Kickstarter is an amazing platform to fundraise for creative projects, and we’re currently running a campaign to make our new jewelry line. As of tonight, we’re at 53% of our goal with just 9 days left to go. Eep, nerve wracking! If you like these designs and support Design Glut, please pre-order now so we can stay in business and keep bringing you awesomeness in the future! Click the link to see even more designs from our new line, as well as all the great rewards we’re offering everyone who contributes.

Pre-order select designs from the new collection on Kickstarter.

Plant markers by Anna Copron, Sub-studio

Handcuff bracelets by Klaus Rosburg, SONIC Design

Engraved wood panel by Brad Ascalon

Ham Sandwiches by Jan Habraken and Alissia Melka-Teichroew, byAMT

Interlocking bracelets by Joseph Eberle, BangBang

Monster Mirror by Ben Light, B.Light Design

sKwirl by kHyel, The Weather sKwirl

Scarf by Kevin McElroy

RSVP to designglut [at] gmail.com with the subject “Laser Party.”
Due to limited capacity, we’ll only be able to put the first 50 RSVPs on the list – so get yours in early!

WHO
A group of designers and laser-lovers

WHEN
Thursday, July 22
5-9PM

WHY
Because we have a laser, and we want to see the coolest, most unconventional stuff that designers can come up with to do with it! Come hang out with us and watch as the pieces come hot off the laser.

WHERE
NY Designs
45-50 30th Street
Long Island City, NY
(Take the 7, E, V, or G trains)

View Larger Map

GROW HOUSE GROW
Grow House Grow is a wallpaper line created by Katie Deedy, and it’s like nothing you’ve seen before. All of her wallpaper patterns are inspired by stories. At BKLYN Designs this year she’s showing three new patterns, all of which are inspired by female scientists from the 19th century. How cool is that?! If you want to learn more about Grow House Grow, read our interview with Katie from last year’s BKLYN Designs.

The lovely designer (and new mom!) herself, on the left:

HUGH HAYDEN AND KATIE VITALE
We met Hugh Hayden last year at the GSS Jello Competition, where we adored his jello “chicken” wrapped in “plastic wrap.” Well, this talented guy is at it again. At BKLYN Designs this year he’s showing a line of wall-hanging, framed, ANT FARMS.

Hugh and Katie:

This one is my personal favorite. Fun fact: The black stopper in the upper left is covering the hole that you can feed your ants through!

PALO SAMKO
Palo Samko was one of our favorites at BKLYN Designs last year, and this year he did not disappoint! His furniture pieces have a fun sense of whimsy about them, and his sculptures are incredibly intricate little worlds.

MATTHEW FAIRBANK
Matthew Fairbank returns with a new collection, branching out into hanging lamps and ceramics. I’m digging the bright colors and gold accents, and am always impressed by the impeccable craft of Matthew’s work. To learn more about Matthew, read our interview with him.

ESKAYEL
Shanan from Eskayel is another designer who’s branching out. She’s applied her patterns to ceramics and textiles this year, creating a comprehensive line for the home. We love the surreal quality of the having plates and pillows with the exact same pattern as your walls. For more Eskayel, read this interview!

RAM METALS
RAM Metals is a custom metal-fabrication studio that had a bunch of great pieces on display. Raine Heidenberg is completely new to us, and we love her work. She designed this huge, severe, geometric chandelier.

These planters were one of our favorite pieces in the whole show, designed by Charles Constantine for Platerworx.

The ‘Flight’ shelves below, designed by Charles Constantine for TIDES OUTDOOR, also have very striking geometry.

LAMACEK
Last but definitely not least, we completely fell in love with the lighting from Lamacek! They won Inhabitat’s award for Best Lighting, and we completely agree. I’ve sworn a million times that I never want to see anything again with antlers, and then someone goes and proves me wrong. And the robot with it’s little red heart is, well, irresistable.

THAT’S ALL FOLKS
These are our favorites – go see the show and let us know if you agree!

