(1) Pantone boxes, $28 each, available at aplusrstore.com
(2) Stila eye shadow, $38, available at sephora.com
(3) Ramen, French Toast, and Tortilla chocolate, $12 for 3, available at amazon.com
(4) Candy wallet, $16, available at shopexit9.com
(5) Nesting bowls, $50, available at momastore.org
(6) Reveal watch, $100, available at yankodesign.com
(7) Cutting board, $28, available at momastore.org
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(9) Apple notepad, $4.50, available at curiosityshoppeonline.com
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(3) Animal calendar, $25, available at momastore.org
(4) Adventure matches, $3.50, available at curiosityshoppeonline.com
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(6) Animal ring, $75, available at aplusrstore.com
(7) Shock pen, $8, available at shopexit9.com
(8) Almond hot chocolate, $9.95, available at chocolat.com
(9) Notebook paper embroidery kit, $14, available at curiosityshoppeonline.com
(10) Bella rain umbrella, $96, available at fiveanddiamond.com

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Dow Jones Hanky – One thing’s for sure, the economy still ain’t what it used to be. Hence why you’re loving this sale, right?! Well our beloved Dow Jones Hanky has also just become a little more accessible, down from $28.00 to $16.80. The perfect gift for the stock-market watcher in your life, available here.

Happy holidays everyone!

Money To Burn candle, $9.00 each

Awkward Moment Cards, $9.00 for a set of 5

Dow Jones Hanky, $16.80 each

Design Public is a fantastic entrepreneurial story. Started by Drew and his partner Sina in 2003, they’ve truly turned their passion into a successful and personally-fulfilling business.

Thanks for talking to us Drew! Let’s start with one of my favorite questions – what’s been your happiest moment at Design Public?

I think my happiest moment was when our company first passed $1000 a day in revenue back in the early days, because by my back of the envelope calculation that meant that I could feed myself and wouldn’t have to take another job any time soon. True, I was only eating ramen, but still — the feeling of personal freedom was and is intoxicating. I go to bed every night excited about getting up the next morning and working on my business. I never expected to find this in life. I very quickly went from a design fan who started a company to an entrepreneur who happens to work in design. Entrepreneurship has become my true passion.

How did Design Public start? Why did you choose to start a design shop?

We started in 2003. Sina Djafari and I had graduated from business school and were focusing in on the design industry as one we were very passionate about. (Sina has a degree in engineering and industrial design; I’m just a big fan). Our research led us down a lot of dead-end streets — we thought at one time that we were going to create slipcovers, for example — before we just said “the hell with it” and threw up a website to learn more about the industry and what sells. The logic was that we’d gain experience and then create our own products. Low and behold the retail part took off and seven years later we are still focused on retail and customer service.

What a great story! What makes Design Public a special destination to shop online?

When we started the company, we wanted to focus on two big things — product and the public. We launched in 2003, and at the time most design was sold through high-end, condescending showrooms. You either knew your stuff or you weren’t part of the cool club. My business partner Sina and I looked in the mirror and knew we were not designers — we were design fans. So we wanted to build a site that aimed the spotlight on the “design public” — the customers and designers that take part in the design conversation — and let them speak in their own words. We were the first design retailer to blog and start throwing up designer and customer interviews, and it is something core to our mission. And today our focus is on delivering a great customer experience with knowledgeable, fun phone “design consultants” who can help you choose the perfect item for your home.

How has the site changed since you started? What have you guys learned along the way?

The industry has become a lot more crowded! It seems like you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a new modern design shop. The barriers to entry are so low — it takes all of $50 a month to set up a web store — that more and more entrants pour into the market every year. So we’ve learned that in order to create a good niche, you have to earn repeat business — you have to focus on your customer and on exceeding their expectations so that they come back. Starting a store is easy, but this part is very, very hard.

That makes a lot of sense. Let’s talk about design for a minute. What do you look for, and how do you find new designers and objects?

We look for great emerging design. Established brands are available everywhere these days, so we wanted to focus on the new, fresh stuff. Thing that solve real problems or create an emotional attachment in the buyer. In the early days, we pounded the pavement at design schools out in San Francisco and at ICFF here in NYC. Today we do a little of that, but rely more and more on customer recommendations and designer referrals.

