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.

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!

What led you to start Jimmyjane?

The real turning point for me was going to dinner parties and talking about what I do. I would go on about my other design projects, but when I mentioned that I might be working on designing vibrators, that was all anyone wanted to talk about. Everyone would lean forward, start asking questions and begin this dialogue. It was like an informal focus group. People had many more thoughts on the matter than I would have imagined, had far more experience then I had anticipated, and were willing to talk about it.

FORM 6 Waterproof Rechargeable Vibrating Massager

I sat back and thought, “These people I’m talking to have nothing to do with the products that are the market right now. What if I create a product that makes sense for us?” Jimmyjane stemmed from that “for us, by us” concept. Nobody was making products like this.

LITTLE SOMETHING vibrator – in gold and platinum

So what were the first products like?

We really started from scratch, and solved the problems that were inherent in every vibrator. Toxic materials, noisy, scary-looking, hard to use, and not waterproof. Plus every vibrator has the same problem, that the vibration will eventually destroy the motor. So we designed and patented the only vibrator with a replaceable motor. You can change it out just like a battery.

Replacement motor for the LITTLE SOMETHING vibrator

Wow. Let’s back up. When did you first know you were interested in design?

I studied electrical engineering at Johns Hopkins, and worked for a while as an engineer at the Lawrence Berkley Laboratory on the human genome project. It was an extremely cool place to work, and I thought, “If I’m going to love engineering, I’m going to love it here.” But I still wasn’t totally enamored.

So I left, knowing I wanted to do something different, and ended up traveling for the better part of a year. While in Europe I met a professor at the Domus Academy. We were hanging out in his apartment, where he had all these weird objects and things half-made and half-unmade. I asked him what he did, and he described industrial design to me. It sounded like what I wanted to do – what I’d thought engineering would be like. When I returned to the states I looked into graduate schools, and ended up going to Pratt for my masters in ID.

Where did you head when you graduated?

I worked for a number of years at Ecco Design; it was really just a continuation of my education. The team that I was with were just amazing designers. It was such a transition from the academic view of design to the reality. I designed a lot of staplers, and did a lot of work on Motorola and Herman Miller projects. It was a great environment to dive into.

Then I moved to Alchemy in San Francisco, who ended up getting acquired by Frog, and we became the design team for the Frog Design office there. It was a phenomenal experience that introduced me to “big design”. I was there for two years, and at the end of it I was running a massive project to design 50 flat panel monitors. That project really tapped me out. I felt like what I was creating wasn’t meaningful. I loved the process, I loved drawing, but at the end of the day I had this sneaking suspicion that I was driving consumer demand without delivering anything more then incremental benefit.

EMBER Natural Emollient Massage Candles

What did you want to be doing?

I wanted to work on more meaningful projects, and have a wider role in the process, rather than just handing off my designs to clients. I wanted to eliminate some of the middlemen between myself and the market. So when I left Frog, I started Plink, an independent design and consulting firm.

Then, in the first couple months, I was approached by a couple of clients that asked me to look into products related to sex. Simultaneously. Nobody had ever come to me with this problem before. I went to a trade show of sex products to do some research. My first though was, “Whoa!” I had very limited experience with this stuff personally. But everyone else was just treating it like their industry, so I started picking stuff up and looking at it like a product.

My first reaction was, “I can make something much cooler then this.” A product that is better made, isn’t made of toxic materials, isn’t noisy, isn’t scary to look at, doesn’t have porn stars on the packaging, and actually functions when you open up the box. That was the first level.

What next?

When I got back to San Francisco, I thought, “That is a totally untapped market. Here is a place I can make a difference. This is important to people.” Instead of making an incremental difference, I could have a positive impact making people feel comfortable in their sexuality and not exposing them to harmful materials.

It seemed to me the industry had been resting on it’s laurels. It was able to sell crap, at unheard of mark-ups, to a public that was unwilling to step forward and say they wanted something better – simply because of the category. People were still buying these things, in spite of the fact they were toxic, noisy, and they had to give their credit card to someone they didn’t trust.

CONTOUR M – Ceramic Massage Stone

So where did you want to take the industry?

It was the most complex design project and problem I’ve ever under taken by leaps and bounds. It was so specific because everybody’s needs are incredibly unique. It’s not about ergonomics. It’s maybe 20% physiological, and 80% intellectual, emotional, and psychological. You create something specific enough that it functions well, but abstract enough that it meets everybody’s needs.

Adding to that challenge, it’s very difficult to have a dialogue with the consumer, since people are so evasive about their sexuality. They may not even be having honest conversations with themselves about what they want and need.

Which poses a huge problem, that you’ve clearly solved successfully, as far as how to approach consumers. You created a lifestyle.

