She’s managed to turn her cheeky sense of humor and fabulous fashion sense into a wildly successful business, at the crazy young age of 27. What more could we ask for? Check out more of her work at http://a-morir.com

Let’s start at the beginning – when did you start bedazzling and befabulousing sunglasses?

I will show you the first thing I bedazzled. It’s my Motorola flip phone from when I was sixteen. Which I like to keep around for when people say, “It’s not durable.” This is eleven years old.

Fast forward to a couple years ago – I’d just quit the marketing industry and gone through a life change. I was working at a boutique to kill time before starting grad school at NYU for a Masters in Costuming History. I wanted to either work at the Met or be an authenticity expert for films and TV.

One day I bedazzled a pair of eyewear for myself. I was like, “Oh, I’ve got these stones, I need new glasses, let me just… ” I wore them into the store i was working at, and literally they were like, “Um, why don’t you sell these?” I made four, and they sold out really quick. They were in the New York Post, and were on Mariah Carey. Rihanna and I met, and she bought four pieces, and she kind of helped champion it. When the biggest pop star in the world wears your most unique design… She wore the chain ones out, and it was very shortly thereafter that this blew up. It was really that quick.

In seven months I’d quit grad school, quit working at the store, and I’ve been doing this full time since July ‘09. It was just the thing, at the time, that made sense for me. And so I did it.

How great is it to be able to say, “I started a crazy eyewear company, that’s the thing that made the most sense!”

People that I haven’t seen in a while ask, “What do you do now?” and when I tell them they’re like, “Well of course!” I guess bedazzling is kind of my destiny.

That’s the title of the interview right there.

Yes!

How have you managed to get so much acclaim and your pieces on all these celebrities?

It’s funny, because I come from the marketing world, so you’d think I’d be really good at email blasts and reaching out to people. I do not do any of that. I’ve never sent out an email blast. This is probably the first season that I’ve actually emailed my line sheets to buyers. Last year I think I opened 17 accounts, and it was all because boutiques emailed me saying, “We love your stuff, do you wholesale?” Yes I do!

This all really just came to me, because I was doing something nobody else was doing. I’ve been really fortunate in that sense. And that’s how I always want it to be – I want the work to speak for itself. I think that’s why all the celebrity press happened quickly and has continued to happen, because the work does speak for itself.

What has been the hardest part of the business stuff to learn, once you started doing this full time?

Apparently I’ve got a really good sense for business, or so my accountant tells me. I feel like it’s a lot of common sense. But the legal formalities, like registering with the state, are tricky. Luckily there are books that are written about that.

Other than that, time management. Figuring out a good life balance has probably been the trickiest. For a long time I didn’t go to the gym, I didn’t go out, I didn’t see my friends. I was just here working. Which is part of what you have to do at the beginning. When you start a business, you spend basically every waking moment on it. Even if the business is doing well, and you’re not worried where the next bit of money is going to come from, it’s still the only thing that you do. “Why don’t you come to my party?” Bitch I have shit to do! I have emails to send out! The business completely envelopes your identity.

I always have this thing, this thing that’s much bigger than I am. But I love it – this is the stuff I would be doing in my free time anyway. I wouldn’t do anything else – I would just roll around in glitter all day!

Do you see yourself moving into more costuming? Looking around the studio, you have the helmets, masks, bras… all kinds of stuff.

Yes and no. It’s very difficult when you start off as one person and you control everything. If you look at any major business, there’s way more than one person working there. Even the most incredible “one-person operations” have three personal assistants, and there are teams of people running the show. I want to get there, and once i do I can focus less on actual manual production, I’ll be able to expand into designing more. But I don’t want to overextend myself. I’d rather focus on being the best at custom independent eyewear. I want to be the best eyewear designer that you know of.

Do you do a lot of custom pieces? How much of your work are things people commission?

I’d say it’s like 25% commissioned work, 75% what I already designed. It’s interesting because the pieces that are commissioned sometimes later turn into my new lines. All of the weird show-piecey stuff, like the helmet or the mask, were commissioned. A lot of the Lady Gaga stuff was commissioned. Her team will say, “These are your inspirations. We need these accessories, in this color, using these elements. Can you do this by tomorrow?” And I’ll be like, “Yes I can,” and then I’ll start to cry, but I’ll get it done.

What’s your favorite pair of glasses right now? What are you most excited about?

I’m most excited about the d’arcy [pictured below]. I feel like once a season, so far, I’ve done something that really pushes the envelope. This is the fourth collection I’ve put out. The first season was the very first four styles that I did, which was like the “aha!” moment. The second season was when I did the chains, and I was really happy with that. The next batch was when I did the Barracuda [black glasses]. People are lucky if they get one noteworthy piece in a lifetime. I was recognized as a master in design at a Nike conference, and on the top of every weird end-of-year best accessories list, from InStyle to Rolling Stone. And I was kind of like, “Really?! Awesome!” So the d’arcy is the style I’m most excited about now, where it looks you have a nose-to-ear chain.

All of your designs are a jump past eyewear – it’s eyewear mixed with things you know from other places.

Exactly. That’s my weird subversive humor.

How do you find your design inspiration? What’s your process? Even though I know it’s hard to put into words, because it’s kind of a thing we just do…

Yeah, if you are an authentic creative you just sort of do it. It’s harder for me to cook a meal properly than it is to come up for an idea for eyewear. It’s a whole mix of things – it can be I found a really good frame and want to do something with it because I like the shape, or I found this great material and I want to incorporate it into something, or I think up something I don’t think has ever been done before and challenge myself to do it.

