and start Materious?

B: We met at a design conference – I saw her from across a crowded conference-room floor! It was the IDSA Midwest conference in 2003.

S: I think our first project together was in 2004. We did Progeny for a DWR competition here in Chicago. We put some entries together and that one was selected. That was our starting point. We got Best in Show that year, so we thought, “Let’s do something else!” We designed Cubby the following year, for the same competition, and it was really successful. It won Interior Design Magazine’s best accessory of the year.

Cubby | 2006 | coat hook & storage | coming soon from Charles & Marie

Wow, not a bad start! What’s the design community like here in Chicago?

B: There are a lot of designers in Chicago, but they’re not always so visible. I think that’s starting to change. The first DWR show was really a turning point. It was like, “Wow, look at all these people!” We just hadn’t seen them before.

S: Well, I would say we knew the industrial designers, but that DWR event was a really great mix of different professions – architecture, and interior, and graphics…

B: It was an interesting way to bring it all together. The IDSA Chicago chapter is very active and has done a good job of bringing the community together. The Object Design League is the biggest new venture – I think it has a lot of promise and momentum going. And Scott Wilson coming to Chicago is fantastic. He’s the biggest name individual designer in Chicago. It’s great to have him here.

S: Also, there’s more and more independent design events happening around NeoCon. The Guerilla Truck Show is another great event, similar to DWR in that it brings lots of designers and artists together every year, and it’s the 4th or 5th year that’s been happening.

Umbrellas for the Civil but Discontent Man | 2008 | manufactured by Kikkerland

Lately I’ve been seeing your umbrellas everywhere. Could you tell us about that project?

B: That’s the project which is doing the best from a commercial standpoint. We made the prototype, sent it to Kikkerland, and right away they said, “We love it,” and put it into production. It’s interesting, because some people say the umbrellas are very humorous and jokey…

S: But it didn’t come from that place.

B: Yeah, it was part of this series about aggression. Right now we’re trying to get Kikkerland to do the whole series. One of the battles with that project, and some of the other projects that we do, is, how do you keep the message there? Especially when it gets decontextualized and it’s now sitting over in a shop. The tag was really important – that was our opportunity to get our message across and make sure it’s not as much a Spencer’s Gifts kind of thing.

There’s a strange line between whether something is “conceptual” or “novelty.”

B: Consumers aren’t used to expecting a layer of meaning. Our interest is in discursive design – objects that give you something more. Yes it’s useful, usable, desirable, but what else? Our goal is to squeeze a little bit more out of the physical stuff. The name “Materious” is a word that’s not in circulation anymore, but it did mean “substance” and “substantive” – it’s got that dual meaning.

Forecast | 2005 | umbrella & stand with rain forecasting technology | concept prototype

You showed in Milan this year – what was that experience like?

S: We went to Milan last year and thought, “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice to show? Wouldn’t it be great?” But we didn’t actually think we could do it – it seemed like it would take years to put it together. And then this opportunity came up in January or February. It was kind of last minute!

B: There was a call for Tuttobene, which is a Dutch group that exhibits there every year. This year they decided that they were going to open it up to international designers. Tuttobene means “all together” or “all good” and it’s largely an environmentally-responsible show. While I wouldn’t classify our work as specifically environmentally-responsible, they wrote about environmental and social responsibility, and a lot of our work certainly deals with social issues.

What did you show?

B: We took these different authors as points of reference for the work. The umbrellas project came from an essay from Freud. And there was an essay from Karl Marx… Basically all the pieces related to a thinker. We had a stool there with the thinker’s name burned into the stool, and then the object itself.

Was it hard pulling it all together?

B: Well, our school, the SAIC, had three exhibitions there this year. Since we’re a new program, we’re sort of trying to come from behind. We identified Milan as a place that we want to be in order to jump to the head of the class. So I was already going. The logistics worked out really well.

S: And the knowledge that came from the other faculty members who had done it before was really helpful.

B: The biggest thing to know is, don’t send anything there through UPS or FedEx. Largely because the mafia still has a hand in it. They know you need this stuff, and they basically hold it up. You call them saying, “Where’s my stuff?” and you hear “Oh, it’s somewhere else.” If you ask them, “What can we do to speed this up?” and offer them a little money, they essentially “find” your package. The guy next to us was from Switzerland and his stuff was send by DHL – lost. The guy on the other side, from Canada, used FedEx – lost. So having done work with the school, we knew things like that. And it’s so much easier with a group show.

Progeny | 2005 | parent & child coat rack | prototype

Given all the expenses and the hassle, why is showing in Milan so important?

