To start off, could you all introduce yourselves and your role is in the CMYK Cocktail event?

Emilie: I came up with the idea originally, and then I accosted Shelly and Nadia to be a part of it! I suppose I’d be the creative director. But really, we’re all working pretty closely on everything.

Shelly: I’m more of the production designer for the event, but kind of a jack-of-all-trades. Suggesting speakers for the event, getting sponsors, and making sure everything runs smoothly. Running around a lot!

Nadia: I’ve been helping with the bulk of the writing, and helping shape the concept of the event and its presentation to the general public and to sponsors.

Where did the idea come from?

Shelly: We started talking about it in August, after the Jell-O Mold competition.

Nadia: Yeah, we started talking about it in the summer. There were a lot of ideas about what the event would be or what Tasteologie would be, and we had to streamline them.

Shelly: Emilie had the idea for a while, though.

Emilie: I’d been doing these color-themed, monochromatic dinners: all-black dinners and all-pink dinners and all-red dinners. All the food is that color, the people are dressed in that color, and every person came to the table with their interpretation of that color, giving it an interactive/performance component. People got so excited and it was way better than any regular dinner party! We thought it would be great to make those a little bit more professional in scope.

What can attendees expect at the event?

Nadia: Booze!

Emilie: There will be five cocktails presented. We’ll start with white, and then go through the CMYK spectrum. Each of the mixologists has designed a unique cocktail that pertains to that color. Some interpretations will be very literal and some will be a little bit more conceptual. Each cocktail will come paired with an amuse-bouche, a small bite to eat that will complement the flavor. In between each course there will be a toast, creating a dialogue about the ideas involved.

Nadia: We’re hoping there will be some participation – that the crowd will contribute their own ideas about what these colors mean.

What kind of people are attending?

Shelly: We have fashion designers, industrial designers, graphic designers, possible some people from Pantone… It’s a mixed bag. The thing about food is everyone can appreciate it.

Emilie: Business people. VPs at Godiva.

Nadia: I don’t work in design, I work in a human rights organization, and everyone that I work with thinks it’s really cool. Food and color is an easily accessible idea.

After you decided to throw this event, what have been the steps to make it real?

Nadia: It took a long time to really flesh out what we were trying to do with it. Once we figured out what we wanted to do, and then we chose who we wanted to be involved.

Emilie: The initial part was curating it, and curating it almost in the same way that you’d put a meal together. Everybody who participates has to be complimentary in some way.

Who have you brought in?

Emilie: We got James Tichenor and Josh Walton from Rockwell Interactive Lab to do cyan. Magenta is Tobias Wong and Josee LePage. Yellow is Renda Morton, who was suggested by a friend of mine. Black is Seymour Chwast, and Shelly can wax poetic on him. He’s probably the most old-school, established designer on board.

Shelly: Seymore helped design the packaging for the McDonalds Happy Meal, so we thought he’d be a really great person for this, combining both food and design.

Nadia: What all of these people have in common is that they have dealt with food in some capacity in their previous design work, as well as cultural consumption. That’s what ties them all together, even though they work in different aspects of design.

We should probably pay homage to the sponsors, because they’re very important to making things happen. Can you talk a little about who’s gotten involved?

Emilie: Well, we have Droog design, who’s been great in terms of allowing us to use their space. They’ve always thought about the everyday in new ways, so I think they are a perfect partner for this. The Evolution Store is donating products, CMYK gifts. And Baked by Melissa is donating food. We’re also in partnership with the Umami festival, which brings together art, culture, and food.

Has it been hard to find sponsors, or has that just come naturally with the crowd you’ve been talking to?

Shelly: Dealing with small businesses seems to be easier. Big corporations are coming in a little slow because of their budget schedule – a lot of companies set the budget in the fall for the following fiscal year.

Emilie: It’s just the timing of it. Getting sponsored just takes a long time, usually. We were really thankful that Droog came on pretty early, and we’ve been talking with Umami about it for a while. We keep getting calls from potential sponsors, though. What’s interesting about working in the medium of food is there’s this sort of cross-pollination that’s happening, cross-marketing. From a commercial standpoint, that makes a lot of sense. You’re able to target such a diverse audience in a really powerful way.

Way back in December we were approached by curators Dan Rubinstein and Jen Renzi to participate in their ICFF offsite show, InDisposed. At that point the show seemed so far in the future, but lo and behold, we set up tomorrow!

The brief they put together is amazing. In their own words:

As environmentalism has infiltrated contemporary design, durability and longevity have become the buzzwords du jour… rejecting throwaway culture to prioritize permanence over the ephemeral—while trashing the very idea of disposability. That’s our loss. After all, are disposable objects inherently bad? Doesn’t disposability have some redeeming social value?