What new item are you most excited about, and what are your favorite “classics” ?

I’m a fan of all Blu Dot items — I love those guys. Everything they make is well thought out. Take the Chicago 8-box for example. It ships flat-pack, so it reduces waste and shipping cost. And it is essentially one piece of furniture repeated eight times to reduce manufacturing cost. Brilliant. I’d put them in our “classics” category since we’ve been selling them since the beginning. As for new items, right now I’m backing the Stadler Form Otto Fan. It’s a bit of a departure from the categories we usually merchandise, but it’s functional and has a great stylish wood panel detail that is exciting.

What’s been the hardest part of starting your company?

It’s been walking the line between entrepreneur and developer. My business partner Sina would agree. We did a lot of the software development that allows us to manage shipments and operations of over 150 different design vendors. But when we have our head in the code, we aren’t able to lead or focus on the big picture. So it takes a lot of mental discipline to carve out time to do both and ensure you are always being productive.

How many people are a part of your team? What’s your office like?
We are a small team — a couple in marketing, a couple in operations and merchandising, and a strong customer service team. We are also virtual — so we don’t have a company HQ. Our team works from all over the US, and we love the fact that our approach allows for a ton of individual flexibility in work style. I spent May working from Paris, for example. Many of our customer service team have small children, so they can balance company time with family time. I really love this aspect of our culture — it’s what I wanted when I started a business. Today I’m typing this from a personal office I have off Madison Square Park in NYC and I’m on IM with about eight people in eight states.

It definitely sounds like you’re living the dream! So inspiring. Last question – what advice do you have for fledgling entrepreneurs?

Wow, I have enough to fill a book! I could pass on some truisms like “just go for it” or “keep on trying”, but I’m not sure how helpful those really are. The thing that has helped me the most has been “iterate quickly”. Get your product out the door as soon as you can, even if it isn’t perfect. The feedback you’ll receive from the market is gold.

This year, Model Citizens has grown tremendously. In a huge gallery, gleaming white walls and natural light, many young designers showed the freshest design work I’ve seen in a while. Here’s a breakdown of our favorites.

The Model Citizen
How cute are these Model Citizen dolls?

B.Light Design
All of Ben Light’s pieces have so much personality.
See more of his work at blightdesign.com

BangBang
BangBang launched their first collection, ‘Domestic Weaponry,’ at Model Citizens.
More at lovebangbang.com

Michiel Cornelissen
Michiel Cornelissen is a Dutch designer – we particularly loved his jewelry. At just $15 (!) his Happy Bird pendants are a total steal.

Niels Cosman
Niels is a Brooklyn-based designer who does very interesting things with glass and wood. More at nielscosman.com

Directives
Carla Diana is a senior designer at Smart Design, who debuted her “Directives” line of furniture at Model Citizens. More at carladiana.com

Future Retrieval
I’m not at all sure what’s going on here, but I like it. Also, their website doesn’t appear to work, adding to the mystery.

Lara Knutson
Reflective necklaces from Lara Knutson. I will always be sucker for shiny things. More at laraknutson.com

Catherine Merrick
Catherine designed these uber-fun bent-glass-tube candleholders.

Brendan Ravenhill
Brendan showed these fun bent-metal pendant lights.
More at brendanravenhill.com

Lauren Vanessa Tickle
Necklaces made from finely-cut dollar bills. An unabashed flaunting of wealth. We like it. More at laurentickle.com. (Also, how great is Tickle as a last name?!)

Stephan Jaklitsch has been the sole architect for Marc Jacobs International. In the ten years since his firm opened, he’s built an impressive 100+ projects all over the world. He also recently published a monograph with ORO Editions which is receiving great reviews. Stephan’s work is modern yet warm. He is best known from the balanced yet unexpected mix of materials used in his work. http://sjaklitsch.com

When you started your company, what was the transition like from being an employee to being self employed?

In some ways it is not that different. I think everyone has this view of an architect as a single person deciding things. But it’s a team of people working together, working with the client, trying to solve problems.

When you start your own practice, there is also the issue of finding your own voice and taking the time to explore the issues that you yourself are interested in. In that sense, it is very interesting and, for me, it was a good challenge.

What were your early projects like?