B: Milan is Milan – there’s nothing else like it. The entire year’s design press comes from that one event. That’s the world stage for design. Since there aren’t a lot of Americans there, people say, “Oh, there must not be much going on in America.” More designers need to do it – it would help American design. It is so helpful if there is a group show.

S: I think there are so many Americans who are interested in it. It would just take an organization, like Object Design League or someone else, to do it. And it helps if someone can speak Italian! But having gone through it once now, it feels very accessible.

What other advice do you have for independent designers trying to get footing?

S: Band up with other independent designers, and share stories, and share your knowledge with other people.

B: Yeah, I’m meeting with another independent designer today to talk, and another on Friday. It’s basically about banding together to say, “What do you know?” You can’t do design alone, if you want to be in the marketplace. You can do exhibitions and lots of interesting work, but ultimately you can’t get into the marketplace without a manufacturer and a retailer. Those are the three legs – without them all your business won’t stand. So you need to learn how that system works, who to talk to, and how to talk to them – that’s the biggest thing for independent designers.

You just came out with an article on Core77 about design clubs cropping up around the country. Could you quickly summarize what’s going on here?
 
L: Sure–right now it’s very difficult for young designers to exist in the space between craft fair and large consultancy. We’re part of a larger movement of emerging design clubs in America, including JOIN:Design Seattle and The American Design Club in New York, that exist to build infrastructure to promote and support these small design businesses. Each group is approaching this problem differently, but in general we all exist to raise the visibility of young designers in the states and to create opportunities by establishing credibility with larger entities that are able to support design: the public, the press, manufacturers, etc.

How does being part of a club help young designers?
 
L: We found that just by formalizing a tiny bit, we got tremendous response from people, which indicated a strong will for this kind of thing. There was an immediate positive impact, and people came out of the woodwork to help and produce work. We’re developing a core group of people in Chicago who know each other and talk to each other and feel inspired by each other, which goes a long way towards building momentum.
 
C: And with the first show, The Promise of this Moment, it was just a call for entries, but it actually spurred a tiny production of work. “OK, well I’m going to make this thing for this show.” So maybe 6 people made new objects for the show. There is definitely an observed impact on the community; it’s not just like, “Oh we bring you guys together.” We actually got people to do more than they would normally do.

ODL members with inflatable ODL logo 

How did you get the idea to form the Object Design League?
 
C: We both graduated from the Designed Objects program at the Art Institute a little over a year ago, in 2008. We came to realize that we really missed the community of school.
 
L: One of our professors, Jim Termeer, suggested that we meet up once a month after graduation, to chat about what we were doing, maybe do a crit or two. So the seed was planted there.  About a year later, after all the post-graduation dust settled, we realized that there isn’t much structure for being an independent designer in Chicago, and that we really missed being involved in a design community.
 
C: And the thing is, that there are a ton of people here doing things – designers, furniture makers – but there isn’t really a tight community. So we planned a little meeting, and sent out emails to people we knew, saying, “Want to come over and we can talk about…stuff?” That was the very beginning, and it evolved very quickly. Within a few months people started emailing us, like Richard Wright. It was obvious that people are interested in this. There’s a desire for it, in Chicago.
 
L: At the first meeting, maybe 7 people showed up. At the next meeting it was 30, and the next meeting it was 50. It’s amazing, how quickly things can grow.

When did you start doing events?
 
C: In March we had our first slideshow event, which was sort of modeled after the Pecha Kucha. 10 artists and designers each did 5 minutes of presentation on all kinds of different topics. We thought we were going to have 15 people show up, and it ended up being like 50, with people standing around the sides of the room because we ran out of chairs.
 
L: By the third event I hardly knew any of the people there! It’s great to have numbers, but I think the most significant thing for us was realizing, in just a few events, that there’s tons of people who are ready to be a part of this. We’re putting together events, like the slideshows, that can help inform design work and help people get ideas, as well as opportunities for people to show their work. We’re trying to help designers be able to build their small businesses.
 

Photo Paddles by Steven Haulenbeek in The Promise of This Moment show

I saw pictures online from your show “The Promise of this Moment.” How did that come together?
 
C: These three grads from the Art Institute formed a collective called The Mighty Bearcats. They’re a little bit before our time – the program that we graduated from is new, so for a while there wasn’t really anyone who wanted to do that kind of work here in Chicago, except for those guys.
 
L: They were kind of this lone little group in Chicago. We met up with them, once we started the ODL. and they told us, “Listen, this gallery’s giving us a space to do this show, it’s going to be a lot of work for us to fill up the whole thing, we’d love to bring you guys in on it.” So that’s how the Promise of this Moment thing happened. The idea was that we could help sponsor and produce and curate this thing.
 