Design duo Andy Pressman and Renda Morton share a love for design, sure, but it was a common obsession with a certain Fleetwood Mac album that launched Rumors — the name of their web, print and interactive design studio — which they founded in 2008 with original partner Holly Gressley. Now, Renda and Andy bounce ideas off of one another in a charming “sparring sibling” style, with all the bickering and building taking place in their Brooklyn studio. Unfortunately, Fleetwood Mac was not blasting as part of the creative process, but there was a Frank Sinatra-esque melody in the air.

Whatever they are listening to, the Rumors studio should keep that Pandora station streamin’, because their genius collaborations have already nabbed them clients like New York Times Magazine and Bidoun Magazine of the Middle East. With new designer Zack Seuberling on board, the Rumors team shows no sign of slowing down. Check out more of their work at http://rumors-studio.com

How did the name “rumors” come about?

Andy: We went through so many names. Part of the trick about having a collaborative studio is you only have so many things you share. And we all like Fleetwood Mac. At the time we were heavily, heavily into it.

Renda: Yeah. Tusk is our favorite album, but Rumors was the best studio name.

How did you two hook up and begin working together?

Renda: Andy can tell the story about how I met him.

Andy: I was hiring for a job. I had a website I was making and I needed a developer, and somebody pointed me towards Renda Morton. So I sent Renda an email. After I hit send, I thought to myself, “You know what I should do? I should go on Myspace and see who this person is.”

Renda: And this was back when Myspace was the thing.

Andy: So I do, and I search her by email address. Then I accidentally ended up sending her an invitation saying, “Andy Pressman wants to be your friend on Myspace,” and inviting her to join Myspace. As if this were an important business gesture.

Renda: He wrote me an email saying, “I’m really sorry. Please ignore this. Please continue to think of me as a consummate professional.”

Andy: I was like, “I know how to spin this—by being up front. That’s what professionals do.” But it turns out she never got the Myspace email in the first place.

Renda: That’s how we met. That’s how I knew Andy was cool.

Nice damage control. Some of the best relationships are formed through Myspace.

Andy: Separate from that, we shared studio space in Dumbo as independent designers. We were collaborating on projects and it just made sense at a certain point to bring these things together.

Renda: We went and interviewed other studios or collectives to see how they ran their business to try to figure out what the best way was for us.

What is the hardest part about collaborating on a design?

Andy: We’re pretty good collaborators. Do we run into disagreements? Sure.

Renda: That’s what makes it good!

Andy: What makes it good is the fact that you’re not talking to yourself. The nature of collaboration requires, to a certain extent, disagreement or at least a separate perspective. Maybe the most difficult part is working with somebody day in and day out and knowing their quirks and knowing what they are going to say about something. It is not unlike sparring siblings. Being able to know this is a safe space, but still be able to say that something is stupid.

Renda: We always have to sit next to each other.

Andy: We always conceptualize together, even if we are working on separate projects.

How do your design aesthetics differ?

Renda: I don’t know

Andy: Neither of us have a particular style.

Renda: But I can tell if Andy made something.

Andy: And I can tell if you made something. A designer does certain things because they appeal to him or her and you see that in their work. But I think part of our process is about the ideas more than it is about the design. We both have different things we like to do. I’m not anywhere near as capable a programmer as Renda.

Renda: He’s better at writing emails. Writing really difficult emails and awkward emails, like the ones where we are saying we can’t do something or need more money.

Andy: I would say I’m more invested in print typography than Renda.

Your job requires you to work closely with your clients and understand what they want. So what makes a good client?

Andy: Sometimes we try to give them what they don’t know they want.

Renda: We want something that will make them happy, but also something that will make the people that have to use the thing that they make—whether it’s a book or a website or an exhibition—those people have to be happy too. Which, in turn, makes the client happy.

Andy: We have two clients essentially. We have the people that hired us and we have the audience. So in some cases we end up being advocates for the audience and what the user would want. But what makes a good client? We’ve been trying to put our finger on this lately.

Renda: We had one project in Greece where we had a client who told us to do whatever we want and would approve everything, and money wasn’t so much an object. That turned out to be one of the worst clients because he just didn’t care. He wasn’t invested in the project.

Andy: The best clients are smart and engaged. They take part in this dialogue of what the output is. It’s a fundamentally collaborative process. Like what I said before, we are not fundamentally surface designers or graphic designers. At the heart of it, we think about what it is that we’re doing or saying and how we say it. So the very logic of the thing that we work on is up for grabs and discussion. We want clients to take part in the generative process. They need to be open to ideas and open to rethinking preconceived notions.

I would have guessed a designer would hope for a client that gives them more creative freedom to do whatever you want!

Renda: If I did whatever I want I would just sit. That’s what I wanna do.

Fair enough. You guys mix a lot of print work with online design. Does this say something about the future of graphic design or where your studio is headed?

Andy: It definitely says something about the present. That’s something that distinguishes us as a studio—we do all of those things… We like working with clients that want something in terms of an exhibition space, the Web, and even a catalogue too.

Renda: And it changes all the time. The iPad came out six months ago and now everything’s different. Six months from now, things will feel different again.

Andy: How things are made really is changing much faster people see. We like taking part in that.

So you guys are always adapting. How do you plan to grow in your studio in the coming years?

Andy: I don’t feel like we need to make an effort to stay on top of things because that’s just what we are curious about by our nature. We just follow those pursuits and it’s been taking us to interesting places. I’m content that we grow as readers as these objects grow as reading devices. As a studio, we do not want to grow to be a business where we have to manage multiple designers at once.

Renda: No. We live in this neighborhood and it’s nice walk to work everyday and not have to go to Manhattan.

Andy: Our ideal growth comes from clients and projects and not the size of our business. We are always looking for more clients that interest us.

What projects are you working on right now?

Renda: We are working on an exhibition for the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal. We are really excited about it.