Provocative, to say the least. InDisposed will be on display at Studio X May 15-20, 10-6PM (closed Sunday).

Can you give us a sneak preview of some of the work on display?

Jen: We invited a lot of furniture designers, but people really surprised us by coming up with small objects. Though as we’ve moved along, bigger and bigger objects have come up that will create their own installation challenges.

Candlestrip by Design Glut for InDisposed (Photo by Ben Ritter)

Dan: Tobias Wong will be showing. He approached Paper magazine, and said, “Let me dispose of ten pages of your magazine, guest-edit them, and then put them online.” In the magazine it will jump from pages 150 to 160, or so, and say something to the effect of, “You are about to skip 10 pages of the magazine. They are being disposed of for eco-purposes, they are exclusively available online, and this is for the InDisposed show.”

Jen: It’s funny, because as a conceptual designer, Toby has conflicting ideas of authorship and responsibility. He almost wanted to unmake something that was already there. His medium is anti-medium.

Are there any trends across the work?

Jen: We actually have a lot of people using food and edibles. Which I guess makes sense, because its such a natural cycle of disposibility that’s easy to embrace. Jeff Miller, for example, is working with City Bakery, and molding old bread into birdhouses. Carlos Salgado is making planters out of used coffee grounds.

Dan: Andrea Ruggiero is doing plates made from birdseed and a super-secret potato starch mix that looks like ceramic. The idea is that you can eat off it, and when you’re done, you can throw it like a frisbee into the woods. It will naturally dissolve, and the birds can peck at the seeds. Then we have Takeshi Miyakawa, who is making molded plastic take-out containers. They look similar to lego blocks, and can be washed after use, and made into different things.

Jen: It’s provocative because it encourages you to use take-out containers. It encourages you to consume, then turn the waste into something functional.

Suzanne Tick for InDisposed

It sounds like an amazing variety of pieces.

Jen: It is all so different. In the end, it’s a lot of designers, taking spare time out of commercially viable work to do these intellectual indulgences for us. I hope a lot of people come out. The show will be up for a week, so come out and take a look around.

How did you think up the idea for the show?

Jen: We actually started last year. We wanted to do something for ICFF, but it was too late to pull it off, so we used the extra time to plan out this year. We knew we wanted to do a show, something conceptual.

Dan: We wanted to do something that was timely and not so commercial. We knew since we didn’t really have a budget, we didn’t have to do a lot of what we saw at ICFF – new pieces being shown at some fancy boutique, limited in terms of the risks they take.

Jen: We weren’t sure if we were even going to be able to get a space. We had this idea that if we couldn’t find the gallery we wanted, we’d do it a little guerilla-style. Have a one-night happening at a bar. Instead of saying, “Are we going to be able to get a space?” We worked backwards and said, “Well, if we don’t have space, what are we going to do?”

Paul Loebach for InDisposed

How did you end up getting together with Studio X?

Dan: We contacted the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. They produce a lot of really cool events, find work spaces for artists and designers, and do lots of fancy things to boost this area culturally post-9/11. We told them we were doing a design show with mostly local talent, and asked if they knew a space someone would be wiling to donate. They told us about Studio X, and we went from there.

What exactly is Studio X?

Gavin: This is a satellite of the Columbia University which acts as an interface between the design school and the public. It’s also a space for research, exhibition, and experimental programming. The idea is that it can be a space for research, and work, then very quickly transform into an event space and back again. No one has shelves, all the desks are on wheels, and everything is mobile.

Sounds perfect. ICFF is an expensive show, which makes people nervous when it comes to taking risks.

Jen: Exactly. A lot of people complain, but it’s a trade show. I kind of wish someone would do an offsite show, of commercially viable products, for people that are just starting out. ICFF can be very daunting. I talk to a lot of designers, even those midway through there career, and they still have a hard-time with ICFF. They would need to get certain things out of it to make it worth the money, and thus they don’t do it. I also feel like the offsite shows are shrinking as people got further in their careers.

It seems like this year may be the year for offsite shows.

Dan: Since the economy has ground to a halt, you would think this would spur super-creative things by people who have no commercial interests. But instead, I have a feeling it’s going to be a lot of hum-drum showrooms, with everyone playing it safe. In all these other places in the world, people are doing incredible design for design’s sake.

Jen: Well, in those places the government funds design. You can’t really compare apples to oranges. We’re just creating a space where people can do something that’s not ICFF-ish.

Situ Studio for InDisposed

Seen on the streets of New York

How did Wooster Collective start?