C: They had the idea, and we sort of figured out how to do it – the logistics, the call for entries, the graphics… We can send all of these things to our members and say, “Everyone jump in!”
 
L: One of our members, Michael Savona, did the graphics for the show. We had some of our members come help with the fundraising party. It was the perfect scale project to really dig in. When it was over, it felt like we had accomplished exactly what we had wanted to do with it.
 
That’s fabulous, especially for your first time doing something like that.
 
L: I was amazed how much support we had. The fundraising party was sort of a donation thing… You didn’t have to give, but people were really excited, put in their petty change or cash or whatever, and they helped fund it. And then the space we originally had folded two weeks prior to the show. Big problem! But Morlen Sinoway, who knew the Mighty Bearcats, ended up saying, “I have this empty space that’s not rented yet – you guys should use it.”
 
C: That’s one thing that we’re finding in Chicago: as soon as you send out an email that says, “We need a space for a couple of weeks,” someone’s going to pop up and be really responsive – it’s great.

Pipette Lamp by Smith and Linder

You two also design together, as Smith and Linder. When did you start that?
 
C: Well, we knew we wanted to work together. Initially we looked at competitions as a way of helping us decide what project to jump on. The first one we entered was DWR’s Modern + Design + Function (M+D+F) show.
 
L: I think they do it in different cities – it’s a competition they sponsor for local furniture designers.
 
C: We decided to design something for that. The first time we sat down, we were sitting at this desk next to each other and we were like, “So, what do we do now?” We needed to set up some sort of a structure just to even get started. It was a little weird.
 
L: We came up with a prototype of a lamp, which got accepted into the DWR thing. Once it got to that point, any division between who was doing what just kind of melted away. It was super fluid and smooth. It’s funny, people would email our company, and we’d both get the email. We’d both respond and CC each other, within seconds, and the emails would be almost exactly the same – verbatim. It’s like we have the same brain! But that’s a great feeling. It’s definitely hard to find that.
 
C: That project allowed us to get the ball rolling. There was no pressure. It seemed kind of fun and interesting to us – a light with two ends on it. The final piece is called the Pipette lamp.
 
L: Going through the full cycle once, on our own, without school pin-ups or critiques or assignments, was really important. We figured out our own way of working. I think we’re both very design-through-making. We just want to make the thing and see what its implications are. Make it, evaluate it, make it again – without a lot of mind-maps and illustrator documents and things like that.
 

Michael Savona’s Goose Cones in The Promise of This Moment show

Everybody has their own process. The process that they teach you in school is geared towards the company model – it directly sets you up for going to work at a typical firm.
 
C: A lot of that process – model making, illustrations, renderings, presentations – is meant to help outside people to understand your idea. Working on our own allows our idea to be insulated up to a point where it’s much more developed and ready for other peoples’ eyes. In some ways, for creative work, that makes so much more sense. It allows you to bring projects to their right fruition, rather than getting watered down too early in the process.
 
L: Misinterpretation can be deadly. If you show it to people and they don’t see something, or they see something too literally, it’s over.

C: I can see the benefits in both ways of working, the independent process vs. the firm/group process. But I think having at least a portion of your practice be independent work is a really important thing to develop your own perspective – which ultimately adds to the larger conversation.
 
So what’s next?
 
C: For the Object Design League, we’re thinking about coming out with a publication, doing a pop-up shop around the holidays, and ICFF in the spring – those are the big ones, aside from continuing the slideshow events.
 
L: We’re also trying to figure out how to move all this from a moonlighting thing to something we can actually do full time.
 
C: Once again, it’s all about getting the framework down. That’s what you need to keep it going.

Bryan Metzdorf’s Teton Blanket in The Promise of This Moment show
 

Stimulation mug by Craighton Berman

What’s the design scene in Chicago like?

Everyone knows Chicago as a design and architecture city, but when I got out here I just didn’t feel it in the way I wanted. There didn’t seem to be much of an independent or conceptual design scene. What I really wanted to see was intelligent, provocative design, as well as design community. But I didn’t know what the right combination of them was. As a creative outlet, I started blogging at fueledbycoffee.com, where I wrote about design and other things that inspired me. I got active in IDSA- most recently I helped to organize an exhibition of conceptual design called Deceptive Design, that ran for 3 months downtown at the Chicago Cultural Center. That started to get the ball rolling for me.