That was always the goal. What we’ve created is neither a product nor a brand. A brand is a side-effect of the relationship with your consumer. A brand grows from products that deliver on their promise, honest design that is what it appears to be. That relationship with the consumer is what’s most valuable. You can’t make a logo and say you’re done. You’ve gotten nowhere near having a brand. I think that is a common misperception.

SPIN ME (With Benefits) – W Hotel & Jimmyjane partnership

Can you describe what Jimmyjane is doing right now?

We have two different lines – The Premier, which has limited distribution, and the Well Being Collection, which has very broad distribution. We sell to Selfridges and W Hotels, but we also sell to Whole Foods and Urban Outfitters.

This is about inclusiveness not exclusiveness. At times our price-points are exclusive, but actually that is our way of including another group of people. For some, to make the concept approachable, it needs to be seen and understood as a luxury product. Luxury is not something we aspire too, but a means to an end. That end being forming a connection with the consumer, and having them understand this in a different light.

We design products and experiences to provide pleasure, strengthen connections, and create possibilities. We’re not saying, “This is sexy, and that’s not.” We’re saying, “Here are a bunch of opportunities.” We’re providing the palette, but the key component is the individuals who paint with it.

Sexuality is a very vulnerable aspect of our lives. We are vulnerable physically and emotionally. We know who we sleep with, and why. The question stands, “Who are you sleeping with?” and with Jimmyjane, you know.

Model Citizens promises to be a truly exciting show. Held at Exit Art (475 10th Avenue @ 36th Street), right round the corner from the Javits Center, the show will be promoting emerging designers and linking them with manufacturers. Read on to hear Erika Carmichael and Mark Goetz talk about their new vision for a trade show which encourages local networks of designers, manufacturers, and stores to find each other and work together for mutual benefit. And of course, attend the party, 5-7PM on Sat. May 16th.

Tables by Piey (Paulina Gonzales – Ortega, and Andres Ocejo), Laquered Wood

How did the idea for Model Citizens come about?

Erika: Mark was the one who really planted the seed. He had gone to Mexico and become inspired by the designers there, as well as aware of their frustration with not being able to show their work.

Mark: All the people I met there said the same thing, “If I could ever come to NY and show my work, it would be a dream come true.” Most of the people I know wish they could show in Milan, because they’re already here and take New York for granted. We should be ashamed of ourselves if we’re not getting out there and showing in our city.

Erika: As soon as I finished my masters degree at Pratt, I said, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to create a venue for this to happen.” I spent days walking around the Javits scouting locations and eventually found Exit Art, which is now the venue for the show.

What is the concept behind the show?

Erika: Model Citizens focuses on the relationship between the local designer, manufacturer, material supplier, and store. We want to create this whole integrated presence. I feel like we need to change the resistance from manufacturers towards experimenting with independent designers. It’s counter-productive. That’s the whole impetus to why I wanted to do this. The show won’t be, “Come see a lot of design in a gallery format,” but rather, “How does that gallery format become a tool for trade?”

Mark: I don’t think Model Citizens will ever be like an ICFF, but rather a place where you can create something. Where you can meet a fabricator willing to do one piece or a small run. We want to support and promote that, and also give manufacturers support, so that young designers know they are out there.

Erika: All the display cards for the exhibitors will be printed with the word “Seeking” and will list what they want to get out of the show – whether they’re looking for a fabricator, or a prototyper, or a store. You’ll know exactly what point of the process they’re at, what they need, and what they can give.

Ty by Grain, a 100% recyclable shower curtain made from Tyvek

That’s awesome. There are so many local manufacturers in NY that people are just unaware of.

Erika: And there’s power in numbers. You could be working with a great fabricator that no one else knows about, tell a few other people about it, who also start working with them, and then your price goes down and the manufacturer’s productivity goes up. Everybody wins.

I think it’s really easy to get into this hoarding mentality with your contacts, but it doesn’t work.

Erika: Exactly – look at our current economic reality. When I hear of fabricators closing up shops, or laying off people, all I can think is, “Now I’ll never have a chance to work with them.”

Mark: I remember going to ICFF several years ago. Britain had sponsored these designers to come show, and they were doing all these amazing things. I remember thinking, “Wow, there must be so much industry around London.” Then I thought, “What am I saying? I’m in NYC. There is so much around.” You can walk down the street and find someone making things. It’s happening everywhere.

Channel Lights by Iacoli and Mcallister, pendant lights made from Corian

What do you see as the long term goals of Model Citizens?

Erika: The space, Exit Art, gives us the potential to grow almost six times as big. This year we have a 1,300 square foot space with about 20 designers. Next year, I want to try to take over both sections of the gallery – the 7,000 sq ft upstairs and the 1,300 sq ft downstairs. Then maybe there will be the opportunity for me to sponsor people who don’t have enough money to show their work. Already this year, we’re bringing a handful of designers from Mexico here to show.