Sara: It was the convergence of a couple things. We were living in a loft on Wooster St. and we got a puppy named Hudson. Marc had just been to Tokyo and bought a digital camera. Marc was walking the dog one day, the dog was peeing, and while he was standing there, he looked up and said, “Oh my god, what’s that?” It was a little piece of street art. He took a photo of it, and as he walked the dog around, took more photos.

Marc: We realized that the neighborhood we were in was exploding with art.

Sara: It was exploding, at that time. 2000, 2001.

Marc: It was like if you lifted a manhole cover up and saw this whole world down there. “Holy shit, I had no idea that it was there.” You literally couldn’t go four feet without seeing or discovering some hidden object, that some creative person put there for your personal enjoyment. That’s the reason so many people become obsessed with street art – it’s very personal.

Ckoe’s Bees in Amsterdam

You have that moment of discovery.

Sara: It feel like it’s yours.

Marc: When you come across a Swoon piece that she hand cut, even though you know that it’s been put on the street for everybody, you feel like there’s this personal connection to it.

Sara: Now, I think, everyone experiences things – concerts, events, birthday parties, whatever – via their phone or their digital camera. Marc was on the beginning of that. He started taking photos and it was his way of capturing these ephemeral experiences. The pieces would change over time, and we really captured that.

When did you start your site?

Marc: I started to get interested in blogging. Blogging software had just come out, and I didn’t like the way I was publishing all these photographs. I couldn’t really talk or write about them.

Sara: They were just published as big blocks of images.

Marc: So we got some blogging software and we just started. Artists started talking about it. At the time, traditional media wasn’t really writing about street art. And if they were writing about graffiti, they were only writing about it as vandalism. People connected with the Wooster Collective site. It started to really grow, and then as the traditional media started looking for what was happening in the art world, they started referring to our site. It grew and grew and grew over the years. But it’s still very much a personal blog. It has no advertising. We haven’t upgraded anything. It hasn’t really changed in 6 years.

Crateman in Melbourne

Well, there’s one notable change – at first, you were going out and finding material to post. But now people submit art to you. When did that shift happen?

Marc: That’s absolutely correct. It happened pretty quickly. Artists all talk to each other. People like to see themselves, right? So if we put up the work of an artist in Spain, and that artist sees that their work is recognized, they email all their friends. And then their friends email us their work.

Sara: That was how the network started. And just in the way we said, “Hey, let’s try blogging software,” we’ve experimented with many other things along the way. One morning we woke up and decided we wanted to do podcasts. We did those, and we put them up.

Marc: Everything we do is an experiment. Other than posting every day, which we’ve done now for many, many years without ever wanting to stop, we don’t commit to doing any projects for a long period of time. If we’re twittering, we’ll twitter as long as it’s fun, and then we’ll move on to something else. If we have a Facebook page, we’ll have fun with the Facebook page and move on. It’s about learning, and experimenting, and seeing what the reaction is.

Umbrella Bloom by Sam Spenser

What other experiments have you done?

Sara: We used to do street art walking tours. Those were really fun because unlike online, we could watch someone see a piece of street art for the first time. People would bring their moms. We had women who lived in New York City for forty years on the Upper West Side just exploding and embracing street art. “Is that a piece of art? Is that a piece?” It was really rewarding, and a nice way to give back to the city.

Marc: Since Sara and I both have other jobs, we don’t have to say yes to anything regarding Wooster Collective. There’s a reality that sets in when you’re relying on a project for your income. You go down a road where you need to have advertising, and then you need to meet with this person, and you need to do this, and you need to do that. It becomes work. Sara and I made a decision that we didn’t want to go home and start a second job called Wooster Collective.

How did you start putting on shows?

Marc: We did a group show, “Hollywood Remix.”

Sara: This was really fun. I think it was in ‘05. We lived above an art gallery, and we convinced her to give us the space in July, when they were usually closed for a couple weeks. The idea was to send out all of these posters, and have the artists remix them, paint them, etc. Then they mailed them back to us. We thought 200 or so people would show up, and it ended up being 6 or 700 people.

What a positive reaction! And somehow you went from that to the 11 Spring show?

Sara: We can’t talk about experimenting without talking about 11 Spring. I think from the outside, it seemed so amazing and huge, and like Wooster Collective, was this big company. In reality, it was so far from that, and such a bootstrapped operation. It was very organic and happened with so little resources. It’s a great example of just going out there, doing something, and having it blossom.

11 Spring

How did it start?