But it wasn’t until I started teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), when things started to move in the direction I always imagined. SAIC recently started a graduate and undergraduate program, in what they call “designed objects.” People from that program have been getting really active and starting to build community- specifically the Object Design League, a recently formed design club. It’s a really exciting time to be here! The Museum at the Art Institute just opened the modern wing with a great new design collection. Big design-stars like Bruce Mau are setting up studios out here. Independent design in general is really starting to pick up. It’s an important time to be designing in Chicago.

Coil lamp: Working-class extension cord with upper-class aspirations.

When did you start developing products on your own?

For a long time I complained about not having that kind of scene here in Chicago. But what I didn’t understand is that you can make your own scene, just like anything else. Just do it. So I started making some stuff.

It became official, though, when Design Within Reach did their M+D+F show. “Modern + Design + Function” is what it stands for – they started the show here, and now they do them all over the US. So I entered a salt and pepper set I’d designed into that, and also a table I’d done with a friend. They both got in.

Working in consulting firms and being a designer over the years, my sketchbooks are full of ideas, but I’d never actually made any of them. Which is sort of the threshold, right? For the DWR show, when I actually had to make them or I would not get in the competition, I made them! So that was the beginning. Once I did that, I realized it’s not so hard to do self-production. Especially with the salt and pepper set, which was slipcast ceramic. I think that was actually the biggest insight – if you pick projects that are made out of materials that you can actually do yourself, prototype yourself, you can actually get going a lot quicker.

I think design education at a lot of schools makes you think that you always have to use injection-molded plastic. They make you think the only option is consumer products that are made in China. There should be more design education focusing on working with small manufacturers or artisans, developing products locally or independently.

Core-toon: Coffee Temperature Acceptability Index

Agreed. School also focuses so much on your craft in the shop – which is important because you have to develop an eye for quality, but you don’t necessarily have to achieve that craft yourself. There are other people who you can work with.

Totally. As long as you can create a really clear vision for the project and you can document how you want it to come out, you can work with someone who has more knowledge on how to actually do it. There is this myth of the designer who’s a “genius” working by themselves for 9 months and when the thing comes out it’s perfect and finished and done. Things don’t work like that. The more you can collaborate with others, the stronger the work will be.

How did you discover design?

As a little kid I was always inventing crazy stuff and drawing. I loved doing that. My parents said, “You could be an engineer, because you like to invent things!” I went to a really great engineering school and was completely miserable for a year and a half. One day I was in class, doodling instead of paying attention, and the professor told me, “You’re great at drawing – that’s rare for an engineer. Most of the time industrial designers do that.”

I discovered the industrial design department, saw people making stuff, and I thought, “Alright, this is it.” I switched into industrial design and, yeah, that was it.

My interests have always been really diverse, though. Right now I’m working at Gravity Tank, a design strategy/consulting firm. I’ve also got a serious interest in conceptual independent design, idea-driven stuff, and I’ve got a serious interest in illustration. Recently I’ve been doing cartoons for Core77, kind of whimsical stuff. I’ve always suffered from being in a billion different spots at once. So I’m kind of hard to pigeonhole.

Core-toon: The Computar

I’d say that’s a good thing – everyone wants to pigeonhole you, as a designer, but I think the longer you can hold out, the more valuable you are.

Right. Although it’s challenging to work a full time job that’s really demanding, and teach, and work on my own projects, it’s also fulfilling. You’re always doing something new. You’re just really busy. I have way more ideas than I have time to make them happen.

Have you always drawn cartoons? You definitely seem like a natural.

Yeah. That was way before design. Cartoons have been happening since like, age 3. I’m really comfortable communicating that way. It’s a great way to just get ideas out there, which is kind of what I’ve been doing with the Core-toons. The Core-toons project started because my friend Tony and I got together for the housewares show and did a series of cartoons riffing on it. The response has been really positive. One of the cartoons got on Digg or one of those things recently, and I got 10,000 hits to my site in a day.

Where do you hope for all your projects to head?

I think the eventual goal is to have my own studio. It would be nice to find a mix of doing all the different things I want to do, and have my own autonomy. My dad has had his own company for 40 years, and that’s always been really inspiring to me. My ideal business model would be to have a line of products that I’m working on, some sort of design-thinking consulting work, and some illustration kind of work. It’s just so multi-faceted it’s ridiculous. But it’s working so far!

How would you describe the Factory Vintage aesthetic, to people who haven’t been in here?

It’s retro. The store that I really emulated is Biba, in London. They started out in a store that was probably about my store’s size, and then moved on to have a whole department store. They only lasted like 10 years, because they got so big that it imploded. The founder was really into Art Deco and the 1930’s and 40’s. They used these Victorian coat racks to hang clothes on. It had so much of her personality in it. That’s what I’m shooting for with Factory Vintage – it’s more like a lifestyle than a boutique. It’s just an extension of me.