Mark: Team Mexico is almost becoming the banner designers. They have always had a willingness to create things with local artisans there. They’re working with people who paint the stripes on tops. Right now they’re going into the hills to meet these artists, showing them their sketches, and working with the lathe turners.

Who are some of the other people who are going to be participating?

Erika: There’s Grain from Seattle – they do sustainable work and are showing a Tyvek shower curtain. We’ve got a professor from RISD’s furniture department, as well as one of Mark’s employes who is doing a beautiful conceptual piece talking about the strength of the eggshell as a seat. Our celebrity draw is Nathan Thomas, who just won Top Design.

How have you gotten people involved? Are you just pulling on your network, or attracting new people?

Erika: Both. For example, I found this amazing company that I got so exciting about, the Veteran’s Chair Caning Company. I called, and after the conversation I could tell I’d be able to go in and say “I want to do this weird project with you, I want to cane but I want to do it in this other material.” So thats the idea – we are reaching beyond our own network. And it’s also the responsibility of every person who is exhibiting to blast out the invitation to stores and people they know.

Hold On by Kandice Levero, ceramic tableware

Shake-a-leg salt and pepper shakers

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

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

It’s so true!

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

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

Basket bowl

Right – like things you would perch on.

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

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

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

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

Petite tray tray

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

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

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

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

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

Plantorb planter

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

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

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

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

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

Rabbit pitcher

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

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

How have you built up your store network?

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

Any advice for other entrepreneurs?

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

A container for one thing

Core77 started in 1995. That’s really early; most design sites were only started in the last 3-5 years. How did anyone think to create a design site back then?

Core77 was started by Stu Constantine and Eric Ludlum while they were graduate ID students at Pratt Institute in 1995. They were interested in interface design, and thought about making a website to help future students find the information that they themselves had found so hard to piece together during their school search process.

They had in their possession a “guidebook for industrial design students,” and thought that this kind of material would make for a great start. So they entered some of the information–lists of art supplies, stores, model-making tricks–and turned it into a website. They also added a list of schools–this was key, and how the site got its strong resource feel right from the get-go.

They linked to people, and people linked back. You have to remember that this was 1995, and the World Wide Web was only a couple of years old. Core77 was the first design site–indeed, it was one of the very first online magazines–and the project grew and grew to the point where Stu and Eric were able to hand in a CD of the site as their master’s thesis.

The first Core77 office in the Engineering Building at Pratt

That’s probably one of the best thesis projects anyone’s ever done.

No doubt. I met Stu and Eric, almost randomly, at their year-end show in the Puck Building. They had a local copy of Core77 set up on a desktop computer (no internet access in the gallery in those days), and it was amazing. Pratt also saw that this was a great thing, and decided to incubate Core77, giving Stu and Eric a room in the Engineering building and a T1 line. They continued to build out Core, designed the first pratt.edu website, and took on other client work.

I used to teach all day on Thursdays, and on my lunch hour I would go and hang out in the Core office. Everybody did. It was an incredibly exciting place and time, and there were parties, beer, people writing articles, people learning HTML. A lot of students came through there, and Core77 was really a labor of love for a lot of them.

So that went on for a few years. I started collaborating with Eric, doing consulting work for Herman Miller and other clients, and it got very busy. Ultimately, the three of us formed a new partnership, and the websites started to generate more revenue, until they reached the point where they were self-sufficient. Coroflot, our job and portfolio site, grew really well, and we launched Design Directory in association with BusinessWeek. The whole thing became a pretty well-diversified publishing platform, serving everyone from high school students looking for gossip about design colleges to Fortune 500 companies looking for design firms.

The sparkly sign. We’ve dragged this all over hell and back.

Core77 isn’t a blog; it’s really a community of people who talk to each other. It seems to me that the message board is really what enabled that. When did that come in?

The discussion boards went up pretty early, and are in many respects the life-blood of the community. When people describe Core77 as a blog, they’re not really capturing the whole offering. Although our blog is very popular and is something we put a lot of effort into, the eco-system around the blog is vast–we’ve described ourselves as the “industrial design supersite,” which we use only a little bit ironically. And as you described it, the beating heart of the thing is the people and their participation in the site, whether it’s through the discussion forums, design competitions, blog and article comments, portfolios of designers’ work, or the design job offerings people post at Coroflot. It’s just this great community.

I’m interested in the interplay between meeting people on the internet and then bringing that into the real world. Core’s really captured that. When did you begin holding events?

Almost from the start. As wonderful as the internet is, there’s no replacement for face-to-face. I remember seeing the founder of MeetUp speak at an event at Parsons a few years ago, and he said, “Unlike most internet companies, our objective is to get people OFF the internet. We are America Offline.” I thought that was great.