My first solo project was for a hedge fund in Manhattan – designing their offices and trading floor. It was a great challenge. The project was located in a neo-gothic townhouse off of Madison Avenue, so the design was very much about respecting the spirit of the existing building.

Some of the other projects were apartment and town house renovations. One of my first fashion projects was a small showroom for Danilo Dolci, which is in my new book. The design had to adapt to three different brands simultaneously, which was a challenge. Shortly after, we were asked to work on our first Marc Jacobs store.

Oh, so right from the beginning of your career you have been involved with very high end designers like Marc Jacobs?

We started doing Robert Duffy’s apartment in June of 1999 and then by the fall of that year we began working on the San Francisco store.

And how did you get to this point? Were you with a team of people or was it just you as a sole proprietor?

In the beginning it was just me, working out of my studio apartment. Within a year, we grew to three people – all working out of my studio. We moved to our current office on 27th Street in February of 2000. I remember it being a very liberating thing to finally have that separation. We started out with just two little offices on the 9th floor. As the business grew, we started taking over more and more of the floor. About a year ago we took over the entire floor.

That’s great! Do you feel that there is a connection between your design work and that of Robert Duffy and Marc Jacobs? There has to be an interesting relationship between the architect and the client when the client is also a designer. I would imagine you have to be very in tune with their design sense, would you say that’s true?

Yes and no, it’s not really an easy, one-to-one thing. There are things about Marc Jacobs clothing that make them special – things that maybe only the person wearing the clothes would know. Like a simple thermal T-shirt made out of cashmere. They take ordinary things and transform them, using refined materials or tailoring to make them special.

Marc and Robert didn’t even have a sign on their offices, and the sign on their first few stores were only about two inches high – which is still true of New York’s Bleecker & Mercer Street stores and the San Francisco store. So, their aesthetic was very quiet, and subdued. I think, if you look at our work, you first see one broad stroke, and then as you look more and more into the details you begin to see the complexity in the work. And in that spirit there is definitely a connection.

And, why do you consider the details and texture to be so important to your work?

I think architecture has to work at the large scale, the medium scale, and the foreground. It has to work from across the city, as well as being up close. I think the closer you get, the more information you may begin to process. For each project, we always try to play with details and explore different materials and textures. But there is always a thematic core that runs through each of our projects, which connects the materials we choose.

Is there a specific approach that your firm takes to design?

Well, it’s one approach for a residential project and another for a commercial project. Though, there is a certain theatricality that links the two. For a commercial project, I ask the client what they want the customer to really experience as they cross the threshold. Do they want surprise? There’s a sort of psychological component to it. Do they want calm or do they want excitement? It changes for each brand and client. From that conversation, a certain mood that is set, and then we go onto manipulating lighting, scale, proportion and materiality to reflect what the client is looking for.

Speaking of scale, you have recently been expanding into product design as well as urban scaled projects. How is that going?

How IS that going? It is definitely a process! We are currently developing some houseware products. We are exploring a number of different themes; some of them are directly related to structures we find in nature. That’s really about all I can say about it right now, it is still very much in progress.

We’re always open to doing other things though. I was trained as an architect and there has always been this sort of dichotomy between interior architecture and architecture, which I view as false. I am sort of surprised by the profession actually, and how they view that division. But, being trained as an architect makes you believe that you should be able to design anything from a soup spoon to a city. It’s a natural sort of progression. Most architects get smaller projects early on and as they mature and gain more responsibility the clients become more willing to trust them.

There is always this problem, I think, with clients who think you can only do a project if you’ve done one before. We’ve worked with clients who have asked us to do things because they like to work with us and they respect our attitude, even though we may not have done that project type before. We actually just finished our first restaurant in Milan which is a new typology for us. I had never done a retail store before working with Marc Jacobs and I had never done a trading floor before working on the hedge fund’s office.

No better way to get experience than to dive right in!

Well, there is a passion that you should invest in what you’re doing. As long as you’re willing to learn and you’re willing to put a certain amount of energy into it, I think that a smart client recognizes that they are probably going to get a better project as a result of you putting in that extra effort.

What advice do you give to young architects today that are looking to dive in and start their own firm?