Sara: There was a lot of art up on the outside of the building.The developer who bought the building fell in love with the fact that the art was changing every week, as she was in the process of buying it. So she sent us an email and said, “I bought this building, I don’t know anything about the artists, but I love art and I want to learn more.” And Marc said, “Come over for a glass of wine.” So Caroline Cummings showed up with her building manager, Malcolm Stevenson. We had a glass of wine, and she said, “I’d love to honor the history of this building.”

That sounds like a dream!

Sara: It was a dream. They weren’t starting demolition for six or eight more weeks, so there was this lag period with nothing happening. We said, “Well maybe some of the artists could paint the inside, and we could have a cocktail party, and invite people to see it.” And on that day or the next day, she basically handed us a set of keys, and trusted us.

Marc: The art was all going to be destroyed. You had to paint directly onto the walls. All of the artists knew that the work was going to be ephemeral – they couldn’t own it, they couldn’t sell it, they couldn’t keep it. Certain artists respond really well to that, and the impermanence is actually a motivator.

Sara: The artists just started painting the walls. We got on the phone, and said, “Fly over, you can sleep on our floor, we want to make this a global thing.” We opened up the and WK, who lives in this neighborhood, came over with his cart. He said, “Sara, I want this wall,” and he points and a 20ft long by 17 ft high wall. He ended up putting, you know, a million dollar painting on this wall. He set the bar for every other artist who came in.

Dface at 11 Spring

What was the opening like?

Sara: We locked the artists in there the last night, and they painted all night. We came in in the morning, to open at 9AM, and they just took all their paintbrushes and pushed them off to the side. Within 3 or 4 hours, there was a 4 or 5 hour wait to get in to the show.

Marc: At that moment there was a lot of discussion about galleries and museums, and what that experience is like, and does it need to change? All of a sudden this happened, and people responded really well. People want authentic experiences. They also want to interact, and feel like they are participating.

Sara: Seeing the paint cans made them understand that this was fresh art.

Marc: The paint was still wet. The brushes weren’t props. If you go to the galleries in Chelsea, it’s great to see art in that context, but it’s not participatory.

Sara: There were holes in the floor at 11 Spring. Malcolm and Marc carried a guy in a wheelchair up five flights of stairs to get to the top.

Doze at 11 Spring

What an emotional experience.

Sara: It was a life-changing experience. If we had said, “We’re going to put on a show with 75 artists from around the world, and we’re going to paint 5 stories, and open it up and have 6,000 people,” we would never have done it. We’d say, “it’s too big,” or, “We need $30,000.” Instead, we just said, “Let’s do this, and see what happens.” It was an intense 7 weeks, and we definitely had fears, but we embraced them.

Marc: Our goal is to push ourselves out of our comfort zones. We wanted to learn how books come together, and are made, so we thought, “OK, we’ll publish our own book.” We wanted to understand gallery shows, so we organized one. I think if you look at different kinds of people, there are people that push themselves out of their comfort zone and go on to amazing things, and there are others that just can’t. They just can’t push themselves too far because it’s too nerve-wracking.

You have to have a stomach for a certain, say, element of chaos.

Sara: I’d call it ambiguity. A stomach for ambiguity. I’m not sure it’s always chaotic. There are moments. But it’s always blurry, foggy, and you have to make sense of it. Then, once you do, there’s more ambiguity that you have to make sense of.

Prepara’s Power Plant

How did you two meet?

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

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

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

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

FRS Watch

When did Pollen outgrow your apartments?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prepara’s Parking Meter Alarm for Kikkerland

How did you get your first clients?

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

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

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

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

Prepara’s Cliq garlic crusher

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

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

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

And then you showed it at the fairs?

E: Not yet.

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

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

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

E: Nobody has a crystal ball.

Prepara’s Trio tri-blade peeler

What’s your advice for entrepreneurs?

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

D: Design Director. More of a director.

Design becomes a smaller and smaller part of it.

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

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

Rabbit corkscrew

BLOGGING

Did you actively promote your site, or did the traffic just grow organically?

No, I never actively promoted the site. I was always proud to say I never marketed it. I never did banner-swaps with anybody. I was fortunate enough to start the site when design blogs were few and far-between. There was Grace from Design*Sponge, Josh from Cool Hunting, myself, and only a few others.

The community used to be much tighter. We would call each other out on postings. Grace and I used to have “scoop wars.” If I posted something, she’d dig back and say, “You’re not reading my site, I posted this four months ago!” Or if we posted something on the same day, she’d say, “I got you by 3 hours!”

But today thousands of sites link to all our sites, and it’s a re-blog world. If someone writes about something I’ve written about, I’m not going to say anything anymore. Back then, there was actually a golden rule. Now that’s completely gone. It’s all about the pursuit of traffic, and post quantity.

joshspear.com

How does one pursue traffic? How often does a successful blogger need to post?