Andy: We are excited because they are smart people and very engaged and really excited about the ideas. Because they are excited about the ideas, we can throw out things that are like….

Renda: What if the museum were re-curated this way?

Andy: Or what if the space wasn’t the way you traditionally conceive of an exhibition space?

Renda: And we get to go to Montreal, which is fun.

When is the exhibiton?

Renda: November 11. We also just finished a thing for the American Institute of Architects, New York Chapter—the Center for Architecture. This week is Architecture Week, so for the whole month of October, they bought all the ads at the West 4th Street Subway Station and they are showing all their members’ projects—architects that are based in New York and what things they are working on.

The opening ceremony of “Made in New York” will be held Friday, Oct. 8 from 6 to 8 p.m. in the West 4th St. Subway station. Stop by for a glass of wine (staying within the parameters of Subway boozing, of course) and some thoughtful analysis of New York architecture. If we’re lucky, the night will also include some clever dialogue on spinning classic rock into a savvy business influence—an art form that both Andy and Renda have clearly mastered.

Cindy Gallop and software engineer Wendell Davis. [image via Wired]

What exactly is If We Ran The World?

IfWeRanTheWorld.com is a web platform for anyone who’s ever gone, “I want to do something to change the world, but I don’t know what or how.” Now if you feel that and you go to any one of a raft of websites that are all trying to tackle this issue – socialactions.org, changents.com, changetheworld.com, etc, what happens is that you are instantly met and assailed by causes. You are met by AIDS, poverty, world health, Iran… And you are paralyzed into inactivity through too much choice.

When, on the other hand, you are asked to answer the question, “If you ran the world, what would you do?” it forces you to stop and think about what you believe in, what you value, what YOU care enough about to want to do something about, and it literally draws the answer out of you. It begins the process of owning that answer, as the first step of a platform that’s designed to make it impossible for you not to act.

How else does If We Ran The World compel people to take action?

I want to find a way to integrate doing something into everyone’s day-to-day lives online as much as doing nothing currently is.

That is effectively what large amounts of time spent on Myspace and Facebook and Youtube is – doing nothing. People spend hours of time playing Farmville, Mafia Wars, and poking each other. I imagine all that time and energy and effort spent on doing something that will have an impact on the real world – as opposed to doing nothing that has an impact in the virtual world.

That means our platform has to be as entertaining, as engaging, as fun – it has to work like a game. We designed it based on game theory and gaming principals. We call it literally “competitive collaboration.” We are leveraging the human competitive sprit to act. We are using all the emotional dynamics that make for the utterly addictive experience those site provide for hours and days on end. There’s a lot of psychology baked into this.

All online social networks currently are underpinned by one fundamental human truth: sex and dating. I’d like to make “taking action” the new social and sexual attractiveness value. I would like to make “Do you act?” the new measure of how attractive someone is. It’s not too much of a stretch, as we already admire people who get shit done.

How will this play out on your site?

On existing social networks, when you post your profile, you can post a photo of you at your most attractive, and a carefully-crafted mosaic of the books and music you like that gives a certain impression. You can lie. On If We Ran the World, you can’t lie. Apart from some basic information you enter upfront, your profile is entirely dynamically-generated by your actions. The more you act, the more it builds. You are what you do. You are the sums of your actions.

I call this “action branding.” Personal action branding for individuals, and corporate action branding for business. Company profiles work the same way – entirely generated by actions, not PR spin or greenwashing. I believe the advertising of the future isn’t about saying but doing. Action branding is communication through demonstration. It’s walking the walk.

Can you describe how it will work?

This whole platform is built around the concept of the micro-action. The micro-action is the atomic unit of If We Ran the World, in the same way the tweet is the atomic unit of Twitter. It’s an incredibly small, simple, easy to do action. We have micro-financing with Kiva, we have micro-blogging with Twitter. Take it to the next level: micro-actions. If it’s so easy to do, why wouldn’t you?

At its simplest, If We Ran the World allows you to sent up an action platform to achieve any goal that is your answer to the question. You break that goal down into micro-actions, and issue them as invitations to act to your friends, family, neighbors, employees, brands, businesses, celebrities. And every micro-action, once completed, reports back to your personal or business profile.

If We Ran the World is based on the fact that as you compete each micro-action, you feel good about yourself. You build your self-esteem. The more you do, the more you feel you can do. The feeling that you can take one small step to take control of your circumstances, do something about life, your community – that’s the dynamic that gets people out of poverty, despair, abuse.

What gave you the idea for all this?

If We Ran The World is combination of all my personal experience and learning and philosophy. It’s based very simply on basic human psychology and ordinary common sense – but if we all operated according to ordinary common sense, the billion dollar self-help industry wouldn’t exist.

It’s an idea that really came out of two places. It came out of the kind of person that I am, and it came out of the industry that I work in. When I say it came out of the kind of person that I am – I’m somebody who is naturally very action-oriented. I’m all about making things happen. I totally believe in “Be the change you want to see.” And I have a very low tolerance level for people who whine and whine about stuff and never do anything to change it. Too low a tolerance level, on occasion.

All of that got me thinking. You could argue that the single biggest pool of untapped natural resource in this world, is human good intentions that never translate into action. I found myself thinking, “If you could find a way to take all of those good intentions that all of us have on a daily basis and somehow find a way to turn them, at the moment of intention, into action, you would then unleash a source of energy and power that really could do extraordinary things in the world.”

Absolutely.

So that was one half of my thinking. The second half of my thinking was born out of 24 years working in brand-building, marketing and advertising. I happen to know that there is another equally large, equally powerful, equally untapped pool of resources – which is corporate good intentions. Companies know that in order to earn the right to do business in the world today, they have to be “Corporately Socially Responsible.”