Holding events has always been important to us. We’ve held the Core77 Offsite series for years now, at various scales. Sometimes we’d invite an individual designer to present their work in a bar and then have drinks and networking afterwards, or other times convene an entire half-day with a full-on panel discussion in a swanky gallery or meeting space. We recently held a design and creative employment confab at SXSW, which was a bit more business-oriented. But then we had the blacklight ping-pong party last May, down in Chinatown, which was not, um, very business-like.

When we interviewed Harry Allen he told us about a great Core77 party where you built a replica of Moss out of foam core.

It was down at Gallery91 in SoHo in 2003. We were producing the first ever Coroflot Members Show, an exhibition designed to celebrate some of the best talent on Coroflot. Eric went through thousands of portfolios on the site, picking out work from designers all around the world that he thought represented some future design indicators (the show was called Canary in a Coalmine).

He also had this very brilliant, very dangerous idea to recreate Moss.

Recreating Moss using Foamcore and AutoPoles

Moss had reached the pinnacle of design stores at the time; it was this shrine, this temple. So the idea was to build a replica of Moss using stainless-steel photographer’s AutoPoles and half-inch white Foamcore. We had a pretty good idea of Moss’s layout, but we had to do a little espionage. (One of my jobs was to recreate the signage placed beside each of the various products–down to the font and the story-telling style. The people at Moss didn’t like you hanging around and taking pictures, but I managed a few.) We brought tape measures to make sure that we had the right fixture dimensions, and were pretty confident that we could build a convincing replica.

Anyway, we’re in this mad rush to build a Foamcore double of the store, and after the press opening we realize that a lot of the objects on display were very small and precious, and that there could be a real theft problem. So, frantically, we installed plastic sheeting to mimic Moss’s glass boxes–which actually turned out to be the perfect finishing touch, evoking the precious vitrine aesthetic that Murray talks about. But even with this protective sheeting, sure enough, one of the items got stolen–Tobi Wong (who was just catching fire back then) had worked with Robert The to create a gun out of Karim Rashid’s I Want to Change the World book. And it was gone.

We had this other item on display that was one of the nicest things in the show–Michael Sans’ set of six bullets exploding into little die-cast flowers at their tips. It was incredibly desirable, and we thought that if the thief were still in the exhibition, he would go for those next. And sure enough, he was caught tucking his hand under the plastic. He was tackled to the ground…the police came…it was epic. We were shaken but thrilled; the best parties are when the cops come.

The infamous “shower scene” at fake Moss

We also re-enacted an infamous stunt that Moss had done a year or two before. They had a shower stall set up in the middle of the store, and every 20 minutes a guy would come out and take a shower, naked. So we HAD to recreate that. We made a Foamcore showerhead, and found someone on Craigslist. Every 20 minutes he would come out wearing a bathrobe and a wrestler’s mask (one of our trademarks at the time), then strip down naked and mime lathering himself up. So ya, between that and the cops coming…arguably one of the strongest things Core’s produced.

I’d like to switch over to talking about your teaching career. What does teaching mean to you?

Teaching’s a really important part of my life, and I’ve been at it for about 15 years now. I am forever amazed at design students, and I think teaching product design is a privilege–it’s like inventor school, with all these people making stuff and breaking stuff and making it again, only better. When I first started out, I was teaching sophomores. Sophomores are 19, generally fearless, and will make almost anything if you ask them to. They’re so excited to be there, and I feel like a sophomore teacher’s job is to just not fuck it up; they’re yours to lose.

A couple of years later, I was very intrigued with the idea of teaching graduate students, so I picked up a thesis class, which was great. So in those days, I taught the first class in the undergraduate program and the last class in the graduate program–an intriguing way to spend a Thursday. I soon learned that the grad students are sort of the exact opposite problem from the sophomores. They’re old enough to know that their decisions have consequences, they worry all the time, and they don’t build anything. They just read another book.

So that’s how you were able to do both; they have the solutions to each others’ problems.

That’s a nice way of putting it. By talking up to the undergrads and placing tight constraints on the graduates, I found some success with them both. The tricky part was making sure there were enough fundamentals taught with the undergraduates, and to not be too much of an asshole with the graduates. (I hope I managed that most of the time.)

Ifaat Qureshi tries on a prosthetic arm “demonstrator” in an SVA Design in 3 Dimensions class

We always ask people what their advice is for young designers. What is your advice?

That’s probably a more complicated question now than it’s ever been. It used to be, “Should I start my own business, or should I work for a consultancy, or should I go work at an in-house department at a larger company?” Many things have changed to alter that equation. We have this amazing convergence of awesomely powerful tools of creation and insanely powerful tools of dissemination.