“We create our designs through an iterative and experimental process. After brainstorming an initial concept, we write a pattern-generating algorithm in the computer through which we further explore our ideas and ultimately create the finished product. You can use the applets we share here to create your own one of a kind jewelry designs or just to play and learn.”

Pinch Bracelet

One thing that really sets Nervous system apart is that your products aren’t just about the final pieces, but the programs you build to generate the designs.

Jessica: That’s what’s always interested us. It’s how we would want to design anything. People at Harvard heard I went to MIT and said, “Oh, do you know how to program computers?” I got pushed into that box, and decided to explore it. I had previously done a lot of programming, and worked as a research assistant at the Media Lab. Jessie’s background is in computer science. We have a shared interest in computational design.

I just opened up one of your applets and started playing with it – it’s really cool. How many of your customers are getting custom jewelry? Is that a big selling point?

Jessica: Conceptually, it is. We have a lot of people who use the applets. But not that many people actually purchase the things they designed themselves. We’re not really pushing that aspect. It’s there as an educational tool which allows people to understand our process.

How did you two meet?

Jessica: We lived in the same dorm. MIT has this crazy dorm system where houses get to choose the people who move into them, so they maintain a certain culture.

Jesse: And we started Nervous System when we were both still in school. At that point, Jessica was studying architecture at Harvard’s GSD and I was at MIT. The jewelry sort of emerged from work we were doing for Jessica’s architecture degree, which used a script to generate a spring mesh.

Filament Necklace

So how did an architecture project transition into designing jewelry?

Jessica: I was just working on a project for school, and making a lot of laser cut models, and eventually 3D-printed models. Some of the pieces were lying around on my desk. The weirdly-cut paper started to curl up. People kept coming up to my desk and asking, “Is that a bracelet?” I started thinking that I could try making bracelets.

Jesse: We threw them up on Etsy, on a whim.

Jessica: Once I did it, there was a tremendous response, so I decided to keep doing it on the side and make a little extra money while I was in school.

What were they made out of?

Jessica: They were polystyrene, which was totally horrible, because they didn’t have longevity. They were very fragile. But we sold them only $15 or something. I was making them at school – I wasn’t considering outsourcing, so they weren’t as durable as I wanted them to be.

You use a lot of unconventional materials for jewelry, like rubber and rapid prototypes.

Jesse: We approach materials practically. We wanted to make stuff out of a strong metal that would be durable and affordable, so we naturally chose stainless steel. We wanted to use a flexible material that wasn’t likely to break, so rubber was the natural choice. We take things as they come. We don’t have a background in jewelry design, so we don’t have a predetermined conception about how things should be made.

Radiolara Necklace

When did Nervous System become more than a side project?

Jessica: I was selling these products, and doing studio and classes, and it got to be too much. I decided to stop doing the jewelry after a month or two. But since we thought it was fun, during the next summer we looked into doing it more seriously and maybe making it a business. We spent time looking for manufacturers, coming up with new designs, and working on the website. By November of 2007, we decided to produce a lot of pieces and try to market them. Every time we had time off, we’d work on this project again.

Jesse: It happened slowly. Our business basically launched that November. We launched the website, did our first show, and met the west coast editor of Metropolis, which led to a great article. That was pretty cool and fortuitous. Then, around February, we moved back to the east coast. The company I’d been working for also had an office in NYC, where I started working part time. In May 2008, we did the ICFF with DesignBoom, and did really well. After that, Nervous System became full-time.

Do you mostly sell through jewelry stores, or through your website?

Jessica: We sell a lot on our website, and wholesale to museum stores, boutiques, and clothing stores that sell jewelry. The larger orders are coming from museum stores. Our wholesale business is getting a lot larger, right now.

Where do you hope for your company to head?

Jessica: We’re interested in larger-scale projects. We don’t innately have any interest in jewelry, in an intellectual way. We want to work on furniture, housewares, and architectural-scale projects. A small building of some sort. Hopefully we’ll start on that in the next year. We’re hoping to move from Boston to a more rural area where we can have the land to do large-scale projects.