They often have very large budgets dedicated to CSR, and employ whole teams of people whose sole purpose in life is to find effective ways to spend those budgets, but who nevertheless all-too-often waste them. Waste them doing things like taking out full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal saying, “Look how green we are,” that maybe nobody reads. And missing the opportunity to align their CSR agenda with their day-to-day business objectives and integrate the two in a way that proves you can do good and make money simultaneously.

So I decided I wanted to find a way to bring those two things together – human good intentions and corporate good intentions. And find a way to activate them collectively into shared action against shared objectives that will produce shared and mutually beneficial end results. An idea is only as good as its execution. Ideas are ten a penny. Everyone’s having ideas. It’s all about execution. Bloody make it happen.

What gave you the idea for Make Love Not Porn?

What I’ll do guys, is I will give you my 3-minute TED talk. I’ve realized that it’s really needed to contextualize where Make Love Not Porn came from and what it’s all about.

I must admit, I submitted the idea as an application for one of the audience 3-minute slots at TED almost as a joke. I had thought, “I’d love to see Chris Anderson’s face when he sees this.” And to give him his due, he got straight back to me and said, “I think this is a very serious issue, and I’d love to do it. We just need to kind of talk about it first.” He was extremely supportive, and gave me a fantastic slot on the opening day of TED, which is traditionally the best attended.

Bill Gates spoke at the end of the first session, and then I came on in the second session right behind Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. And I must admit I was very nervous before I gave this talk. I had no idea how the concept would be received. Chris and the TED team knew what I was going to talk about, but nobody else did. When Chris introduced me, he just said, “This is Cindy Gallop, she’s been on the TED stage before, please welcome her back.”

So I walked out on stage and I said,

“Those of you who saw my previous lecture at TED University know that I date younger men. Predominantly men in their twenties. When I date younger men, I have sex with younger men. And when I have sex with younger men, I encounter, very directly and personally, the real ramifications of the creeping ubiquity of hardcore pornography in our culture.

Now, as a confident, mature, experienced older woman, when I encounter this personally, I have no problem accepting that a certain amount of re-education, rehabilitation, and reorientation needs to take place. I have no problem responding, as I’ve had to on a number of occasions, “Actually, no thanks, I’d much rather if you did not, in fact, come on my face.” My concern is not for me, it’s for the young guy who believes, because hardcore porn has taught him, that all women love having men come on their faces. And it’s particularly for the young girl, whose boyfriend wants to come on her face. She does not want him to come on her face, but hardcore porn has taught her that all men love coming on women’s faces, therefore she must let him come on her face and she must pretend to like it.”

As one twitterer said, it was probably the first time the words “come on my face” have ever been used six times consecutively on the TED stage! And I went on,

“So, I’m launching at TED today a website called makelovenotporn.com. And what this site does is it take the myths of hardcore porn and it balance them with the reality. Two very important things about this site – the first is that Make Love Not Porn is in no way whatsoever about judgment. This is not about ‘this is good’ or ‘this is bad.’ Because sex is the area of human experience that embraces the widest possible range of activities. Secondly, Make Love Not Porn is not anti-porn. I’m a big fan of hardcore porn; I watch it regularly myself. But hardcore porn as an industry is predominantly funded by men, managed by men, driven by men, directed by men and targeted at men. And so hardcore porn tends to have one worldview. Hardcore porn goes, ‘This is the way sex is.’ And I just want to say, ‘Not necessarily.’

I’m asking the audience to be aware this is an issue, because I would never have thought about it had I not encountered it myself. Check out the website. Forward it to anyone you think might be interested. All I want to do with this is help stimulate and inspire an open, healthy discussion about sex, in the interest of encouraging more open, healthy, and thoroughly enjoyable sexual relationships. Thank you very much.”

Brought the house down. Totally.

That’s awesome. So you launched the site, and then what?

Make Love Not Porn was massively well received. For the next 3 days of TED, everybody came up to me and said, “That was fantastic.” A lot of people said that they particularly liked it because, while TED talks a lot about big ideas and art and science, it touches much less often on human emotions and behavior. They found it very interesting in that context. And it absolutely exploded all over the blogosphere. What really pleased me was that, if you look at the comments, it did what I wanted it to do – it got to young people in the mainstream.

The site is very basic at the moment. You can only do 3 things. You can leave comments, you can send in your own porn world/real world ideas (and I have a shitload, by the way) and you can write to info [at] makelovenotporn.com. Now, I’m not promoting it in any way at the moment. Nevertheless, It’s getting 900 hits a day. Obviously it has the word “porn” in the title, that helps. But any way that they come at it, that’s fine by me.

One of the most recent emails that I got was from a young guy in Morocco. He wrote to say, “Thank you so much. Young people in Morocco are just like young people in the US. They are heavily influenced by porn. Now, at last, I can tell my friends how to make love to a girl, thanks to your wonderful website.” I love getting emails like that.

Do you have intentions to grow the site?

I’m looking for funding, at the moment, because I want to build makelovenotporn.com out into a broader interactive community and discussion platform. The need is absolutely there. I’ve been looking in two areas for funding. On the one hand, I’ve been looking for commercial brand partners. Whenever I say that, people’s minds always go to the obvious. They go, “Oh, condoms. KY jelly.” I’m actually interested in the not-obvious. I’m interested in, for example, youth-targeted brands, who want guaranteed youth attention, interest, and an engagement platform. It obviously requires a very brave brand. BBH, my ex-agency, loved this, and thought it would be great for Axe. They talked to Unilever, who felt it was a bit of a bridge too far. Which I understand. The corporate world is a little nervous about this.

The other place that I would love to get funding from is the porn industry. This could be the porn industry’s version of corporate social responsibility.