Designers have never been equipped with so much ability in terms of 3D software, materials technology, or the ability to get questions answered…almost instantly. Designers can send out their stuff to design sites, or post it in online portfolios. A piece of work can find its way around the world in half a day, and suddenly you can be a hit, fielding inquiries for more press, or orders, or nibbles from potential manufacturers. I’ve seen it happen many times.

The other things that have changed are more sober. Designers are the people who have these unique talents and methodologies around ingenuity and innovation; who are problem solvers. And given the magnitude of the problems right now, the world needs designers more now than ever. It just may not need them to design teakettles or toasters or MP3 players.

Happily, for a lot of students I meet, this isn’t a burden. Design students, for all their eagerness to design “cool products,” really do seem to come out of the box interested in design for social good, in making a difference and creating meaningful experiences for people. I think the future’s never been brighter for design, and it’s incredibly gratifying to support the field both through teaching and through my work at Core77.

Why did you start Thwart Design?

A year out of school, I realized I really needed to have a creative outlet. I had a handful of friends that felt the same way, and I wanted to create a design collective as a venue for people to express their ideas and an avenue in which they could turn their vision into reality. The idea was to do something on the side that would be design for art sake. So I created Thwart Design – Thwart meaning to stop, put an end to, or to go around. It asks you to question design, and do something the opposite of it.

What I really liked about Thwart Design was just having a collective of creative people working together and supporting each other. In college you have this amazing collective energy. There is this driving peer network that really helps you be successful. I wanted to have that again.

What else did you notice, making the jump from school to the real world?

Like most art school graduates, I had unrealistic expectations when I finished school. I got really caught up in a hyperbolic design world that you read about in Wallpaper. The one with design rock-stars and these grand archetypes. With all due respect to design media, it represents a very small sliver of the design world. What they show is going to sell magazines, and struggling art school graduates toiling away in the trenches won’t.

When I graduated in 2002, I was going to do my own thing. Three months later, I had a ton of student loans and no income to pay for them. My needs changed, and I got a housewares job designing product for brands such as KitchenAid and Cuisinart. It was a good, senior position and gave me great experience in mass-market product design. But It wasn’t like I was Pablo Picasso, coming up with anything I wanted, and getting it manufactured.

That’s the real design world, though; those are the jobs that are out there and those are the jobs that round out your portfolio and help prepare you to launch your own projects. You learn a lot in those trenches. To no fault of Pratt’s, they don’t really set you up for the day-to-day of working in design. For the first year after graduating, I was definitely feeling my way around, independently, and in a way I’m thankful for that because I learned a lot about what I needed.

Tell us about your DWR projects.

In 2003 or 2004, I did a project called “Design Without Reach”. It parodied, and at the same time paid homage, to Design Within Reach. I took all these products of theirs and showed how to make them out of househole items – like a Tootsie-Pop version of the Nelson Clock. It did well on the blogs, got a lot of attention, and drew people into the website. At the time people were doing a lot of DIY stuff – I even got a few book offers – way more attention that I thought I was going to get.

Recently my fiancee and I produced a sequel called the “Tools for Dying” collection, because DWR was opening its Tools for Living stores in New York and California. I couldn’t resist.

You’ve also organized a few Thwart Design shows. How did that come about?

I used that momentum from the “Design Without Reach” project to book a show for ICFF in 2004. I called the Thwart Design contributors, and we had 2 1/2 months to create a cohesive show which ended up being called The Living Room. We set up a living room, and each product was a part of it. We had a couch, curtains, a mirror, lamps – all the essentials. Since it was a “living” room, all the things were either once living, or objects that were already dead and given another life. I made a ceramic vase that had a print of a bunch of dirt around it, so it was almost like replanting your flowers. It was a lot of fun, and cool to be a part of that ICFF world.

In 2007 I organized another show in Dumbo; a charity event. I took a bit different strategy in that I asked a bunch of designers to make sustainable green clocks for a competition called “Make Time for a Green Cause.” We held it at Spring gallery, and it was a great success. We had a ton of support – fifty local designers submitted clocks, and we auctioned them all off. All the money we raised went to this organization that would plant trees. We ended up planting something like 40,000 trees from the profits – it was a great event. I think that’s such a great feeling for people who get so stuck in their design-related day jobs that they don’t have the opportunity or time to participate in a show. To be able to facilitate that was really cool. Plus, I met my future wife at that show.

One of my favorite pieces is your clock, which I saw at Spring gallery.

Spring now produces my clocks for me, since demand was too high for me to continue making the clocks on my own. I used to make them myself until this one point; I remember it so vividly – I was living in Dumbo, my studio was in the Navy Yard, and I needed to drop off a shipment at Spring. I had this whole elaborate assembly line, where I was cutting pieces of molding, gluing them, clamping, and spray-mounting.