Radiolara Brooch

What advice do you have for creatives going into business for themselves?

Jesse: We’ve just focused on doing things that are interesting, exciting and new. We’ve gotten our stuff out there and then let the blogs and press spread it.

Jessica: There’s never been a better time than now to be out on your own, as a designer or businessperson. It’s never been easier to get your product out there. Through the internet, you can get exposed to everybody at almost no cost. You can send your things out to manufacturers and just get a couple pieces made by rapid prototyping. It’s easy to explore and see what it’s like to have a business, without putting in a huge amount of investment. People should just start doing it. Even if it’s just in their weekends or evenings.

Jesse: I was giving a talk yesterday at MassArt, and one thing the professor mentioned ties into that. In traditional manufacturing, the designer might get thousands of units made because that will bring down the cost. Then you’re stuck with thousands of units that you have to sell. I’ve seen people at shows with ceramics they’ve gotten produced, and at the end of the show they just want to give them away. They’ve already paid for the thousands of them, and they just need to get rid of them. But now there are manufacturing technologies that allow designers to do small runs and not make such an investment. You can just test out the waters – see what works and go with that.

Ben’s first product, the Song Sling.

Where does this story start?

I was in high school. I had an idea for an iPod accessory, so I ran home and made it out of ribbon and crap. It was the first lanyard headphone for the iPod – your iPod hung around your neck and your headphones were up here, so it cleaned up the cable mess. I called it the Song Sling.

I showed it to my parents and said, “I’m going to go find investors!” At first my mom was scared. Then she said, “You’re not going to find investors. I like it, I like your idea, I want to be your investor.” My parents actually re-mortgaged their house to give me the money to build this product. I basically missed the last month of high school because I was over in China. Our factory had screwed up a bunch so we went over there to sit with them and watch them.

How did you find a factory?

A friend knew Mandarin and made a call off a website to a place that made headphones. It didn’t make much sense and, in hindsight, they were not a good manufacturer. But, at the end of the day, it was a start. We got a product to market. I named the company Mophie, and launched the Song Sling the day I graduated high school. Then my parents shipped me up to college in Burlington, Vermont, where I stayed for a couple years.

Who managed all the Song Sling business when you were at school?

Well I went off to school – but I never really went to class! I continued to run the business at the same time. I had this vision for Mophie to become a full-on manufacturer of really cool and innovative accessories for digital devices. I started to build out a whole product line, which was when I came up with the idea for a modular case accessory system.

Say you want to put your iPod in an armband when you’re working out, but then you want to put it in your bag, or in a belt clip. I developed a case that allowed you to keep your iPod in one case and then just sled it into all these different things. It was called the Relo family of products. I went to MacWorld 2006 with it, and won Best in Show. I had just turned 18. I ran back to Vermont and was like, “Yay!”

At the same time, I had accrued $300,000 worth of debt to develop this product line and get to MacWorld. I had to find money, and actually wound up raising $1.5 million from a group of venture capital guys.

Mophie’s booth at MacWorld 2007, made from a bunch of 2×4s

Wow, how did you get hooked up with the VCs?

Somebody told me, “Dude, you should go meet this guy.” I met him at a Starbucks, wearing a t-shirt, shorts and a backpack full of my products. Money guys are funny. If they have an obsession, they’re very eager to fund things in that vein. He had just gotten an iPod and thought it was the coolest thing in the world. He thought, “This changed my world, and I’m going to own the accessory company that changes the world around it!” He funded me.

So now you had money to work with.

Yeah, and the next MacWorld show was coming up. I’d gotten Best in Show the year before, so how do you top that? I designed a trade show booth which was very Apple-esque. I spent $80,000 and had the thing built-out. It was in crates, it was ready to go, but I was really unhappy. Clearly we had money now. We had built out a product line. We had a lot more retail distribution than the year before. I didn’t want to show up and have a booth that said, “OK, now we’re just like everybody else.”