Well, it’s really not a bad time. Actually, a downturn can be a really great time to start, if your overhead is low and you’re willing to take risk. It can be a great time because you’ll grow as the market recovers. It takes time for people to know what you’re doing, where and how to seek you out, and help you realize a project. But, I think it’s also a matter of remaining true to what you really believe in. We take an academic approach and we treat design very seriously. We have never lost that. That’s what we do, and I don’t think that will ever change here.

See more at http://sjaklitsch.com

At first glance, they look like something you’ve seen before – old-fashioned brass candlesticks. Then you realize that they’re doorknobs! Suddenly it’s not old-fashioned at all – but something new and fresh and clever.

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

Prepara’s Power Plant

How did you two meet?

Ed: I had been freelancing at Smart Design for a year, and Dean had been there full-time for a couple years. We started working on a project together, and the project became more difficult than it needed to be. Why have so many levels of bureaucracy between your drawings and the client?

Dean: And Smart was paying us practically nothing. Ed and I thought, “You know what, if we landed one client job on our own, it would pay what our salaries are.”

E: But we didn’t want to get an office and overhead, without work, because that creates all sorts of pressure. We knew people who had done that – left their jobs, borrowed money from the bank, gotten an office, and then they’re already 30 grand in debt.

D: We worked out of each others’ apartments. Ed would come over and cut foam at my apartment, because I had a spare room. And I’d go over to Ed’s to get some sanity, when his ex-girlfriend wasn’t there.

FRS Watch

When did Pollen outgrow your apartments?

E: Eventually it got to a point where working from home was kind of embarrassing, because clients would want to come over. You’re masquerading as if you were a bigger firm.

D: In hindsight, I don’t really think the clients were embarrassed. I think we were embarrassed. You feel uncomfortable. But the client is already using you for a good reason, which is that they’re saving a lot of money. And they’re getting really good design.

E: In 1999, we’d been working out of our apartments for 2 years, when a posting came up for a place in the middle of SoHo. The price was too good. We thought, “Something’s wrong. It’s got to be a mistake.” It was on the corner of Prince and Wooster, looking down into the Camper store. And it was $1200 a month. It was small, though, like 500 square feet.

D: You’re exaggerating about the 500 square feet. Maybe if you included the outside air space. If you were six feet tall, and you leaned out the window…

E: Alright, it was 480. We measured. And at one point we had 7 or 8 people in there. It was a little tight! We spent 5 years in that studio. Our model shop took up a quarter of the space. Well, the only machine we had was a bandsaw. All our designs were limited to the size of the block of foam that would fit on it.

D: That’s really going to look good in the interview! When that’s written, it won’t even have a sense of humor to it. “Pollen Design only accepts projects that fit on their bandsaw.”

E: We have a huge bandsaw, now. And we have a disc sander too, so look out!

Prepara’s Parking Meter Alarm for Kikkerland

How did you get your first clients?

E: We decided we needed to each get a client, so neither of us was mooching off the other. Dean went to the CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, with his little leather briefcase/portfolio…

D: Every designer carries a leather briefcase. We know this now, because we’re manufacturers ourselves, and we do the trade shows. If you ever see a designer coming with a leather briefcase, you have to turn and hide.

E: At that show Dean landed a small manufacturer of cordless phones as a client. And then I went to the housewares show and landed a housewares client. My pitch was, look, I’m the guy that actually does the work when you hire a big firm. So instead of going through them, why not just hire me directly? I may be working in my underwear in my apartment, but it’s the same guy doing the work.

D: But that pitch only works to a certain point. It stops working when the projects get bigger. As time went on, we became the go-to resource for a lot of our clients. Not just for design, but everything from professional photography through to the packaging, even writing the copy about the product. Ed and I have different strengths, and we fill in each others’ weaknesses. As the company got bigger, we built a team around us, with other people that fill those gaps. As our team solidified, we were able to become a bit more picky about projects.

Prepara’s Cliq garlic crusher

When we first tried to set up this interview, you were in Germany. I assume you were at the housewares show in Frankfurt? Were you showing your Prepara line?

D: Yeah, the big story is Prepara now. When you do client work, you’re at the mercy of too many variables. How they market the product, who they go to to make it, all these things. We wanted to get to the point where we could do the manufacturing ourselves. Over the years, we’ve tried every other business model known to man. Whether it’s licensing, or retainers… Each option has pros and cons. Recently, 3 or 4 years ago, we conceived of the idea of doing our own line of housewares.