I stayed up all night making these clocks that needed to ship the next day. That night there was a torrential downpour, and I was on my bike, with two garbage bags full of boxed clocks, no sleep, riding my bike uphill back to Dumbo, hours before I had to go to work. It was a labor of love, but after that, I told Spring that I needed assistance, and they started working with an artisan in Vermont to manufacture my clock for me.

What are you working on now?

Since then I’ve done a few other products, and I’m working on some patterns and putting together a group show. Pretty recently, I manufactured a small run of a piggy banks that look like a pork chop. I actually scanned a pork chop, and then printed that image on ceramic. I had 50 of them made by these great potters in Greenpoint. That was something I had to invest a lot of money in, because of the printing on both sides and the lengthy and involved glazing process.

We love Rob’s Pork Chop piggy bank so much that we’ve put it up for sale exclusively in our webstore. $60, printed and glazed ceramic, handmade in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Your company is strongly rooted in an ethical philosophy. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

The company was co-founded by myself and my sister, Teresita. Having grown up with the same people, our parents, we naturally brought the ethics we were raised with into our lives and our business. Our father was a Peace Corps volunteer. And prior to that, he studied architecture, so he has a design background which came out in our upbringing. Our mom grew up in India, where you inherently learn how to live close to the earth. In India, versus the United States, you don’t have the luxury of being hidden from how you use things and where those things go.

I think the ethics of how humans make things and do things is drastically changing. Designing that change is where we see SMIT fitting into the big picture.

Do you think that starting a business is a good way to express a moral philosophy? I think that’s a pretty new idea.

At SMIT, we design and make things for humans and their environment. The products that we choose to design at SMIT and bring into the world are because we believe in their ability to lessen our (humans’) impact on the earth’s resources in an accountable way.

Our moral philosophy comes out in how we design and the choices we make in that design process. When it comes to starting a business, it has to make money. That’s the agreed system in which we all do business. Our customers value not only our products’ physical design and functions, but also the fact that the product itself has integrity and a sustainable relationship to the world. And as long as people choose to buy the products, then the business and the moral philosophy can both work.

You’ve shown your work at ICFF and at MoMA. Those must have been two big turning points for you! How did those shows happen?

When I was graduating from Pratt, my sister was also graduating from NYU’s ITP program. She and I were kind of taking similar paths. I was creating a product, GROW, while she was creating a business, SMIT. Her business plan incorporated some ideas that I was really interested in, in terms of starting a business and entrepreneurship, and my product fit well with the business plan.

When I was a senior, I showed my project to the committee who was choosing what was going to be shown at ICFF in the Pratt Booth. It was chosen for the show, and that was a big turning point. ICFF opened the door to a much broader audience. I walked away from ICFF with probably 200 business cards in my pocket, and a number of different architects who said, “When this is real, let me know. I want this for a building.”

It was great timing for my sister and I. Deb was gathering people for the Pratt Design Incubator. She looked at us, and at this product, and said, “Do you have a business plan? Do you want to be in the Incubator?” I didn’t have a business plan! But, my sister was right there and she did. We had a meeting a week later and were accepted into the Incubator. Then began the process of starting SMIT, Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology, LLC.

And MoMA?

The MoMA show was another big turning point and they actually found us. You know, one doesn’t exactly go after, “How do you get into a MoMA show?” and expect anything to come from it. It’s something I had written off as an impossible thing. After ICFF we went about developing GROW. One of the first things we needed to do was raise some development money. We got a grant, and with that, we agreed to create a blog in order to keep everyone up-to-date on our progress.

Someone working at MoMA stumbled onto the blog. They wanted to get in touch with us, but on the blog we didn’t provide a phone number or e-mail to avoid spam and what not. A persistent MoMA intern read through our entire blog and spotted our uncle’s name. She happened to have gone to Cornell and taken one of his courses! She emailed him, saying “I think I’m looking for your nephew and niece” And he says “Yeah, that’s them,” and forwards us the email. We literally freaked out. What, the MoMA is looking for us?!?

As it turned out, they wanted the GROW concept be a part of their catalog for an upcoming exhibit Design and the Elastic Mind. So we said, “Yeah! We’ll send you images, of course, whatever you need!” And ever-so-slyly also said, “We could make a prototype for the show, if you want to show it.” Not being pushy, but just slid that one under the door.

They deliberated on it, and they eventually said yes. We made an up-to-date prototype and installed it in Feb ‘08. It was a very exciting experience! I have always gone to and been inspired by the shows at the MoMA, and to be putting up a piece in one was truly an honor.

After the show we got some more good news. Paola and her team were considering our piece for the permanent collection. Again, we were overjoyed, but trying to be reserved about it. I think we said, “Oh! Really!? ” They eventually got back to us with a yes. So our piece from the show is now in the MoMA’s permanent collection. A little surreal, and very welcomed!

Did it lead to a lot more architects getting in touch?