About a week before the show, I said, “Fuck this, here’s what we’re going to do.” We threw the $80,000 trade show booth in the garbage, went to Home Depot, and bought a ton of 2×4s. Raw, unfinished, splintery 2×4s. We showed up to MacWorld and basically built a frame of a house. Everyone thought, “Where’s the sheet rock? When is the rest of this coming?” But it was an unfinished work-in-progress – that was the point.

My idea was, “Instead of showing off our new products, let’s hand out pads to these 30,000 people at the show and tell them they should design our new product line for us.” The goal was, “Can we design a product in 72 hours?” And we did.

Mophie’s first crowdsourced product, the Bevy.

How?

We went from people’s doodles, to online voting, to industrial design, to naming it. We had rapid prototyping machines on site. We launched the product live on the CNBC at the end of the show, and within a few days we were selling to 20 countries worldwide. We called this the Illuminator project, and it became the lifeblood of our company.

Business took off. At the same time, I was incredible bored. I was thinking, “Check out what we just created in terms of a process of collaborative development! And I’m here making iPod condoms.” I was stuck. So in August of 2007, 3 months after MacWorld, I sold Mophie. It was literally on a Wednesday when I had the idea, “What if I just sold the brand?” and by the following Friday it was done.

And that’s when you started Kluster?

Yep. I wanted to create a platform for other businesses to plug into the crowd-sourcing process we’d discovered at MacWorld. We spent 2 years developing the technology. Kluster powers lots of sites now, like namethis.com – where a new company can go on and ask the community of 60,000 people for a new brand name.

The thing is, we went from developing tangible products, which are very physical and easy to understand, to developing a bunch of websites. At the beginning of this year I felt like I needed to start making tangible things again.

A lot of why Mophie worked was because I was really excited about feeling this “power of influence.” When I created a product out of my parents’ garage and saw someone use it on the street, I thought, “I made that!” It made me feel amazing. It also made me tell 500 more people about my product line. So now I’m trying to distribute the power of influence, the feeling of “I did that,” to thousands of people.

One of Quirky’s first products, a double-sided USB stick called the Split Stick.

Which is what your current company, Quirky does.

Right. Quirky gives us the ability to take people’s product ideas – toys to electronics to housewares, whatever it might be – and develop it from sketch to store. We pick one product a week and we move it into our online store for pre-ordering. In the online store we say, “We need to sell 150 of these things,” or whatever it might be, before we’re actually going to tool up and manufacture it.

When we hit that threshold, we manufacture and retail it. Then, 30% of the revenue from the product gets distributed back to the community. So it’s really a full-circle thing.

Does it go back to the person who came up with the idea, or how do you plug it back in?

It largely goes back to the person who came up with the idea. But Kluster, which powers the Quirky site, has developed a way to identify influencers. Everyone who was influential in creating this product gets a cut. Did you pick the color? Did you identify the good industrial design? Did you name the product? Did you figure out the tagline? Did you put a logo on it?

The ideator will get about half of the influence just straight up. But all the other people that identified the good idea, and helped get it through to maturity, will be credited with varying percentages of influence.

So Quirky sort of enables the people who participate to become shareholders in a product.

Don’t tell the SEC that, but yeah! It’s a way for you to turn your creativity, and your intellectual property, into royalties. There’s a few different types of people that could really be excited by what we’re doing at Quirky. There’s obviously the person who has a great idea, that they’ve had for a really long time.

Then there’s the designers who are looking to pick up work on the side. Help us with the industrial design. Do the logo design. Logo design’s always a big chunk of influence, probably about 15%. If we sell 2,000 units of a $30 product, you’ll make $2,700 for designing that logo. If we sell 20,000 units, you’ll get $27,000.

The Kickster is a Quirky product currently in presale. Buy it now!

That’s way more than any client is going to pay you.

It’s the same with product design. If you try to sell a product idea to Hasbro or a consumer product company, the average royalty they’re going to give you is 4%. If you look at what we give you – the person who came up with the product has 50% influence, which means you wind up getting 12% of the profits as opposed to 4%.