Where do you get all your clothing?

Sometimes I go thrifting around the city, but mainly people bring it in and I buy what I like. I just go through it and pick out what I think is salable, and and then I wash or dry clean it. For the accessories – I buy new sunglasses and earrings and things like that, for people who want them for parties.

When did you start the store?

At the end of August, it’ll be 2 years since I opened. A store called Viva Vintage used to be here. I worked there for 5 years, through college and after. Then the old owner decided that she didn’t want to have a storefront anymore – she’d been doing it for 10 years. One day she told me, “I’m thinking about closing,” and I thought, “Crap! What am I going to do?”

So I took over the space, painted, added carpeting, and got all new racks and furniture. I wanted it to be more homey. I also wanted it to be more open, so I can keep an eye on people. The old owner used to have tons of problems with shoplifting. One summer we had a mass theft of tube tops – you’d go to organize and there would be like 15 of them gone. They’re like $8! Is there a black market for tube tops?

On that note, what’s been the hardest part about running a store?

I’ve been really lucky in that my dad started his own studio, and so he has been awesome at helping me out with my spazz-outs! He told me, “Caitlin, when I opened the studio, I had 6 months where I didn’t have any clients.” You’ll have days where it’s totally dead and you’re like, “Fuck! Nobody’s ever going to buy anything ever again!” And then the next day is amazing.

I was talking to one of our neighbors, who owns a bookstore on Printer’s Row that’s been there for 20 years, and she told me, “We definitely have days where we make $10 and think, ‘Crap this is it, we’re done.’ And then the next day is fine. That never goes away.”

Also, trying not to take stuff personally is really hard. Because it’s your taste, it’s an extension of you. So I have to remember that when somebody doesn’t like something, it’s not against me.

So where do you hope for the store to go?

The direction I would love to go is to have vintage, but also have new clothes. I would love to be bigger. It would be awesome if I could have a store in London!

How have you funded this, starting out?

I took out a $40K bank loan. It took about 6 months. I did a business plan – I just got a book from the library and I basically copied it with my own information. I took it to 3 different banks, and we ended up getting it from Devon bank, because my dad had a relationship with them. He co-signed, since I was 24 and I don’t have anything in collateral. And even so, it still took a long time. Now, with the recession, I can’t imagine what it would be like to try and get a loan. It was definitely stressful. And $40K isn’t anything, really.

Your concept of money really changes. Especially when you’re our age and you’ve never bought a house, you’ve never dealt with tens of thousands of dollars before.

I know – for a while I thought it was the weirdest thing to write a check for like $2,000. But it’s amazing, when you’re starting, how much everything adds up.

What’s your advice to people who want to work for themselves?

Make sure that it’s not all about your job all the time. That can be really hard, when it’s your business. You’ve got to compartmentalize. If you have a really bad day, you have to be able to go home and turn it off, otherwise you will drive yourself insane! It took me a year or so to figure that out.

Richard Wright turned vintage resale into a serious multi-million dollar business.

When did you start out on this path?

I started in the vintage world in 1986, purely by accident. I lived in Boston and was going to school. I wanted to be a writer. Through an old girlfriend, I discovered the vintage world. She wore all vintage clothes. At that time vintage clothes were just kind of coming in. It was the first wave of it. She was from St. Louis, and she realized, “I could buy vintage trenchcoats in St. Louis for a quarter, and we could sell them here in Boston for $20.” And I was like, “A quarter? $20? Let’s quit school!”

She was 3 credits away from an art history degree at BU, and she dropped out of school. Her parents were like, “What the fuck are you doing?!”

Oh my god. That’s amazing!

I had $2,000 and a car. We hit the road and started this crazy adventure, picking clothes. A little while into it, I discovered I didn’t like picking clothes – they’re dirty, and I didn’t really get it. So I started looking at objects. Before long I was buying kitschy clocks and lamps and things that.

Her father was an architect in St. Louis. He said to me, “What are you doing to my daughter? You don’t know anything! Do you even know Charles Eames?” And of course I said, “No…” So he made us stop everything and start learning the history. I think he felt, “OK, if you’re going to do this, at least do it the right way.” And it was perfect – we both started really studying. We’d go to the libraries, pull out all the vintage magazines, interiors magazines, and go through them all and learn it.

Pieces from Wright’s Important Design auction, June 2009

Soon we had all this knowledge. It was really a cool time to be doing this, because as I said, it was the first wave of vintage. There were hardly any vintage shops, and it was before the internet. We’d buy stuff out in the midwest, because it was cheap, and we’d drive it into New York every 2 weeks to sell it. We did the 26th St. flea market for a few years. When we got tired of that, we started doing the pier show in New York, which was a fancy show at the time. Then we moved into an antique mall space, and finally we opened a little gallery.