A few years ago I did an experiment. I went from posting about four times a day to posting 15 times a day. I did that for a while, and traffic jumped by a lot, obviously. But three years ago there wasn’t nearly as much to read. If I posted 15 times a day, you tuned in 15 times a day. Now people scroll through everything in Google Reader. I read all my blogs in Google Reader and I don’t usually know which blogs the posts come from. That’s what’s happening.

Do you get a lot of feedback from your readers?

We get a surprising amount of feedback. Especially from the core audience that’s been reading it since the beginning. Well, the “beginning.” Everyone has a different sense of the beginning. Anybody who has actually been reading the site since the beginning knows that it was never really about products. If you dig far enough back, it was a blog about “what the hell am I doing?” I wrote about politics, and things that I found inspiring, and leaving school. It was very personal.

But that growing community was always there. And when you hit some sort of milestone, you hear from them, “Congratulations!” Once in a while, we get people who are either genuinely moved by something we’ve written, or it has moved their supply in some way. I have a secret folder on my computer called “Magic” where I put stories like, “You posted my shirt and it sold out instantly.” Yes! I love that.

undercurrent.com

BRANDING

How did you get into the branding and marketing work that you’re doing at Undercurrent?

I got a random email on my blog, about six months after I started it, from the Leo Burnett ad agency in Chicago. They asked me to come in and speak to them about the interwebs, and particularly about their client, McDonalds. I’ve never been in McDonalds, and I’ve never eaten McDonalds, so it was interesting. I gave them some pretty raw and authentic thoughts, and it turned out to be very helpful. Most of these brands are so insulated from what’s actually going on. They have to do a grand study to figure out what the kids are saying, and then someone has to translate that.

Did you come from a branding background? What got you interested in all this?

I came from a brand savvy, product savvy, never “settling” household. My dad is a designer. He’s a feng shui expert. When I grew up he was designing hotels and private residences, working with people like Karim Rashid. In grade school I always had Muji notepads and pencils that my dad brought me back from trips. There was always some thought put into a purchase, and what brands stood for, and what values they had. But it took a long time for me to realize how interested I was in brands. I just knew that I liked some of them.

Josh Spear’s lecture on branding, Brand Utopia

That’s an interesting transition.

One of the first and most important things I realized is that anyone who says they’re immune to brands is so unbelievably full of shit. I have long-since given in to my love for certain brands. I buy the things they release on day one, and I far overpay for something just to know that it came from those people. Even if it’s entirely irrational, I do it.

I still meet people who say they “aren’t really affected by brands.” OK, let’s have a test. Say you’re flying to London. What airline would you rather fly, British Airways or something you’ve never heard of, like Air Chumbawumba? And when you get out of the airport, would you rather get into a taxicab that looks like the ones you know, or something that looks like a boat on wheels?

That’s like when my family comes to visit and I try to put them in an unmarked Brooklyn gypsy cab. It’s a really hard sell!

Exactly! And yet your family would probably tell you that they’re not into brands. Another example: people come to New York City to go on vacation. They don’t go to Buffalo. Which do you think is the stronger brand, New York City or Buffalo? Nobody is immune; brands affect your decision making.

Image via the World Economic Forum’s Flickr set

WORLD CHANGING

You recently got back from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. How did you get the chance to attend?

I spoke at a Google Zeitgeist conference, a year and change ago. There was a delegate from the World Economic Forum in the audience. They came up to me afterwards and said, “I’d like to invite you to Davos.” I’ll never forget looking at his card and thinking, “What is this place?” I’d certainly heard about it, but I never thought I’d go in a million years. So I went for the first time last year, and I was one of the youngest people there.

I would not guess that a whole hell of a lot of people our age are at the World Economic Forum.

They invited a fair amount of younger people, though they were more internet/technology focused, rather than lifestyle/design/culture, or whatever category you want to put me in. They put me in the “Media” slot. I spoke about young people, and branding, and marketing to them.

I went again this year, and was nominated to the Global Agenda Council for marketing and branding. Councils have 4-10 people and are about planetary science, and the oceans, and national security, and Iran, and oil… All these wildly important things. The marketing and branding council is made up of bigwig agency owners and leaders. They put me on there partially, I think, because they wanted someone young to keep them honest. They’re trying to invigorate what they’re doing. We ended up collaborating with the council on climate change, to come up with better ideas to communicate climate change.

From Davos, I flew to LA to attend the TED conference. That was my third TED, and it’s the best week of the year, every time. Although this one was very subdued, having come from Davos where I met, you know, the Prime Minister of every country in the world.