So there’s a lot more money in it for you. That said, there’s a lot less money in it for us as a company, but what we’re trying to do is build out this whole brand of collaborative development. A brand powered by the people, full-circle. We think that will provide amazing products which can then be distributed around the world.

I love it! On last question – What advice do you have for entrepreneurs who want to start up creative businesses, like you’ve done?

Embrace the risk. There’s a lot to be said for screwing up. I gave a talk a few weeks back called, “Go Fuck Up.” Seriously. If you fuck up a lot, you’re in a great position to do something awesome. I told you the good side of my story. I could go through and tell you every single mistake I made, which then made the good story true. If I hadn’t fucked up, I wouldn’t be here. Just do it.

Zoe in the TOUCH gallery.

When did you start TOUCH?

TOUCH is super new – a year and a half ago, or less. But I’ve been a product development consultant for many years. I used to be the director of design development for Artecnica. I worked on all those projects. It got to a certain point, though, where I couldn’t be in a corporate environment. I like my freedom.

I began consulting, as well as working with social organizations. I started combining designers with social organizations.

How does TOUCH help the designers you work with?

Some we represent because they can’t produce their designs by themselves. Some, they can produce but they’re not ready yet to hit the market themselves, because it’s a big step. So I’ll take care of that for them. And others, they don’t want to deal with it, because the product is too expensive, so I’ll take it in to a different manufacturer and I do it. We go through the whole manufacturing and packaging thing, and then some of the products become TOUCH’s products.

The TOUCH gallery [image via Dwell]

TOUCH is also a gallery, right?

Yes, my partner Peter Scherrer and I got a space, which we called TOUCH. I looked at the whole space I thought, “OK, we can do dinners, talks, exhibitions…” But I didn’t want it to be like a gallery where every two months we have to have a new show, even if we haven’t found something good.

Every time I find products, or projects, or some sort of interesting thing related to product design, we do it in our space. Like when I saw InDisposed, I said, “You know, let’s take it to LA.” But most of the time it works as a showroom, as a studio, one part where we do consulting and the other part where we do branding. Peter runs Studio Mousetrap where he does branding and PR.

What interests you about product development?

Design is going through a very strange moment, a shift now. We had the moment of the products that were inflated, or the products being more conceptual, all of that. I think now, you can’t detach yourself from the production. The process. You need to keep yourself very close to how things are made – understand that world. That’s the world I’ve always understood, because the designer passes on to me and I actually go and working with the artisans.

I come from Brazil, where we work a lot with artisans. There is always someone who makes your product. At the same time, I don’t like to use that too much as a marketing tool. Yes, there is a story to how things are made, but I believe that the design has to be good. This is not charity, it’s business.

The Alada line in Touch’s booth at the gift fair.

How do you choose who to work with?

I think it’s about the energy, always, that we are all on the same page. We care about the environment – we’re thinking about it, at least. We’re learning, because we don’t know everything. We’re learning that we need to pay attention, but at the same time, we’re in a super conflicting moment. Do we really need to buy anything? And then we all make products! But what are we going to do with all this trash that is around us?

We come from this culture. We cannot just stop completely and say, “We are all going to go be hippies on a farm!” That’s not the solution either. The world cannot just collapse from one day to the next.

So slowly, more and more designers wanted to work with me and more towards what TOUCH is about. I think there is a good energy and there is a good approach. We’re super strict about the materials that we use and the designers that we work with. We’re creating a kind of a collaborative.

What brought you to the gift fair?

TOUCH has been growing, and suddenly I thought, “Wait a minute, there are all these products, I have to start selling them.” I’m very happy to be here at the show, because we’re doing well! I feel like the economy is picking up and people are more positive. It’s been interesting to see which designs people pick up. Different stores like different things. It’s been great to see how many people are interested in sustainable objects.

Rolha candelabra, made from cork and aluminum.

Do you have any advice for designers and creative people who want to start doing their own projects?