Absolutely. GROW and Solar Ivy are products that are able to interact with many different typologies of architecture. So, naturally, architects and developers are interested. Most of the Architects from ICFF were in and around New York, or in the United States, with a good handful of companies from the rest of world. But after the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition opened and its catalog released, our exposure went all over the world.

I also knew from the beginning that architects were going to be the first adopters of GROW. My sister and I brought on Benjamin Howes (Pratt Arch. 2006) as an equity partner in 2007. He’s a great thinker at many levels and can break down the most complex ideas into logical systems. Plus his last name is Howes, pronounced “house” and he’s an architect. What more could we ask for?

I’d like to back up to where you were talking about the grant that you got. I don’t think we’ve talked to anybody who’s taken that route. Was that part of your original plan? How did you make that happen?

GROW came from examining the relationship between humans’ built environment and how nature responds to it. When you build a building, plants will start growing on it. Things start to inhabit it that you don’t want to inhabit it. GROW’s concept was to harness energy in a similar way to what plants do, through a form of biomimicry. Ivy, for example, finds the side of the building where it will get the most sunlight. It creates its own footing. And it has this beautiful kinetic sculpture effect, as wind blows through it across the side of your building. This, in turn, presented a unique opportunity to harness both wind and solar energy.

We applied for the grant to prove out our technology and develop GROW into a product. Since w
e were in the Pratt design Incubator, we were able to utilize Pratt’s grant writers, who found the organization, NCIIA (National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance). NCIIA had an Advanced E-Team grant, which is set up to foster ideas from concepts into actual working prototypes. We used the grant to fund R&D for GROW as well as pay for legal fees involved with filing a utility patent, which we now have.

What’s next?

We recently hired David Rose as our capital campaign adviser. His background is in design innovation (he teaches at MIT’s media lab) and business creation. David has been great in helping us fine tuning our business plan and ushering us into this next round of developing SMIT. We have been pitching to some venture capital firms and angel investors. The process is kind of like finding a dance partner. Some people you find a rhythm with, while some you don’t. It has been a fun process as we have been learning a lot about how this works.

For the past year or so, we’ve been making alliances with emerging solar tech companies, universities, and manufacturing companies to help facilitate our designs. It’s also just really fun to see what others are up to. So, we continue to meet more people and work to move new ideas forward.

We are also going to be part of a few shows coming up. There is a show in Germany which is traveling from Hanover to Berlin in which we will be showing the GROW concept. There is another possible show in Paris later on in 2009. We also have the GROW concept in few book publications due out early ‘09. And, soon, look for a website update that’s happening as we speak: http://s-m-i-t.com

Could you talk about your design philosophy?

Well, first of all, my father was an industrial designer. I never thought of doing anything else as a job. It just seemed like the best thing to do. You could work on anything and everything. But when I went to college, I didn’t think that I needed to study industrial design.

You probably already got some of that education in the first part of your life.

Right, that’s what I thought. But then, when I was going to school in England, I had this idea for a Beatles nightclub. So since I was in England, I went and talked to John and Yoko about making this club. And they were like, “But why would we hire YOU to do it?” And I said, “Because I had the idea!” And they were just like, “No.” I realized that maybe I did need to go to school for design and get some credentials. So I went to Pratt.

I think my basic philosophy is that design is a tool for doing social things. I’m not interested in sculpting the perfect teapot. I’m interested in things that are going to change people’s behaviour. That’s why I like what I do now, working in the LAB at Rockwell Group. Our clients aren’t asking for specific things; they’re asking for an environment or an experience.

[mauboussin kaleidoscope from labatrockwell].

You’ve been involved in starting up many creative companies. What was the first?

My brother and I started a jewelry store in Ohio, called Ohio Silver. When we started it, I read this article that said, “Most businesses fail within their first year.” When we made it over a year we were like, “Woohoo!” And it’s still in business.

We set it up to be a place where we could make whatever we wanted. Jewelry, stained-glass windows, leather goods, anything. It was a place for us to make things, and then to support that habit we would sell the stuff. I learned two important lessons at the store. One, I learned that the price really didn’t have anything to do with the actual value of the thing. Sometimes we would make something and it wouldn’t sell. So we would lower the price. And it still wouldn’t sell. Then we would try raising the price higher and it WOULD sell.

Two, I learned that the industrial part of industrial design was really great. When we sold something, “Wow, we made money,” but then it was like, “Oh no, we have to make another one!” After I did that for a while I realized why mass-production was a good idea, rather than being the machine myself. So that’s when I went back to being a real “industrial designer” again.

What led you to Smart Design?

I met this guy at a party, Davin Stowell. A couple of days later a friend of mine who was working with him called up. Davin had just moved down from Corning, NY, and he and a bunch of his friends from Syracuse had this project of designing the information panels for the Empire State Building. So I went to his apartment and he that was the beginning of Smart Design.