It’s hard to come off that high.

Yeah, exactly. My first year at Davos, I was thinking, “Oh my god, look, it’s Robin Williams! It’s the Prime Minister of Turkey! It’s Jet Li!” And this year it was, eh, Jet Li. You get jaded really fast. Which is good; all of a sudden it becomes so much less about the people and so much more about the content.

It’s exciting to see someone our age at these conferences. What do you think our generation brings to the table, in terms of world-changing?

The first year I went to TED, you couldn’t actually download any videos. Can you imagine, you couldn’t watch TED Talks? That’s insane! So the fact that that’s broken open now means that we can all share some of the things that were spoken about there. And Davos, for the first time this year, is all HD, you can download it. 1 in 5 people in the world are under 24. If a pretty large portion of them can have access to the internet, they too can consume this knowledge.

There’s never going to be 500 24-year-olds at Davos, it’s just not going to happen. But there are more than 500 24-year-olds around the world that understand and care about those issues, and don’t need to be there. They won’t ever have the crazy experience but, nonetheless, will in some way get to shape the future. They can be much more knowledgeable, and make a much greater impact, than young people ever could before.

What advice do you have for creative entrepreneurs?

Live your life. It seems so cliche and obvious, but living your life is the only thing that allows you to discover things. Fearlessly go forwards and taste new things, whether they are countries, or people, or foods, or emotions. Put yourself out there and live a life that is tremendous. Whatever you invest in yourself will eventually pay dividends in your world.

Skills can be learned by anybody. We have schools; we have ways to take advantage of people who go to schools. We’re set up for that stuff. What we’re not set up for very well is the nourishment of the self. That’s your own responsibility. There’s a person right there in the mirror. Take a good look. Take the time to get to know that person. That will pay off in anything that you do, whatever you want to be.

This is not magic. There’s no mystery to this. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m just presenting the way I see life. I’m curating it the way that I see it, and putting it out there. Now you tell me, by the virtue of the market economy, whether this has a future or not. And I will go on, or not. I don’t claim to know any better. I just claim to see what I see.

[the black apartment]

And you also take action. Many people have visions, but actually figuring out the logistics and getting it to people in a finished form is everything.

I hate to quote Yoda in anything, but as I learned in my youth, “Do or do not. There is no try.” That’s always been a huge thing for me, and it speaks to what you just said. Action is what makes anything valuable.

I used to call this the “bedroom Mozart” syndrome. You can be an extraordinary, extraordinary human being, but if you do not act one day to get it out of your bedroom, nobody will hear your symphonies. And that may be perfectly fine; that may be enough for some people. I, on the other hand, do not claim to have that kind of artistry. But I do want whatever I feel or imagine to be experienced by the largest possible number of people, so that it can have impact.

Woody Allen said, “Don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with somebody I love.” So I can’t knock masturbation. But you can have masturbation AND sex, you know? I don’t think one replaces the other!

So what does The Apartment do, other than masturbate?

We have blossomed into a full-fledged agency that looks at problems which have outdated solutions. I think there’s, to borrow your word, a glut of old ways of looking at things. Old ways to create meaning and old ways to create experiences. That’s where a company like ours comes in. We don’t have the rules ingrained in us. This allows us to take risks where others would never dare to.

Everest would never have been climbed if someone hadn’t said, “Fuck impossible.” You know? Someone said, “I’m doing it. I’m maybe going to die halfway through, but I’m still going to do it.” And I think that comes from a totally naive way of looking at life, which is wonderful. The Apartment has that fearlessness and takes on all kinds of projects, from the branding and marketing for a broadway show to creative-directing the planning of a small eco-city in the Ukraine. We tend to gravitate towards projects that make our lives more interesting, not ones that simply make our company more profitable.

[the black apartment]

Part of being a creative entrepreneur is that it’s not a “job.” It becomes your life. It has to fulfill more than just your bank account.

Precisely. And that kind of business changes in the same way that your life changes. I’m 39. and I’m no longer the person I was when I started The Apartment. I was 28 and idealistic. I started a store, and I had no idea what I was doing. I had never done retail before. I was a filmmaker at NYU, and Gina was a marketing consultant. We decided to do this together. We knew nothing about the rules of retail. We naively just went into it.

What was the concept behind the store?

I came up with the idea of creating a new, theatrical retail concept. Retail needed a new way to exist. Maybe it’s not just crap on shelves with price tags and you go to the cashier, anymore. Maybe there’s something else.