Just keep doing it. I think discipline is super important. The designers that really make it have an amazing amount of discipline. Self-promotion is also very important, being good at self-promoting doesn’t necessarily you are a really good designer. It’s important that you have that, but the integrity of what you do and the quality of the work will pay off more.

And do the shows. Go to all of the shows possible. Go to Milan, 100% Design… I think you have to do that to create your network. You need to be in front of the people and learn what they think about your product. Make all the mistakes. Put your work out there. I think that whole process makes you a great designer, if you are talented and have a good idea!

I adore the Drop piggybank.

Design Glut on Design Glut… Super meta.

“I was contacted by Design Glut for an interview a few months ago, and I’ve been a dedicated fan of their products and weblog ever since. Upon our meeting I was instantly fascinated by these charming ladies’ design story, and I thought if anyone would make for an amazing interview, it’s Liz and Kegan. So for this very special guest feature the tables have turned- and I bring you the founders of Design Glut generously sharing the inner workings of what makes their operation tick. Enjoy!”

Thanks Paul! Be sure to check out his work here.

Paul: So how did the Design Glut blog come about?

Kegan: We were bored. We had a really slow period in our studio last summer and didn’t have much work to do and the website needed a revamp.

Liz: It was more of a portfolio website, at that point, which wasn’t really working out. We went through different ideas to try something new: event calendars, covering events, editorials, pictures that we liked – each day there was a different thing that we wanted to include in our website. But the one thing that really worked was the interviews.

K. We started having so much fun meeting people and hearing their stories. At first we mostly just convinced people we already knew to sit down with us and talk.

L. Then there was a turning point; it stopped being people we already knew. We started contacting people we really admired. Harry Allen and David Weeks were some of the first established people we interviewed who we didn’t already know- that’s when we felt like we were actually becoming journalists.

Liz and Kegan in the Design Glut office [image via New York Magazine]

Is it ever hard to get interviews with well-known people?

L. Some people that I would liked to have met didn’t respond to our request. But we are always surprised how getting a response doesn’t seem to have any correlation to how famous someone is.

Design Glut is a great example of how someone can leverage a design background to build a successful product business. How much time, percentage-wise, would you say you spend on the business vs. the design side of development? Be honest.

K. 90/10.

L. Shipping and emailing take up the bulk of our time. In the beginning we had trouble getting back to our creative sides after spending all day doing the business stuff, because it’s such a different part of the brain.

K. As a small business, all these balls are up in the air and you can’t drop anything. But it’s gotten much easier now, and all those mundane tasks have gotten more streamlined as part of our routine.

In your experience, is self-production more profitable than licensing?

L. Yes. For licensing to work, you have to have a bunch of products out. Then it adds up – but the royalties for a single product are very small. For a designer just starting out, I think it’s a lot easier to be profitable with one product if you do it yourself, rather than if you have a licensing deal. But you have to do a crapload more work, so it’s kind of a trade off. You can’t really have a day job if you need to go to the post office every day to ship your product.

Promo photo shoot outtake

How do you find a manufacturer to make your products?

K. Google.

L. We usually Google a manufacturing process, email ten of manufacturers, and get three responses back. Of those, one will be affordable. There’s always just one. We never really have to make a choice.

K. It would be nice sometimes if we could! Then once we have a manufacturer to work with, we try to do an initial smaller run of 100 pieces and see how those sell. We learned that as we went along. In the beginning, right of the bat we’d have 2000 pieces made.

L. We were crazy. Our first two products were the Egg Pants and the Hookmaker, and we got thousands of them made right away. I would never do that now…

But the Egg Pants were a huge success, right?

L. Egg Pants were kind of a perfect first product – by completely dumb luck. They’re tiny, they’re super light-weight, you can drop them and they won’t break, and they have this cuteness that everyone likes. All those things together meant that the product took off. So this huge success in the beginning led us to believing that selling our products would be really easy. “Let’s just start a company and make stuff and sell it!” From there, it took a long time, pretty much the last two years, to get back to consciously being able to design products that are smart as opposed to stumbling into it.