Which would be amazing.

In the same way the big tobacco makers fund anti-smoking campaigns, this could be the porn industry going, “We know what we do is fantasy.” The site would be a way to balance it out with the real-world picture.

I started Make Love Not Porn effectively as a public service announcement. I would like to embed a business model in it. And I see a very interesting business model in the other URL that I own, which is makelovenotporn.tv. I won’t say anything more about that at the moment, but I’m looking for far-sighted and broad-minded investors who are interested in something that has the potential to do something very, very different versus the porn category. That’s all I’ll say about that at this point in time!

Want more? Watch Cindy’s entire TED talk here:

I heart Carbonmade’s graphics.

This past year has been hard on most companies, especially small businesses. How are you guys holding up?

I think part of our success has been tied to the recession. Artists and illustrators are getting killed right now. A lot of our members are super talented and never needed a portfolio. Now that they’re out of work – they do. They also don’t have time to spend creating one, or don’t know the html code to do it. We’re here to help them out.

Who are your main users?

We thought it was going to be web designers and graphic designers, but it’s all sorts of people. We have interior designers, architects, photographers, and sock-puppet makers. If you go to our site, there’s a list of all the categories that have 500 or more portfolios. Photographers and illustrators are our #1 – we have 10,000 of each.

So how did Carbonmade start?

Dave and Jason, my two partners, started the company. They met in 2001, in a chat room, and started doing consulting work. They were some of the first designers for scribd.com, a huge start-up that does online text storing.

They built Carbonmade in 2006. Dave, the designer, wanted a tool to help upload his work, as opposed to manually editing HTML files. He wanted to create a system. Jason did the coding for the backend. It was really just a private system, until a few of his design buddies wanted access to it, and he opened it up. Carbonmade wasn’t built for money; we didn’t even have a payment plan for the first 6 months. It wasn’t until server expenses started to ramp up that we had to find a way to cover it.

SilvioAR’s Carbonmade portfolio – http://sar.carbonmade.com

How did you get involved?

I met Jason and Dave online, wanting to hire them to do some design work. We got along really well. They needed someone with business experience to do the day-to-day stuff – marketing, support, copy etc., so I came on board. During 2007 we were mostly doing consulting to pay the bills and Carbonmade was a side project. Mid-2008 it became “ramen profitable.” We could track our growth and see that we were going somewhere.

What gets you excited about working on Carbonmade?

Yesterday we had out biggest sign-up day ever – 466 people! That’s crazy. I love the idea that a bunch of creative people are coming together to use our product, and show off their work – that they think our platform is good for that. It makes me want to come to work every day. Yesterday, I was on the phone with a customer for an hour. He didn’t understand how to create a portfolio, and he would have been pretty lost without us.

That’s customer service!

In 2008, I made it a goal that we were going to be really good about customer service. That we would support our users and make sure people understood that we are listening to them. I answered 6 months of old email. You learn the business by talking to your users.

Do you incorporate your users’ requests for features into the interface?

We’ve been working a new version of Carbonmade for over a year now. Hopefully it will be released in a month. Creating something that looks simple, and seems simple, is the hardest thing to do. It’s also what’s made us popular. If we screw that up it’s going to be bad! We have 160,000 users. Coming out with a new version and introducing them to a new experience is very nerve wracking. We want to create new features and make the interface more flexible, but still keep that simplicity. It’s the hardest thing in the world.

Super easy-to-use interface for updating your Carbonmade site.

Do you have any other advice for those looking to start their own company?

If you see a need, and have a problem, chances are other people have that problem. It has to be something you enjoy doing – not for the money. You can’t put yourself into a project fully if you don’t care about it. I can see myself working on Carbonmade for 5 or 10 years, or even scary as this sounds, for the rest of my life. As long as you really like it, you will eventually make a profit, and be able to continue to work on it.

How did this start?

James: Well it was easy to find each other, because we’re brother and sister, so that was a previous relationship… We’ve always been really close. We cooperate well. And we decided that we wanted to do something together professionally.

Why Paperless Post? Where did the idea come from?

James: We threw some ideas around, but we came to this one because we decided that there was no online option for designing and sending a meaningful note – something that expresses your look and your style. That’s a big part of how people have communicated for a long time, but it’s not one that’s caught up with the internet until now. The people who love us are are people who really get what’s great about nice paper.

Alexa: We wanted to create a platform for more meaningful communication online, both aesthetically and emotionally. And we want to give people a centralized archive of all these really important communications from years of their life.

Like a box of letters.

Alexa: Yes, exactly. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but I always save birthday cards. That’s basically the only kind of paper card I get anymore, because it comes with a physical gift. The experience of going back through all these old cards is really powerful. Each one of them represents the person that wrote it, because they chose this paper and they wrote these words and it was to you. It has a meaning that transcends the time when it was written. We want to make that for the online world.

James: Bringing texture to the flatness of email is our big idea. We’re giving people the tools to create and manage the communication that actually matters to them online, in an emotional way.

That’s really cool. When did you launch?

James: We launched our public beta on April 17th of 2009, but we started thinking about this business about 2 years ago. I was a sophomore in college, and Alexa was one year out.

Alexa: We took this risk and it was really scary. But I remember James saying to me once – a lot of times the scariest things that you do, if they work out, they’re better than you expected. You really couldn’t have imagined what happens.

Do you guys have a business background?

Alexa: We didn’t have a business background, but now we do! If you have a goal in mind, and you want to achieve that goal really, really, really badly, then you do everything that you need to do to make it happen. The limitations that building a viable business sets can actually be a really good thing for creativity.

Definitely. I think that’s important. If you could do anything in the world, you wouldn’t know where to start.