E: In the past, when we had a couple of ideas on the drawing board we would have licensed them. Typically we’d deal with the patenting, go through the process, patent them and license them to other housewares companies. For the Prepara line, we had a couple ideas, and we decided to do everything ourselves. We already knew the manufacturers. We do the graphic design.

And then you showed it at the fairs?

E: Not yet.

D: You’ve got to have more than like 2 items. So you start thinking about what else would be complementary to it. One thing led to another. We met our third partner in Prepara, and he comes from a retail background. His job and expertise is in sales. He’s a very good resource; he knows the right people. We’ve been building it. Prepara takes up a lot of time and energy, but it’s something we’re both very passionate about.

E: We didn’t just wake up one day and start Prepara and have it succeed. There were a few failures before that. Dean and I had some steady clients at Pollen, and we had a nice retainer model, so we had spare time to tinker around in the shop. At one point we started a line of barbecue tools that didn’t go very far. And there was the “Shoulder Boulder.” There were a lot more that we probably don’t even want to remember. But they were critical learning moments, and otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to get to where we are now with Prepara. Each of them was important.

D: I’d like to add something to what you were saying about the failures. You can do the best piece of work ever, some of the things that personally are more fulfilling to me, and it won’t work in the marketplace. It’s incredible, to me. You could do the nicest piece of design work, and it’ll win awards, and that’s like the kiss of death. The stuff that you think is going to fly off the shelves, doesn’t. And the stuff that you don’t even think is portfolio-w
orthy does really well.

E: Nobody has a crystal ball.

Prepara’s Trio tri-blade peeler

What’s your advice for entrepreneurs?

E: Don’t bet the farm. Hedge your bets. Take it slow. Try to get feedback from the marketplace before you lay it all down. Dean and I, over the years, have spent all this money taking things really far without getting a read from the marketplace. Now we try to get a read early on. Also, now that we’re selling product, our job is totally different. I don’t know, do you even consider yourself a designer still?

D: Design Director. More of a director.

Design becomes a smaller and smaller part of it.

D: You’re like an antenna, now. You pick up everything. You’re at the trade shows, so you hear feedback from actual users and buyers. You go to the stores, introduce yourself to the store manager, talk to them about your product and they’ll give you free reign to kind of hang out and observe. And then you’re speaking to the factories, on a different level from just being the designer. You’re the creator and owner, and you talk about financial things. Basically you’re like a huge antenna, receiving all this information, and it’s your job now to translate that to the rest of the team.

E: Another piece of advice is, when I was a young guy, right out of school, I didn’t really understand the value of an idea. You’re so focused on just getting your product out there that you give this guy 10% and that guy 15%. We had one guy who wanted to distribute our product and keep 90% for himself. But all he had was a warehouse. It should be the other way around; you should be getting 90%. Don’t let go of ownership of your idea. You should trademark it, copyright it, and patent it if possible. Then you should hire someone to sell it. You don’t really understand how important that is until you’ve been doing this for a while.

Rabbit corkscrew

What do you think is the biggest stumbling block when starting a business as a designer?

I think the whole designer/maker thing is a bit of a trap. Where you start a studio, you buy a bandsaw, and you start making things out of wood and then you’re selling those things. The problem that I’ve always seen with that is, first of all, you’ll make the same thing over and over again. Which is fine, some people like that, it’s admirable, and there’s part of me that wants to do that. But I also think it’s very limiting and you can get sort of stuck in a rut and it’s hard to get out of it. You tend to not actually charge for your time; you’re charging for the piece. You figure it out and you’re making $15/hr, you might as well be a janitor. To avoid that trap, I always had other people make things, and I always paid them, and added whatever profit I wanted to make to that, and then try to sell it to the stores.

Also, in the beginning, I was doing things that when I look at them now are totally impractical. I’m glad I did those things, but now I know why I didn’t sell those things. There’s always that fine line between doing things that are useful and can fit into people’s lives, and doing things that are artistic. Though there is now room to be that art/designer, thanks to Moss and Wallpaper. You can sort of be that person who sells $50,000 one-off tables. But it’s about as predictable a road to success as being an artist, which is a really hard thing to do. If you want to make one thing, if you want to sit in the studio and make something that’s a real personal expression, and it’s going to be cast in diamond, and it’s going to cost $8 million, yeah, that’s a business plan. That’s one way to go. But you sort of have to think about who it’s going to.