At that time, experiential retail didn’t exist. Prada was starting to think about it. A couple of people were starting to think about it. But nobody had really done it, especially in the design world. Design stores were all either the gadget market or the museum market. There was nothing in-between. We came in and said, “There is something missing. There’s a very large group of people for whom design is about usage, for whom design is about function. For whom design is something you live with, not something you admire.”

The Apartment was literally an apartment. Everything was for sale, but you could come and do whatever you wanted. You could eat. You could take a shower. Everything was there for you. You could stay all day if you wanted, watch TV, whatever. And we started to form a community of people, by the virtue of having a physical space which people came into.

How did that transition into your client work?

Most of what’s happened to us has been organic. There was never a business plan. Very quickly, 9-12 months after we opened the store, people started to come in and say, “Instead of buying individual pieces from your store, can you do this whole thing at my house?” And we thought, “Huh, maybe there’s a business here!” So we hired an interior designer and started doing people’s houses. Getting our first interiors clients was that simple.

And then somebody came and said, “We have a restaurant business. Could you do all the interior design? And since you seem to do your own branding pretty well, could you also do our branding and our marketing?” Hey, absolutely. We did it. Little by little, we saw how big that market was. People who not simply wanted design, but wanted consistent design that was integrated from department to department. From what the place is called to what you hear about it before you go. From what you expect it to feel, look, smell, sound like when you come in, to what you actually get, to how you remember it when you leave.

All of these things are usually taken care of by different people, usually freelancers. Providing continuity became a big thing for us. It became about storytelling. What we were doing, which wasn’t being done by “professionals” in the field, was thinking about life-impact. Thinking about stories, thinking about the things that make us tick on a daily basis: love, sex, entertainment, haircuts… all of the things that make our lives interesting. We saw a gigantic opportunity, so big that we needed to choose between that part of our business and the retail store.

[hello]

Why did you choose the agency?

We saw retail as only ever being able to grow from one store to a chain of stores. That wasn’t all that interesting to us. That was merely scalability. And so we turned into the agency, with no real agenda of what we wanted to do.

We stayed quite open as far a
s what kind of projects we wanted to take. Interior design was an easy first target, because people saw us as a furniture store. It was easy for people to think, they do furniture, they do interior design, that makes sense. People like to put you in a box. It was an OK box to be in for a while, but I grew quite impatient. I wanted to do stuff on the branding side, and the product side, and music, and movies. So we had to educate our clients as to who we are and what we do. It doesn’t always work. Half the time people don’t know what the fuck to make of us.

But I’m not willing to specialize just to be more “successful.” I am absolutely a generalist. I’m the conductor of a grand orchestra, and the orchestra changes up for every project. The Apartment and I will always be able to see life as a whole and design parts of it, whatever you need for your project. That’s what is interesting to me.

Where do you hope for all this to go?

When I’m designing an apartment or a product or a marketing plan, the number of people who it benefits is finite. So how can I create the environment which will be of the most value to the most people? I know there will never be an end to that quest, but I think it’s interesting to start it.

That’s one of the reasons we created Meet at the Apartment, up the street, with our friends at the Wooster Collective. It’s a way to go beyond theorizing about great ideas, and put them into action. We created that place because we didn’t want to just say we’re about community. We wanted to actually create a community. We made a place where we could meet, where big brands or big manufacturers could meet street designers or graffiti artists. I want to get people together who would otherwise never meet, and see what happens after a day.

Meet at the Apartment is the embodiment of a need to redefine success as something more than financial, something more than fame. What we want to do over there is make something like a sophisticated learning annex. It’s somewhere for us to gather the people that we’ve met on our journey over the past ten years. Whether it’s you guys, or Stefan Sagmeister, or Richard Meier. Take anybody in the world that we find interesting, put them in a room together, give them a subject, talk about it and bring people meaning. And see then how we can institutionalize this and make it valuable.

[meet at the apartment]

What makes New York a special place for that kind of community?

Well, I came from Paris when I was 18 years old. I came here specifically because in Europe, you are nothing if you’ve done nothing, and you are no one if you know no one. You’re completely disrespected because you have no experience. It’s unbelievable to me. Whereas this country, young by definition, can’t afford to disrespect its young. It was built upon the young. So when young people arrive here, as New York has proven again and again and again, we are not just welcomed but taken advantage of in the best possible way.

This country is so full of opportunity. Even today, when a lot of people are seeing dead-ends and desperation. For creative people, I think this recession is an absolute godsend. It’s an opportunity, for once in our lives, to think about subtracting rather than adding. Which is why we’re here today, actually! We got to meet because of this article in the New York Times, speaking of the positive aspects of subtraction. Which I think is extraordinary and shouldn’t be shied away from by anyone, least of all Murray.