Was it in New York or Chicago?

It was here in Chicago, on Lincoln Avenue. They we broke up. She’s still a dealer here – we’re still friends.

I ran my little store for a couple of years, but ultimately got bored with that. It was tiny, I was maxed out in terms of what I could do, and the Chicago market was terrible. So I was going to close my store and move to New York. I had a lot of friends there – it was sort of the center of the business. I put a big sign in my window, “Going out of business.” Then my wife, who was a client at the time, called me and was like, “What are you doing? Why are you going out of business?”

I told her, “Oh, I’m closing to move to New York.” She said, “Really? We haven’t gotten to know each other yet. Can we at least have lunch?” OK, sure. We did, and the next thing you know I closed my store and I moved in with her.

Pieces from Wright’s Modern Design auction, March 2009

That’s such a great story!

I really was kind of drifting, at that point. Fortunately, right then a company called Treadway in Oak Park did the very first modern auction in America. They had been doing Arts & Crafts pieces, and somehow came up with the idea to do 50’s stuff. An old friend of mine was the specialist out there. He did 3 of the auctions, and then got disgusted and left, but called me up for the job.

I went out there in 1994, ran their modern department until 1999. It ended up being great training for me. I learned how to do auctions. In ‘99, I did the first auction of all Charles Eames materials. It was very important for me – it was very personal. My wife helped me art direct it. We hired a graphic designer and we did this incredible catalog like nothing people had ever seen in the auction world. It was basically like a magazine, or a book design. Nobody made the catalogs look sexy, back then – even Christie’s and Sotheby’s looked dumpy.

The catalog blew everybody’s minds. It was fantastic. It really made me see, “Oh, I can do this, I’ve got a bigger vision here.” But the guys at Treadway didn’t understand why you would pay $5,000 to have a catalog designed. So in ‘99 I left there, and in 2000 opened my own auction house in a little loft space.

What was your vision for the catalogs when you started your own company?

I tried to make it fun. I wrote little personal quips about the pieces. In the photographs, I added accessories, like a starfish on a surfboard table. We took cues from the way the stuff was shot originally. For the layout of the catalog, we did so many firsts – big, bold graphics on the cover, pictures crossing over two pages, supergraphics, and more of an open grid system, not everything in a picture box. We’ve done location shots – we’ve taken stuff out to Frank Lloyd Wright places, we’ve shot on the beach, we’ve shot in strange little parks and alleys… We’ve just tried to explore what we can do visually with the pieces. That’s the fun part.

Wright’s auction catalogs

What was your first auction on your own like?

It was really cobbled together. We had no money – maybe $30,000. I called all of my friends and begged them to give me something for my first sale. Somehow we pulled together an auction, and we did $400,000.

Wow.

The timing ended up being perfect. By that time, in 2000, I’d already been in the game 14 years. And I didn’t realize, “Gosh, everything’s so cheap.” If you don’t have any money, $2,000 or $3,000 for a piece doesn’t seem that cheap. But then the marked just skyrocketed. By 2005 or 2006, we sold a Noguchi coffee table for $630,000. Which was more than our entire first auction, just that one item!

It really illustrated a shift. So our first year we did $1 million, then we did $2 million, then we did $10 million. We kept really moving. We kept hiring people, and it was a kind of fun, crazy time. And then we moved into this building. It’s 40,000 square feet – It used to be a print house. There’s amazing parallels between the printing industry and auction houses. There’s a front of the house and back of the house, there’s a workflow, and you need a big loading dock.

It was a good ride. But in 2007, my wife ended up getting cancer and dying. It was horrible. Our boys are very young. So it was a crazy ride, because it was wonderful and then it was crushing. A lot of the credit of the business goes to her. We were a great team. She really had vision. When we first walked into this building, we both loved it, but I was scared as hell. It was too big! She said “No no, we can do this, we’ve got to do this.” She was really always pushing, while I was the more conservative one.

Tagliata Arne chair by Martino Gamper for Wright

Where is the auction house heading now?

After she died, to keep engaged and because the industry is moving, the contemporary design thing started to take over here. That’s been the new thing I’ve done to keep it interesting to me. I love vintage stuff, but I’ve handled a lot of it.

Economically, the market sort of peaked in 2007. We did $27 million at auction. Which, for a company this size, is a lot. And then we did about $15 million last year, and this year we’ll probably do 10. It’s really kind of come back down. The transition’s been incredibly hard, but I actually think that there’s good things in it. I think you do better quality work when it’s harder.