Alexa: No, you wouldn’t. And what you would make probably wouldn’t be that awesome, because it would be all about you.

Have you seen a good response so far? What has it been like?

Alexa: Yeah, it’s been incredible. We’ve grown by a multiple of 10 in terms of users and revenue in the past 4 months. What people like most is the aesthetics. If you read the reactions from users, it’s just all about design. A really important part of the site is our design tool. It allows you to choose a paper, choose a motif, set the type, and word the invitation. There are defaults set in so that there is some guidance for people who don’t feel comfortable really getting into the whole design process. But then, a lot of people who use us really do have a vision of what they want this to look like. The products that come out of these user accounts are really amazingly reflective of those people who make them. They’re really different.

How have you gotten the word out about your service? How has this spread?

James: It’s been a lot of viral growth. People receive these invitations and notice that it’s different from anything they’ve ever seen before on their computer screen. They say, “What is this?” and go to our home page and create an account and end up sending an invitation to new people, who continue the same process.

Alexa: 600,000 invitations have been sent so far.

What’s been your happiest moment with all this?

James: One of them was definitely when an article about our company was published in the New York Times, in the style section, in June. The piece was really positive, and it was the realization of a lot of work on our end.

Alexa: One of the moments that I can think of is on Mother’s Day, when we saw that all these people from different places were going on our site to basically jerry-rig invitations to send a Mother’s Day card to their moms. We saw that this idea of aesthetics that we started with, doesn’t just relate to invitations. It relates to all these other kinds of messages that people want to send each other. Watching the users take our products in their own direction – that made me really happy.

So what’s next?

Alexa: We’re adding announcements now, and we’ll be adding a bunch of other products this fall. Maybe you don’t have a party coming up, but you want to send a thank-you note to your friend’s mom.

James: Or you want to announce that you graduated from college, or that you had a baby.

One last question – what advice do you have for people who want to start their own business?

Alexa: I would say just do it. And you better really be committed to succeeding, and you better make sure you choose the right idea, meaning that you care about it. And that you have people you trust.

James: You need willpower and commitment.

Alexa: And determination. Be ready to do whatever you have to do, that’s legal and being a good person, to get there. Seriously. If you feel that way then you’re ahead of a lot of people.

For the people who haven’t heard of it yet, can you briefly describe what Foursquare is?

Naveen: The background for Foursquare comes from a service that Dennis started a long time ago, called Dodgeball. It was a service which allowed you to ping your friends to let them know where you are, via text messaging.

Dennis: You get this ambient awareness of where your friends go and what they’re doing and where they are right now and where they’re going to be in an hour from now. It helps you make better decisions about what to do after work, or on a random Saturday.

How did Dodgeball work?

Dennis: It was before we had GPS on phones and big touch screens. It was all based on SMS, so people would just send us a text message that said, “I’m at The Magician,” or “I’m at Cooper Square,” at wherever. And we would have to do all this tricky stuff on our end to try to match what the user said to where we thought they were.

And Foursquare is more sophisticated than that?

Dennis: Yeah, it gets a little bit easier on today’s phones. We have an iPhone app with a menu that will tell you, “Here are the 10 places that are nearby, choose the one you’re at.” It’s more precise and easier for people to use. But the way people are using it, the value that people get out of it, is still the same. There’s just a lot more people that are playing with it now. People have more mature phones to play on, and they’re used to things like Twitter, so the Foursquare concept is easier to grasp.

Screenshots of the Foursquare iPhone app via TechCrunch.

What are your backgrounds? What led you to start this thing?

Naveen: A long long time ago, I was working at Sony Music, doing a lot of their mobile product stuff – basically building a music store for your phone. And then I worked at this company called Socialight, which is where Dennis and I met. They also do a lot of local platform, local blogging kind of stuff. So I’ve been doing mobile-related stuff for almost 10 years now.

Dennis: Before doing this, I was at a company called Area/Code. It’s a digital agency, and they specifically do work that overlaps the digital world with the physical world. They started a business around co-opting public spaces or public data feeds. A lot of the Dodgeball and Foursquare stuff comes out of time that I was there. Dodgeball was bought by Google in 2005. When we went to Google it was just too big; we couldn’t get a lot of stuff done. So I left Google and went back to Area/Code. Naveen was at another company that shared office space with them. We were at different companies, but our desks were next to each other.

Naveen: Dennis and I started talking about how we could augment the Dodgeball experience with other things. There’s a lot of data to be mined from where everybody hangs out, where everybody goes every day. Your friends know a lot of things about the city that you may not know. We thought, why not bring all that stuff together in a single experience? We just threw ideas out there.

When did you decide to go full-force with Foursquare?

Dennis: Naveen and I had been running little experiments on the side, just talking about stuff and prototyping things. Then, in January, Google announced that they were going to shut down Dodgeball. Naveen and I started seriously thinking, “We should build something and try to replace it.” We set SXSW, in March, as a deadline to launch.

Naveen and Dennis at SXSW [photo via flickr]

Wow – that’s not a whole lot of time.

Dennis: Yeah. And so we saw a huge spike in growth at SXSW, but then there was a big comedown after that, because a lot of the stuff wasn’t working properly yet. But we got the concept out there. Around June, we got everything working. We came out with stronger versions of the iPhone app, and since then we’ve seen hockey-stick growth. It’s been awesome.

What was the launch like?

Dennis: We went down to Austin for SXSW thinking, “People either going to be really interested or they’re going to laugh at it and think it’s stupid.” Luckily it worked and people liked it, and they told more people about it. SXSW is great for that. People go home to Seattle, and San Francisco, and Portland, and Washington, wherever, and spread it to their friends. So it was really important that we hit that launch date.

What kind of feedback have you gotten?