How did Smart Design get its first clients?

Davin started off with Corning Inc. as his client. He went to Syracuse University and he was from Corning, NY, so that was pretty much the place to work. He’s a great designer, and they were very happy with the stuff he designed. He said he was going to quit and move to New York City. And the Corning design director said, “You should work for us as a consultant, and we’ll pay you a certain amount every month.”

So he came down here, and he had this job he was doing on a regular basis for Corning. They they started asking for more work. And then his friend got the job doing the Empire State Building graphics. From there it was just word-of-mouth. With design, if you’re doing a good job for someone, other people want you to do it too. If you’re doing a bad job, then it’s harder to sell. You’ll probably need a marketing guy and advertising and stuff.

And from there you went on to open Frog Design’s New York studio, if my internet research told me the truth.

Well, I was the chair of the IDSA conference and I wanted people to think about the future. So I got a bunch of people to come and make predictions about ten years from then. Bruce Nussbaum, joking around, said, “There will only be five design companies in the future, and one of them will be “Smart Frog.” Everybody got a big laugh out of that.

This friend of mine, Steven Holt was working at Frog. He goes, “That’s actually not such a bad idea. Frog needs an office in New York.” And I thought that the mixture of Smart’s very smart design and Frog’s gung-ho, emotive design was a good combination. We almost merged with them. Smart decided not to do it, but Hartmut Esslinger convinced me to start the office. Dan Harden from Frog came to New York, and we went around with a realtor looking at different spaces.

We didn’t even really know how big of a office we wanted. We visited all these spaces, and then we went into one and said, “This is it!” And so that was the one we rented. And then we said, “So that means we’re going to have how many desks? How may people?” That kind of a process has its ups and downs…

I’m curious how you got into the new-media world.

That was one of the reasons I went to Frog, because they had just merged with a new-media company in Austin, TX. And so they had that kind of capability; they were doing advanced stuff like CD-ROMs.

But when I was still at Smart, I’d met Craig Kanarick, one of the founders of Razorfish. I met him when he had just started up and there were like two of them. I was really interested in what they were doing, and he was interested in us. We got a job to design a remote control for a Toshiba television, a “television of the future.” I said, “This is mostly interface design,” so we hooked up with Razorfish and did the project together.

I thought the partnership was great. The interface, the software, and the hardware all went together. So then when I went to work at Frog, I tried to get Frog and Razorfish to merge. We got very close, but then that fell apart.

Why didn’t it go through?

One of the problems was naming it. Frog thought that they had a lot of equity in their name, and Razorfish thought that they had a lot of equity. It was like, “What, are you going to call it? Frog Razorfish? Razorfrog?” So then, the same thing that happened with Hartmut happened with Razorfish, and I said, “OK, I’m going to Razorfish.”

Then the internet bubble burst. Similar to this time, the economy shrank really fast,
and so I got laid off from Razorfish. But previous to that, I was talking to these Dutch guys about merging with Razorfish. They were an industrial design company from Amsterdam. When the bubble burst, again, I said, “I’ll go work with you guys.” So we started Springtime-USA. Once again, we were looking around for office space…

This is sort of a repeating pattern.

Yeah. The same thing. And then David Rockwell said, “Hey, we have extra space in here, you can have a desk.” So he sort of incubated Springtime-USA. He also had some connection with Coca-Cola. Eventually there was a new CEO at Coke, who wanted innovation. We pitched the idea that we would make an innovations think-tank here. We would think up new kinds of cans, or new displays, new drinks, new graphics, anything. They liked the idea, so we started a special Rockwell studio for Coke called Studio Red.

It was a multi-disciplinary group that wasn’t constrained by what the deliverable would be, except for that we were going to create something cool and innovative. I think that’s the ideal project for designers. Most clients come in and they ask, “We need a chair,” you know? He came in and said, “This place is not exciting. What can we do?” That kind of attitude is much better.

[sheraton toronto from labatrockwell].

How did that transition to the LAB at Rockwell Group, where we’re sitting in right now?

David decided to make the LAB a separate thing which would focus on R&D interactive design, so that’s the thread that runs through from all the way back at Smart Design: the idea that interfaces and physical components should be conceived together.

I’d like to throw your own question from the IDSA conference back at you. What do you see happening in the next 10 years?

This recession is not a regular recession. I think it’s more of a cultural shift. I don’t think the economy is going to work the same way anymore.

With everything falling apart, it presents a very interesting opportunity to rebuild.

Right. And that’s the right attitude. It’s an opportunity to build it back better, not to try to patch it up. Designers are in a great position, because we do make stuff that’s better. It’s too bad for the bankers, what do they do? We actually provide wealth, really, whereas other people just manage it and move it around. We take the raw materials and improve them.

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.