It’s a very exciting time right now because everyone’s starting to reflect, as opposed to just going through their usual patterns. When the economy is great, you don’t have to think as much about what you’re doing. The possibilities for change, right now, are huge.

They’re as endless as your imagination. It sounds Disney, but it’s true! It’s kicking us in the ass, but it’s also saying, “What are you actually made of?” It’s not a bad thing to be tested in that way. It’s testing my company as we speak. We are relying on our own power to reinvent ourselves. You need to go through the changes. It’s not enough to continue the line that life gives you. At some point you have to say, “No, even what I started two years ago may not apply to me today.” Maybe there’s something else that I should do, and I have to change. And then I have to change again and again and again.

Now I operate a lot like an octopus, reaching out to talented people all around the world. We have them partner with us on different things, as opposed to relying on people in-house, people who ultimately create unmanageable overhead. And for what? For not much. For an antiquated vision of success which was built by our parents in the ’50s, that the more people you employ, the bigger your office, the more successful you seem?…

When you start your own company, in a lot of ways you refuse the status quo. You refuse to play by the rules, even sometimes by your own rules. As an entrepreneur, you set up your own rules. And you think, “Well those are the best rules anybody can ever set up for me, because they’re mine.” But after a couple years, you look at it again, and you say, “No, that’s bullshit too. Because I’ve evolved.”

[yelo]

Because I was wrong.

Yeah, “I was wrong.” Those are such powerful words, you know? That’s something that I want to be able to say every day. In order to reconfigure. This company is a different company than it was six months ago, for the better.

Character
19 Prince Street
New York, NY
212.274.1966
www.characternyc.com

When did Character open, and how did it start?

Character started in 1999. It was at that time that all the European character work was coming out. We were bringing things over from Belgium- Tintin, Astrix, The Little Prince, I’m sure you remember. The current owner bought the store in 2004, and wanted to put a different spin on it. At that point the store became much more design oriented. We focused on up and coming designers, current events, and really the celebration of fantastic ideas. It became much less about the traditional definition of a character, and more about the character of an , its personality, the story of how it came to be. I think the word character is the one thing which really connects the store- from the products we carry to the staff and designers. There’s nothing that cant be seen or done here.

What do you look for when you bringing new product into the store?

We don’t like to put limits on what product we bring in, it just has to be good. Obviously, as you see, we have a little bit of everything. You can find anything from a baby gift to a bad ass necklace. We look for products that aren’t trend driven, but rather unique and creative, that catches peoples eyes – conversation pieces. Our customers tend to be more interested in the intellectual pieces, as well as the stories of the designers behind them. Obliviously if a product doesn’t work with the clientèle, I can’t do anything about it, but we’re always looking for work with a story- objects that people can connect to.

Do you have a typical customer?

There are a wide variety of people that come into the store. The clients vary depending on who’s working, the music, the weather, the specific time of day – I’m generalizing – but our product range is so vast you can’t really typify a customer.

For example, I know that my older clientèle comes in the early morning, on Saturday we’re going to be rocking out playing music and giving out free condoms, and if there is going to be a little granny in the store on Sunday, well I certainly still don’t want to have bowls of condoms out. All three of us that work here, Adam, Tyler, and myself all have a very different personalities, and as a result, we draw in very different customers.

You’ve talked about connecting people in the store to the staff, as well as products, do you think it is important for the customer to be able to connect to the designer behind the piece?

I think it’s critical for us to be able to present the designer as well as know their work. This is especially true with the local designers. Customers love it when you can tell them the product there buying was made by someone based in Brooklyn. The locality makes the work much more tangible.

Have you noticed any current buying trends?

Summer is a very interesting time because we have a lot of tourists. This year its been people from Mexico and California, less Europeans. The trends change with the demographic. In the last three weeks we’ve sold a lot of jewelry and mirrors. The Harry Allen mirrors in particular are doing particularly well.

How does display and packaging of a product affect the sales?

The placement of a product in the store is extremely important, and was a big part of my professional career in merchandising. When people first walk into the store, especially if it’s empty, they’re going to be a little trepidacious. We like to place relaxing, inviting items near the front of the store – work which is easy to grasp and will draw people further in. I also like to create narrative with some of the smaller items, place them in glass cases, use putty to stand the product up, it makes them more visually engaging.

What is your favorite object in the store and why?

I have the pieces that I’ve always loved, and had for a while. I love the Harry Allen mirrors, but every product in here is really a favorite of mine, I wouldn’t keep ordering it, or work on selling it, if I didn’t believe it was great. I’m very selective about what we carry, simply because if I’m not passionate about an object, I certainly can’t sell it.