Dennis: It’s a lot like the feedback Twitter got early on. I don’t know if that’s encouraging or just to be expected. People say, “I hate it, I would never use this.”

Naveen: Well, more like, “What’s this for? Why would I use this?”

Dennis: And then people come back to it. “OK I tried it, now I’m kind of hooked.” There’s definitely that same hater-to-hardcore-user cycle. So we want to encourage people to sign up and play around with it! And let us know what you think – a lot of the decisions that we make about what we’re going to build next come directly from the users. The more feedback that we get from people, the better.

Video of Naveen and Dennis at SXSW, talking about the Foursquare launch

How many cities do you support now?

Naveen: It’s 20 cities in the US, plus Amsterdam and Vancouver.

Dennis: The number one feature that people request is, “Bring it to my city.” It’s one thing to try to go get data for Phoenix, but it’s another thing to try to get a data set for Berlin, or Tokyo – somewhere where you don’t understand the language, or the character set doesn’t even match up. It’s difficult. But we’ve got this laundry list of users that are asking, “Please add this city.” A bunch of users started a petition to launch Vancouver. Weren’t you getting like Twitter-bombed?

Naveen: Yep. They would retweet, over and over again. It was easily 300 or 400 messages.

So what are your hopes for growing this? More cities, more users – anything else?

Naveen: More devices. Right now we’re on SMS and mobile web, as well as iPhone. We just launched Android. That’s an app that was actually developed by 8 to 10 passionate developers and designers who just got together and used our API.

Dennis: There’s a huge list of all the stuff that we want to do. We’ve started to reach out to bars and offer specials, like, “If you’re the mayor you get a free cocktail.” We want to allow local businesses and local merchants to communicate back and forth with the users. There’s all these little things that we just started experimenting with. We went and raised some investment money, so now we can hire a couple other people to flesh a lot of this stuff out.

Very cool! One last question – what advice do you have for other people who want to take their ideas and launch them?

Dennis: Don’t be afraid to work in teams, and don’t be afraid to share your ideas with people. I’ve been teaching at the ITP program at NYU for a couple years, and lots of students say, “I’m really afraid to get people on board, because I don’t want them to steal my ideas.” You have to realize that ideas are kind of a dime a dozen. It’s much, much harder to go out and build something. You have to be a little bit vocal and try to get a lot of people involved, and get them excited about what you’re doing.

Naveen: I’d say find a co-founder. There have been many times when I started different projects, but nothing ever went anywhere. I did a lot of small hacks and small experiments, but if it worked for me, I would leave it at that scale. For instance, I had a bookmarking thing on my phone that helped me bookmark all the places that I wanted to go to or wanted to remember. It was very hacked together, very low level, but it worked for me. So I never took it to the next step. It helps to have someone to bounce ideas off of.

Dennis: Another thing is, there’s always people that say, “What you’re doing is stupid. No one wants that.” There’s just a ton of haters. People hated on Dodgeball before we built it. We even hated on Foursquare a little in the beginning – “This is kind of stupid, right? Is this going to work?” But if you have a gut feeling about something, you should just do it and see how it goes.

I’m really curious to find out your story, because you’ve transitioned your creative work into a career so well.

I always get asked, “How did you end up where you are?” Looking back, I literally have no idea. I originally went to NYU and studied journalism. I didn’t really enjoy the school, so after 2 years I switched to William & Mary in Virginia, where I’m from. I ended up majoring in fine art. While what I’m doing now combines those two things in a really perfect way, when I graduated from college I felt completely lost. I felt like, “I have a degree I don’t know what to do with, I don’t have four full years of anything, what am I doing?”

So what did you decide to do?

I turned to my other passion in college, which was being a radio DJ. I thought, “I’m going to go into the music business. That’s what I’m interested in.” So I moved to New York the day after I graduated and worked for a record label. It was a giant disaster – not at all what I thought it was going to be.

6 months after moving to the city, I found myself looking for a new job. I wanted to do something in the arts, but I knew that I wasn’t ever going to make money on my own art. My strength was in my eye, but how do you make a living off of that?

I realized that I loved being around creative people. That’s always been my favorite thing – it’s why I went to NYU. So I tried a bunch of jobs, ended up at a super tiny PR firm in Brooklyn, and was there for two years. It was the perfect job because I got to meet a lot of really fantastic designers. We worked with Vitra. I got to meet the Bourellec brothers and Zaha Hadid – super cool people that I was just in awe to even be talking to.

The Design*Sponge site.

That’s amazing!

Also, part of my job was to deal with magazine editors. I’d always idolized magazine editors as a kid. I thought, “That’s it – that’s what I want to do. I want to go work for a magazine.” So that was my goal, but how on earth would I get to be a magazine editor? My boyfriend at the time said, “Why don’t you start a blog? It could be a fun way for you to discover your voice and build up a portfolio.”

When was that?

It was August of 2004. I spent probably 2 weeks just playing around with super basic stuff like, “How do you upload a picture?” and not publishing anything. Once I discovered the blog world, I wondered if there was anyone else who was into furniture and design. I looked around and found MoCoLoco and Apartment Therapy and DesignBoom. They were the only sites talking about that sort of stuff, and it wasn’t quite my aesthetic. So I decided to just write about things I like. I’d literally just put a picture up and say “This chair is cool!” And that was it.

Obviously Design*Sponge has come a long way since then! When did you really gain a following?

As I was writing and talking about things that I loved, I was covering Brooklyn design, which was literally just about to break and be a big deal. Sort of right place, right time, right content. I think a lot of people were looking for young, cool things. There were other design websites, but they were a lot more sophisticated and high-end.