How did your collaborations with contemporary designers start?

Contemporary design started to become very interesting to our clients. We started selling more of it at auction, and you were seeing super-high prices. I decided that it would be interesting to try to commission somebody to do a program. I happened to be in London at the Frieze Fair, and met Arik Levy, who is a charming guy. I brought up the idea and he said, “OK, let’s do something!”

Typical of the way I’ve run my business, I didn’t have a plan of where I was going. So we did that, it was fun, and then I met Martino Gamper and thought, “Hey, he’s cool, let’s do something with Martino.” And then I found Ron Gilad through a Cooper Hewitt show. So it’s kind of just evolved. Now I’m trying to fit a business framework around it. We’re working on launching a website for distributing our contemporary program.

What’s really cool about contemporary design is the opportunity to commission work from the best in the industry. I do a little bit of work in the fine art world, but man that is a closed world. You can’t just call up Damien Hirst and work with him. Design, on the other hand, is an open world. You can meet the most famous designers and work with them – and they will come up with something amazing. I think commissioned design can be very important, and that’s the role I want to continue to play.

Console No. 1 by Ron Gilad for Wright

Thanks so much for meeting with us – you’re a true guru on the topic of creating your own path as a designer and entrepreneur.

It’s something that I talk about a lot. In 2006, I did the keynote at SXSW Interactive. I spoke about firing your clients and making your own clients. In the past 5 years, we’ve seen a lot more small-to-medium size creative studios trying to find their own way and take greater control over the work they do, as opposed to just selling it to somebody on a work-for-hire basis.

With all the tools from the internet at your disposal, you’re enabled to do so much with just a few people.

Yeah, definitely. Manufacturing, distribution, marketing, sales, customer contact – all of that is supremely manageable by a very small team. In the traditional model, you have this big corporation where the creative department is in the back, and they’re those wacky people with the Tabasco ties and chattering teeth in their cubicle, and everybody is a little afraid of them because they’re so “wild.” The rest of the company is the marketing, production, distribution, all of that. Well, our idea was that the little creative team could do everything.

Coudal really does seem to do everything. You have the ad model, you have physical products, you have a consultancy… I’m curious, what came first?

We were a pretty traditional design and advertising consultancy for a long time, 9 or 10 years. We did fairly visible work for a lot of cool clients. We redesigned the Houston Astros’ identity system and all of their uniforms. We worked for national restaurant groups and came up with brand names for restaurants. We also had this Coudal.com site, which was surprisingly popular.

After September 11th, the economy kind of took a dive, and through no fault of our own we lost a bunch of business. Some clients decided not to advertise, or took stuff in-house, or whatever. It wasn’t because we weren’t doing good work; it was circumstances beyond our control. At that point we had to make a decision about whether we were going to continue to chase client work, and ultimately do work we weren’t particularly proud of for people we didn’t really like, or find another way that we could go forward.

The SEED Conference put on by Coudal Partners [photo via flickr]

How did you start to find that other way forward?

We looked at our assets and our liabilities, and we said, “Well, we have this audience that comes to our Coudal.com site all the time, and they must be like us, if they read the things we put up. If we can find a way make, create, sell things that we need, then this audience might need it too.” That was the idea. In 18 months we wanted to have half of our revenue come from things that we owned, as opposed to work-for-hire.

And then nothing happened. It was easy to talk about, but we just went on and did brochures and identity systems for this and that. We also did a series of films with two guys called Slowtron. The films are short profiles of artists and designers, talking about their work. People really liked the videos. They were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. We got a call from a distributor in the UK, who said they might be interested in pursuing this idea as an episodic television show. And we thought “This is it! This is exactly what we wanted – we made stuff on our own, and now here’s this opportunity.”

We were putting together a DVD to send over to the UK, and did a beautiful design for what we wanted it to look like, when we realized that there was no interesting packaging available for CDs and DVDs. They were all crap, like the plastic boxes that you have at Blockbuster. Somebody here had a disc from a European stock photo agency that was in a really sweet case. We took all of the paper out of it, made our own paper, cut it out with an Exacto, put it together and sent it off to the UK. And that’s where that story ends.

Nothing happened?

Nothing happened. We don’t even know if they ever got it, because the guy we were in touch with got fired!

But we thought that it was so hard for us to find a nice case, maybe other people were having this problem. And we’re pretty crafty, so making customized paper inserts wasn’t that big of a deal, but wouldn’t it be nice if all the templates were set up properly and the paper was perforated ahead of time? One thing led to another. We found the company that made the cases, in the Netherlands, and we met with them and made a deal.