As a designer, I feel like in the beginning I made things harder than they needed to be. People like Target, they really just want a pillow with a little chick on it. In a way, you have to figure out how to give them that pillow with a chick on it, with an edge. Or, it needs to be YOUR pillow with a chick on it. Or you don’t give them the pillow with a chick on it, you give them something else, but you give them something else that that person can relate to. And you think about who’s going to be buying it.

When I started designing, it was really hard for me to get out of my own life. Really, people want a lamp with a base that sits on a table next to a sofa that fits into the format of their life. You can break that format, and you’re going to find a few people that want a broken format, that are attracted to that, or you can stick in the format, and you can reach that much of the population. There are a lot of really interesting things to do right in the format. You don’t always have to break all the rules.

I feel like the core point there is to really think about who you’re selling to. Especially if you’re a designer/maker, you can get caught up in “I’m doing this because I feel a need to create this thing.” But if you want to step it up into a business, then it’s not centrally important that you feel a need to make these things. It’s more important who is going to consume them.

Exactly. Really, the business plan is to say, “OK, what’s missing in the world? I’m going to make that thing!” And maybe it’s, oh, the world needs Calvin Klein underwear. You’re satisfying this need for something that was not there. But the problem with that is it’s not always fun. I can’t imagine that underwear was hugely rewarding for Calvin, except for the fact that it made him billions of dollars! But that’s why he kept doing the collection, to feel creatively rewarded. I think you’ve gotta do a little bit of everything.

What I love about my Reality line is that it actually does both things. A lot of people want it, and I enjoy it. That’s the sweet spot. That’s where you want to be. But it’s hard to get there.

You managed to turn your school thesis project into a business. Could you tell us a little about that transition?

My design degree is my grad degree. My undergraduate degree was in political science. I did the whole “academic” thing and I got that out of my system, basically because my parents highly recommended that I do that. So I did it. I’m not bad at that stuff; I graduated cum laude and I can read and I can write and analyze things. I’m very happy that I have that degree. But then I moved back to the city and started realizing that everything that I enjoyed doing was creative, was what I had done in high school. You don’t change. You don’t just go off and study political science and then decide to be a political scientist. It was innate in me that I was going to be creative.

So I went and took some classes, and ended up at Pratt. But then I was 27, so when I got out of school, I was like, “I’ve gotta figure this thing out.” I went to work at a cosmetics firm called Prescriptives, which is a very high-design branch of Estee Lauder. They hired me in store design. I worked there for a couple of years. One of the guys who I worked with also did furniture, and had shown in the furniture fair for a couple of years. I looked at him, and I thought, “God, that’s what I want to do.” I quit my job, and I took some freelance work, but basically I took the whole spring off and I took my thesis and I turned it into real product. I had it made, etc. My grandmother had died and she left me a little bit of cash, so I took that money and I funneled it starting a little furniture business.

At the time, I had studied under the big shadow of Philippe Starck. He was THE design star at the moment. Everything was shaped like a horn. Prescriptives was a totally different influence – they were very modern, everything was Jacobsen chairs. My furniture was a reaction to what was going on at the time, all the trendy Philippe Starck stuff.

I had some luck with it. I did that for a couple of years and sold quite a bit of it. But then a got a little bored, actually. Bored, and it was so scary. Because you’re making things that cost $3,000, and I’d have to lay out the money, and then it breaks or something… It scared the hell out of me. I got through a couple years of it. Plus I just kept making the same thing over and over again. Even though it was this really flexible system, and you could do a lot of things with it, I just realized I was going to be doing the same thing over and over again. So I stopped doing it. And then I designed another line of furniture, I did some lighting, I started adding to it, and then some of the interior work kicked in. That was when Murray found me and I did Moss.

What’s really cool about your work is that you do everything from spaces down to tiny objects. Could you talk a little bit about getting into interiors?