The biggest turning point was probably when the New York Times did a big story on design bloggers. They picked up Maxwell and Harry and I. They put me on the front page of the Home section, which obviously was a huge deal. It brought a huge amount of traffic to the site. That was probably 6 months after I started. I had no mission, no goal, I was just sort of talking – and then I got thrown into a place where I had a lot of people reading.

Design*Sponge DIY project: Miniature helper tins.

You were still working in PR, right?

Yeah, I left in 2006.

So that was when you started doing your blog full time?

Pretty much. 2006 was the other big turning point. This weird thing happened where the magazines I’d always wanted to work for ended up coming to me! House & Garden came and said, “We’re an older magazine, and we want to connect to somebody younger. Will you come help work on our website?”

They offered me a full-time freelance position. I was able to leave the PR job, do work for them from home, and run my site at the same time. I helped them re-plan and re-design their website, and wrote a bunch of daily content for it. I did that for 2 years and absolutely loved it. It was so cool to have one foot in that world and one foot in the blog world. When House & Garden closed, I moved to Domino. Then Domino closed! So it’s been full-time Design*Sponge for the last year and a half.

I guess that whole world has moved online.

Yeah, it really has. There’s this bank of very talented writers, style directors, and stylists who have no jobs. There’s basically nowhere for them to go other than online, which is such a different world. I feel really fortunate to have learned my way up from both places. I’m not really firmly entrenched in one or the other.

Design*Sponge’s guide to Office Accessories.

Over time you have obviously found your voice. How would you describe what Design*Sponge is about now?

I’m writing a book now for Design*Sponge, and I have to sum up what we’re about in a sentence or two. I’m having a really hard time doing it. The site tends to move and change completely based on whims. I added a food column because I was obsessed with cooking and thought, “Maybe somebody else is too.” As we’ve learned and grown, we’ve just added stuff. That’s the great part about the web. You can literally come up with any idea and two hours later, have it online. It’s been so fun to test things out and see how people respond.

I want the blog to feel like a friend you have, who happens to know a lot about one particular subject, and talks about cool things. The staff and I really enjoy the work we do because it’s entirely based upon what we’re interested in. If I’m not interested in a topic I’m not going to cover it. I know everybody wants Top Ten Lists and everything under $25, but I don’t want to put anything out there that I’m not personally interested in.

Who are your readers?

We have a pretty niche audience. It’s almost all girls, between the ages of 25 and 35. Most live in big cities. So We’re sort of writing to ourselves, which I love. As I get older, so does the audience. I feel like as our tastes change and grow up a bit, so do theirs – it’s this nice, natural progression.

What is your team like, these days?

I have ten editors now, which blows my mind! I fought tooth and nail against that for the first four years. I didn’t want to have to worry about telling someone, “I don’t like the way you write.” That’s a sensitive thing.

As I went along, I ended up hiring an intern, who was my age. It just didn’t feel right having her as an intern, so she became my first editor. That’s Anne, who runs all the home tours. Then I just turned to the people who I’m friends with. I thought, “Hey, you’re really good at this one thing. Rather than me trying to pretend I’m an expert in that field, why not bring in the person who actually is?”

Design*Sponge’s guide to fresh fig mini-pies.

It still feels like it has a very coherent voice.

We’ve grown in such a way that it still feels small, because only three of us are in the same city. I never see anybody – they email me a post once a week. If we had an office and we were all together I think it would feel really weird and big. We’re all still sort of doing everything on a shoestring, and that’s how I prefer it.

Can you tell me a little about the book that you’re working on? When can we expect to see it?

Assuming I can meet my insane deadline, it’s going to come out next fall/holiday. It’s going to be a 400+ page hardback book with Artisan, which is my favorite publisher. We’ve been talking with publishers since like 2005. They’ve been wanting us to do books, which is flattering, but they sort of want to push you into a really narrow topic.

This is going to be a huge selection of our favorite home tours, DIY projects, and before-and-afters from the last five years, combined with new homes, new projects, new before-and-afters. There will also be some really great basic how-tos, details for hacking IKEA furniture, floral arrangements inspired by rooms and based on budgets, design history, and a design glossary.

I want it to be THE book that people will go to right now for inspiration and actual practical advice. Sort of like where the Domino book left off. I love it and it’s the only book I actually use these days, but it just doesn’t have enough in it for me. Plus I’d like it to be a bit more budget-conscious. So I thought, “I’m just going to have to do it myself.” I have two-and-a-half months to pull it all together.

Design*Sponge DIY project: Wallpaper file cabinet.

That’s crazy! Best of luck on pulling it all off, that sounds like an amazing project.

Thanks!

What was the hardest part of getting to where you are now?

Figuring out what I was good at. It was a hard realization to face the fact that I wasn’t actually an artist. I’m not a great artist. I happen to have a degree in it, but it’s not really what my strengths are. I think you just have to keep trying lots of things. Work two jobs at once. Take an internship on the weekends. I did all those things. I tried so many different jobs before I figured out what I wanted to do. So try it, and don’t be afraid.

What advice do you have for people who want to take their own passions and turn it into their career?

I think the key is to not listen to the people who tell you that it’s impractical. People will say you should go for a standard 9-to-5 with health insurance. You can get your health insurance other ways! Especially in an economy like this, everyone says, “No, stick with the safe thing, you’re crazy to follow what you enjoy.” But I think this is the best time to do it. I think this is the time when people are forced to realize, “I have to have a job no matter what – I might as well enjoy what I’m doing.”

Ben’s first product, the Song Sling.

Where does this story start?

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

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

How did you find a factory?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So now you had money to work with.

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

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

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

Mophie’s first crowdsourced product, the Bevy.

How?

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

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

And that’s when you started Kluster?

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

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

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

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

Which is what your current company, Quirky does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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