That was the beginning of Jewelboxing, this really sweet system for doing a short run of DVD or CD packaging. We launched it, and we made 13 sales on the first day. We thought, “Maybe we’re on to something!” All of a sudden Jewelboxing became the big business. We had a client that was different from all of our other clients – we owned it and could do anything we wanted with it.

Jewelboxing by Coudal Partners

You obviously didn’t stop there, though.

Well, then we wanted to get the word out about Jewelboxing. Not only to the core Coudal.com viewers, but to a larger community who we thought might be interested in it, like wedding photographers and architects and film students. So we started dabbling a little bit in doing online advertising.

It was a total clusterfuck. It was completely impossible to buy the markets that we were trying to buy at any sort of reasonable cost, and the paperwork and research and headaches involved were just a pain. You can see where this is going. We were like, “OK, screw this, we’re going to do it ourselves.”

We talked to Jason at 37signals and our friend Jeffrey Zeldman in New York who runs A List Apart and said, “Look, we’re going to build this little ad network, called The Deck.” It started with us 3, and now there’s 41 properties in The Deck. Last month we served up almost 50 million ads for advertisers like Adobe, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, and all kinds of different people.

The Deck, Coudal’s ad network

And then you had two “clients” that were projects you owned and could do whatever you want with.

Right – and The Deck sort of came out of Jewelboxing. We also created a very successful company called The Show, in which we went on tour with bands like The Pixies and Dead Can Dance and recorded concerts. We mixed and matched them and sold specific concert performances from the bands. But as digital music was growing and CDs were waning, we decided that this was going to be a sunset business, so we wound it down.

Then we built Field Notes. Our friend Aaron Draplin in Portland had a goofy idea for this little notebook. We thought it was less than goofy, and we made a deal together and created the notebook. Now it’s in a hundred stores and we sell hundreds of orders every day online. The thing that’s cool about Field Notes is it appeals to a rifle-toting budweiser-drinking mammal killer, AND a coffee-swilling fedora-wearing pretentious Brooklyn hipster. It has a totally universal appeal.

Field Notes now come in limited-edition colors.

So do you only work on your own projects these days?

We still sort of do client work – we do once in a while take on a project if it’s particularly interesting or particularly lucrative.

We have this thing called Layer Tennis, which is a live design event on Fridays. We actually created it way back in 2001 as a total goof. We invited people to play from all over the world and it was a big success. But after a while, a lot of people were copying the concept, and we were doing other things, so we just sort of put it on the back burner.

Then we were dealing with Goodby out in San Francisco on some work for Adobe. They needed something to promote CS4. So we brought Layer Tennis back, and offered it as a sponsorship. In a way Adobe is our client, except rather than us selling our services to them, they’re sponsoring this thing we created.

You’re getting paid to do what you were already doing.

Right – except much bigger now. In the final match we had 40,000 people watching live. So it’s been very good for Adobe as well. We’ve done 2 seasons, and we’ll most likely do another. So now we own this ad network, we have some consumer products, and we do these sponsored web things.

Layer Tennis is a super fun design event by Coudal and Adobe

What’s next?

I don’t know what’s next! It’s kind of a joke, but we’re proudly “without business plan” in our 13th year. We’ve had a lot of things not work, and that’s OK too. If it’s a good idea and it gets you excited, try it, and if it bursts into flames, that’s going to be exciting too. People always ask, “What is your greatest failure?” I always have the same answer – We’re working on it right now, it’s gonna be awesome!

What was the hardest part of building your businesses?

At the point where we made a conscious decision to move away from the traditional work-for-hire model, things weren’t going very well. And nothing gets your attention faster than not having enough money in the bank to make payroll on Friday! But I think that, to a certain extent, you can overcome financial fear with hard work. So just work 12 hour days. So do the fucking brochure. And then get on to what you want to do.

Everything’s not all unicorns and rainbows, and sometimes it’s a little scary, but we are a lot happier than we were in 2001. And there’s something to be said for that.

What’s your advice for people who want to set out on this path?

You need to have the stomach for risk and you need to have good ideas. Let’s just assume that those are the givens, that without either one of those nothing else makes a difference.

I know a lot of people who are in our position, who used to work for The Man or whatever, and now are making records or making films or designing clothes or creating products or screening posters or any of a million other things. And all of them, without exception, all say exactly the same thing and they say it in exactly the same words: “I should have done it sooner.”

When you think to yourself, “In 18 months I’m going to start my crocheted beer coaster company,” the problem with that sentence is the 18 months. What you’re really saying is, “I’m afraid.” Do it now. If you bankrupt a company before you’re 25, that’s like a badge of honor! Get out there.