Prescriptives was what got me into interiors. The art director there hired me to be in the interior design department, even though I was an industrial designer. And that was pretty visionary, actually. The United States is all about pigeon-holing people. It’s like, if you’ve designed one thing, then they’ll come back to you and you’ll design the same thing over and over again. It’s very hard to do different things. So here’s this guy hiring me to do interiors. He had the ability to see that someone co
uld do other things. That was where I got the experience. And then when I broke out on my own, a second visionary person came along, and that was Murray Moss.

He saw my furniture, and asked me to design a store for him. That was a nice little job, at the time, and it’s turned into much more because the store has gotten so famous. At the time it was a little job down in SoHo!

I realized that interiors was a potential source of income and I couldn’t ignore it, even though I really wanted to be doing the furniture and lighting and product design. That was really where my heart was. And now, my business is about 50/50, if you can believe it, interiors/product design. It’s split right down the middle, and I like both equally.

There are a lot of things about interiors that are different. You need more people. It was really difficult when I was doing it by myself. Now I have a very competent staff. There are so many more details. You can really get your head around a product. You know all the details really intimately and you can go deeper and deeper and deeper into the details, whereas in interiors you can just never get that deep into everything. Also, if you have that product design experience it’s like, I’m used to telling them where the screw goes, you know? So then you’re like spending all your time worrying about where the screws are going, when what you really want to be doing is defining the big picture. It’s a very different game.

But doing one informs the other. I love having both of them. I do believe that all designers should have the opportunity, or, that you become a better designer if you have the opportunity, to cross fields. It’s good for your head. I learn one thing one place and bring it to something else and it’s more expansive, in a way. It’s all sort of the same thing, you know? And now I’m doing a whole bunch of graphics, too, which is a whole other thing. But I’ve really consciously… I’m just doing that graphic project on my own, because no one’s going to hire me to do it until they see what I do. If you want to go somewhere, I always say this to people, it’s like, I would just tell people, “I’m a furniture designer.” And then all of a sudden you become a furniture designer.

So that was the story of how you went from furniture to “bigger” things. How did you go from furniture to “smaller” things, like the Reality line that you’re so well known for?

It’s hard doing product design, getting people to believe in you enough to do a piece of injection-molded plastic for them. It’s very difficult to build enough confidence in people. But I managed to do all that; I had a few people who believed in me a lot and allowed me to do all that stuff.

A couple years a go, I looked at my roster of clients: Target, Estee Lauder, Corian, which is DuPont, and there might have been another one in there… They were these big corporate clients. Which is great. That’s what you aspire to. But then you get there, and you realize that all you’re doing is sitting in these big meetings and trying to satisfy a team of eighteen people. I do love that work; I love coming out of a meeting, listening to all these different things and you find the one sweet spot where everyone’s happy with it. That’s really exciting, it’s really fun, it’s a very satisfying experience. But it’s also very different than just going, “Eh, I want to cast a pig today.”

It’s a very different thing. What makes one fun makes the other one fun too. It makes the other one the opposite, the antithesis of it. While on one side, there’s a brand you’ve got to work within, or you’re helping to shape a brand, or solve a problem, or whatever it is you’re doing for your corporate client, the other side is like, “What do I want to do today?”

I really missed that. I thought, “I want to give that manufacturing thing another go.” And I had the idea for the Reality stuff. I did the hands, the candlesticks, and the pig first. Honestly, what I liked about them was that they were small goods. And the reason that I thought I could give a go at the manufacturing business again was because they were these small goods. That was why I got out of manufacturing the furniture. When I say “manufacturing,” it was like, I had a wood guy, I had a metal guy, I had a basement. I wasn’t like a factory or anything. This time it was, I had a guy who could cast the resin and I had a basement. It was no different. But you can fit a whole lot more pigs in a basement than tables. I knew that it was a different formula, and I had a feeling that I could make it work.

The piggy bank kind of started it. I was like, “This is a great idea to do the cast piggy bank from a real pig!” And I wanted to get it out there before anyone else did. Sometimes you get that frantic feeling like you have this good idea and you’ve gotta gotta get it out. I showed it to Mr. Alessi, I showed it to the guy who owns Magis, Mr. Perazza, I showed it to Umbra, I showed it to a bunch of people and everyone rejected it. They were like, “No, you know, we’re not doing pigs this year.” But I knew it was a good idea, so that was what prompted me to just make it, get it out there, and start selling it. At that point in my career, I’d been designing store interiors for years. So that all of a sudden when I had goods to sell again, it wasn’t like when I was doing the furniture, which was just like a shot in the dark. I knew all these people, and they were really great, they bought into it.

I had it for about a year, maybe a little bit more, making them and selling them. And then I showed with an old friend at the furniture fair, Ross Menuez. He’s a great designer and he has this company called Salvor. He was doing all these animal prints, and we sort of saw a pig, an owl, let’s put them together, so we did. We showed together. And then it turned out that his business partner in Salvor ended up picking up the production of the Reality line, and that whole company became Areaware. Which is the company that makes and sells them now. They have great distribution, and sales have done very very well all over the place.

I liked what you said about your initial furniture line being a reaction to the Philippe Starck style, and then the Reality line being a reaction to what you were doing in the corporate world. Is that a big part of your design philosophy?

I never really thought about it like that before.

Do you have a design philosophy that you apply?

I like to think that I’m broader than one philosophy. I like to think that I’m not the person who takes the same aesthetic and sort of stamps it on a bunch of things. My work is appropriate to what I’m doing, and I have enough stuff going on that I can draw from a variety of places. I’m interested in your question about the reaction, though. It’s very interesting. I don’t know, I think I could probably write a whole dissertation on it!

As a student, that’s what everyone does. You’re in this rebellious period and you see what’s going on out there and you’re like, I’m not gonna do that! Or, I’m gonna do something DIFFERENT, I’m gonna make my name, or whatever. So I think that’s kind of a student thing. And then, maybe I just haven’t grown up! [Laughs.] Really, though, life is a series of actions and reactions, so I have a feeling that it’s more that than it is any philosophy. I’d like to build it into a whole thesis, though!

What advice do you have for young designers?

When you’re young, everything seems very very precious. You have an idea and it’s the most precious thing in the world. Everyone always wants to know how to protect it. And then as you get older, you realize people will not steal an idea unless it’s already making someone money. You only steal an idea that’s valuable. Just an idea is not valuable, unless it’s been tested
. That’s what I’ve experienced, anyway.

What you realize is, the hardest part is making it. That’s where the commitment comes. I always liken it to the birth process. Conception is really easy, but it’s the labor, and then the birth, and then the nurturing, that’s the hard part. The idea part is great, but its worthless unless you make it into something and you demonstrate it to people.

I think that’s a big part of what sets apart people who actually make a career for themselves, is that follow-through. I think that’s really what separates people. Exactly what you just said – it’s easy to have a prototype, but to have something that can wholesale is much, much more work.

Yeah, price structure, or whatever. And I used to think that was like magic, that the business people stepped in and they figured it out. But then you realize that many of these small companies are figuring it out the same way you would. You sort of think that “business” is “objective.” Like it’s this world in which you deal with people in a “business” sense. And then you realize that the people who you do the most work for are people who you get along with. They’re people who you would have played around in the schoolyard with, you know? There’s not some magic, objective playing field. It’s very subjective. And you really only want to work with the people that you get along with and have a like mind with, and that’s how good things happen. All those myths just get broken down over time.

One of my questions was how you got clients when you were just starting out, and I think you already sort of answered it in that they were people who you already knew, which I think ties into what you just said about working with people who you’re friends with.

What’s so weird is that all these people who I was starting out with, we were all in the design trenches at Prescriptives or wherever, the first couple of jobs that I had… I wish I actually had had more of that. I wish I had worked at about five companies before I broke out on my own, because all of those people that I worked with have gone off and become creative directors and now they can give me work. Or they tell two friends who tell two friends. It’s amazing how that network grows and changes and morphs into people who are actually of influence and can actually make decisions and can actually sign a check. It’s like, Wow! How’d that happen?

Once again, they were just people that you were going out to drinks with after work, or whatever it was. It’s also weird what comes around. You’ll be focused really hard on trying to go after some job, and then the next day someone from your past calls and he’s like, “Oh, hey, how are you, my sister Bonnie’s starting a blah blah blah,” and then that ends up being your next job. It wasn’t what you were focusing on it all, it’s some curveball. I always say to the guys in the back, you won’t even believe how work gets generated in here. But it’s about having those sorts of ties, those long tentacles, the deep roots.