Packaging Egg Pants in the studio

So you got a thousand Egg Pants made at once? Where did you put them?

L. Luckily, Egg Pants are really small. Even 2,000 of those didn’t take up that much space – I was warehousing them in my bedroom.

K. But 2,400 Hookmakers… Luckily the Hookmakers weren’t shipped to us until we had a larger studio space. Otherwise it would have been a disaster – and it was already a mess. We had to receive pallets to a residential address. We were literally breaking the pallets down on the sidewalk and loading them into the basement of our building, where we weren’t even supposed to store things.

L. …and each pallet was 1000 pounds!

That must have been a big financial investment.

K. It was a huge financial investment. For the amount of money that goes into bringing one product to market, you have to be really sure that it’s a product you want to go with. And you have to find that money somewhere.
So how do you figure out how much something should cost?

L. Trial and Error. I remember pricing Egg Pants for the first time – I just had no clue. I asked people and nobody had any idea either. Now we know that stores will mark up the price 2-3 times from the wholesale price you sell to them at. I don’t know why that isn’t common knowledge; it should be. I think a lot of designers play a lot more with value and see what they can get for their objects, but we try to price things as low as we can. Our goal is to make conceptual design accessible.

K. For the cost of a product, there’s a lot of things you don’t think about at first: The bag that it goes in, the stickers, the box, the wrapping paper, the bubble wrap, the ink, the printing… The things that just cost a few cents add up really quickly.

L. That’s become part of our design process. It relieves a lot of stress down the line.

Liz and Kegan hard at work in the office.

How did you guys link up with overseas manufacturing?

K. The Hookmaker is the only thing we’ve done overseas so far. We had a factory recommended by a friend of ours. I don’t know how we would have found one on our own.

L. People that we’ve interviewed who are looking for overseas manufacturers seem to go over and look at factories themselves and find the one that’s right for them.

K. I would love to manufacture everything here, but if you want to sell products at a reasonable price point, or if you want to use a certain process, you sometimes have to go overseas. Each product we do involves a new process, so we figure out what’s best overall.

Can you recall a business mistake you made that you would never want anyone else to repeat?

L. Every single one of our mistakes has taught us something. I can’t think of any mistakes I wouldn’t repeat. I guess that’s how I am. If I don’t see a silver lining, I have to find it.

K. Having pallets delivered to the house was a pretty big mistake.

L. The vinyl!

K. Oh my god, the vinyl. When we did ICFF last year, we wanted a black background in our booth, but you can’t paint the walls unless you pay a fee for refinishing, which would have been like $600. So to get around that, we had the genius idea of getting solid 4’ x 8’ sheets of vinyl and sticking them to the wall. We started putting it up and it started bubbling and wrinkling like crazy. Every single person that peeked in our booth was asking if we needed help. I was about to have an utter meltdown. We still paid like $500 for the vinyl and it looked so bad. We were completely miserable.

So what’s the moral of the story?

K. Don’t try to apply large sheets of vinyl!

Liz and Kegan at their very first show, the DesignBoom Mart, in 2007
[image via Metropolis Magazine]

There’s an old adage that says you shouldn’t go into business with your friends. What would you guys say about that?

K. Well, we were business partners first and later we became friends.

L. At first we didn’t know each other at all. At Pratt, we had senior studio together and one day Kegan happened to tell me about the DesignBoom Mart at ICFF. I applied for it and we decided to split the table. Neither one of us was a “plays-well-with-others” type of person. We were both kind of surprised how well we worked together. So we figured we should probably keep the partnership going! Neither of us was looking for a business partner and I think that’s why it worked so well.

K. I’m sure that in any company with more than one person, inevitably there’s going to be some drama- but we’ve been really surprised how much other people expect there to be drama between us. It was funny how friends, family, even strangers would dig for it – they wanted to hear the drama!

L: Yeah, there isn’t much drama at Design Glut – but we joke about making stuff up and giving people want they want!

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Some close-ups of the salt and pepper shakers: