3rd Ward gives a free bike to each of their members.

How did 3rd Ward start? What’s the beginning of the story?

Wow. OK. In 2004, a bunch of other artists and I moved to New York from Boston. We moved in together in this big loft, and we thought, “We’re all going to become New York City art stars!”

Of course!

Right? And then we got hit with all these harsh New York realities. The cost of real estate down here was out of control, so we ended up way out in the middle of nowhere in a warehouse. Nobody could find work. Nobody was getting along. “Dude, you didn’t pay rent!” or “You broke my shit!” It was totally like a reality show.

For work, Jeremy and I started doing some construction jobs. We did a lot of work for this one guy who had a bunch of real estate. At the same time, we were still trying to do our own artwork and design work. We had a lot of problems finding the resources we needed. We needed access to a shop. We needed a place to do photo and video shoots. We needed access to good enough computers to do retouching. We thought, “Man, I wish there was a place that I could go do that.”

One day I just pitched our idea to the real estate guy. I said, “Look, I know it would work because I personally need this and there’s other people out here like me.” And he said OK. He had just bought the building that 3rd Ward’s in now. He asked me how it was going to work and I said, “How about you build everything out to our specs and pay for it all, and then we’ll pay you rent.”

So he did it?

He did it, and we opened in May 2006. And then we could never pay rent! We started throwing parties for rent. I was giving him his rent money in brown paper bags that had beer-soaked cash. So that’s how we got started. There’s a long way from the day we opened to now. We’re way stable now.

How did you get past the phase of figuring out how you were going to pay rent?

Basically by learning how to serve our members. We’re customer obsessed at 3rd Ward. It’s part of our culture. We are there to serve this community of people. And we are always figuring out how to do that. If we build something that doesn’t work, we rip it out. We had a whole dance program, it wasn’t working, so we just ripped that whole room out and added a lot more to the shop.

You have to keep listening to people and responding to them. We are our members. There is no 3rd Ward without them. We have to provide resources that members want to come and pay for. So we obsess over keeping them happy and making it more and more productive for them.

What was the hardest part of stabilizing?

There are a couple things that are really challenging. First of all, you’re always treading water trying to get money in the door. You have to learn how to be a business person really fast. I really wasn’t. So I got my indie-MBA on the streets of Williamsburg! Understanding cash flows and all that.

Then there’s learning to really look down the road long-term. What we’re going to do today, we’re not going to feel until 6 months from now. You have to think, “How are all these moving parts going to impact each other in 6 months?” You don’t want to fall into short-term thinking, where something might seem good right now but is going to hurt you down the road.

The front desk at 3rd Ward.

Can you walk us through all the different services 3rd Ward offers?

It’s a lot of interrelated resources that are under one roof – two roofs now. A big thing that we do is desk space for freelancers. All the furniture is there, all the internet is there, all the utilities are there, basic secretarial stuff is there, there’s always a lobby for clients to wait. We take your mail and packages, that kind of stuff.

We have four photo studios – there’s a lot of photographers who sign up for membership just based on that. We have a huge shop. There’s a digital media lab, which is free for all members to use whenever they want. And then we do a lot of classes.

The class program that we have at 3rd Ward is massive. The woodworking classes, the welding classes, and our core digital design classes, always fill up. We also try to do weird stuff, you know? We’re always trying new classes, and some work and some don’t. We know that and we’re comfortable with that. Somebody once said, “You have to learn to see failure as progress.” We believe that at 3rd Ward. We’ll always try new stuff. We did bag building, which was really popular. Screenprinting is really popular.

What are the plans for this second location?

There’s a drop-in co-working space, where you can just show up with your laptop and work. There’s a bunch of desk space and work studios. We’re going to have a couple new classroom spaces. Down the road there will probably be a real screenprinting setup. And we’re putting in a commercial kitchen and doing culinary classes. I’m really excited about the culinary program. It’s more universal, you know what I mean?

We’ve noticed a few people in Brooklyn starting up food companies, it’s pretty cool.

It’s true. There’s actually a kind of renaissance of culinary stuff happening in Brooklyn right now. I’m good friends with the guys at Roberta’s. They have a little farm in the backyard, and they have beehives on our roof.

Do you want to keep 3rd Ward in New York? Have you thought about expanding outside?

Yeah, I have thought about it, but we have a lot of work to do here. We get courted by a lot of people. Somebody from the Detroit government called me and was like, “Please come to Detroit. I’ll do all these great things for you guys.” But I can’t just go to Detroit. I am of this community. I know these people. I don’t know what’s going on in Detroit. So the short answer is, we’re focusing on New York right now. The long answer is, wherever we’re needed. 3rd Ward Moscow!

Jason Goodman and Jeremy Lovitt at 3rd Ward. [photo via NY Mag]

What’s been your happiest moment so far with 3rd Ward?

There’s this whole economy that happens, where the jewelry designer hires a photographer to shoot her work. And then the woodworker goes to the metal guy and says, “Hey, I’ve got this table I need to make. I’m doing the wood work on the top, but the client wants a steel base. ” It happens every single day, all the time. Seeing that happen is pretty magical. And giving the free bikes out was pretty exciting. I don’t know if you guys know about that.

I saw the sign outside and I was wondering about it.

Last year I was thinking, “What is another thing I can do to enrich my members?” and the lightbulb went off. “What if I could give everybody a good, urban bike for New York City? That would be amazing.” We threw a huge party and we were like, “Free bikes from now on!” The bikes are single-speed, so they can’t really break. They have a nostalgic old Schwinn frame look, set up for a street bike – skinny tires and straight bars. It’s something that meant a lot to our members, and it also did something good for the world. Every bike on the street is better. Every day with that is progress.

Absolutely. You guys are doing amazing things.

I have a super awesome team of brains. We have a really creative culture in the office. There aren’t a lot of rules, and we don’t need a lot of rules, because we’re all really engaged with what we’re doing. I would never be where we are today without them.

And we have a great front desk crew. We’re staffed from 8am to midnight every day. They’re constantly taking care of our members. Whether people need food delivered, or to packages coming in, or a circuit blew. We make it so you don’t have to worry about if the roof’s going to leak, or if the circuit’s going to pop, or if your delivery guy’s not going to be able to get in. You can focus on what’s in front of you right now and making this photograph happen, or whatever it is that you do.

Handmade Music at 3rd Ward.

One of the reasons we started our blog was because it was so hard for us to transition from art school into trying to run a business. You went to art school – you know!

Going from college to the real world was awful. Awful. College was not even an approximation of the real world. It was not even 1% similar. And I’m not saying that my degree was a wasted effort, but nothing I did really prepared me.

We always say that graduating art school feels like landing face-down on the cement.

It’s like you were just academically roofied! You’re waking up from like a bad night out, and you’re thinking, what the hell just happened to me?

That might be the best analogy EVER. What led you to furniture design?

Looking back, it all makes sense. My mom was an antique store owner. I grew up around that – the decorative arts, in a really broad sense. And I was always building things, like tree forts. While the other kids had a one-story tree fort – I had to build a five-story tree fort. I had to outdo every other kid on the block. I made little trap-doors so you could climb up to the higher levels. And in high school I designed and built the sets for the school plays. Now, I can see that I was already on the path to being a furniture designer, I just didn’t know it.

Fife tripod lamp by MFD – spun brass shade, ebonized oak legs, & brass feet

Where did you study?

I went to RISD, and, like so many people, had no idea what I wanted to do. Growing up, I was exposed to a narrow view of what fine art is. Ceramics was exotic. So I went into RISD thinking, “If I’m going to go to art school, I guess I’m going to be a painter.”

And then the summer between freshman and sophomore year, I met this amazing woman named Megan. She was in furniture design. Her car literally broke down in front of my house. I was kind of handy, so I helped her jump-start her car. We got to talking, and she invited me over for dinner. I went into her apartment, and it was full of all this furniture she had made. I was so impressed!

“You mean furniture design is also an art? Artists make furniture? I thought furniture came from a factory or something! ” It’s incredible that I was so naive at that point of my life. I started calling the furniture department and begging them to let me in. The program was a great experience. There was a core group of us that really became “wood nerds.”

I love that term! Wood nerds!

Yeah, like, “Ooh, check out the finish on this surface!” Or, taking a human hair and trying to squeeze it between the joinery in a table. If you can’t get your hair in it, then you’re good. So I was one of the wood nerds.

Barrett writing desk by MFD – leather, bronze, and walnut

What did you do after school?

I came to New York. I’ve been here for six years. I can’t believe I’m saying that!

I got a job working for a hotel company, designing hotel interiors. Going from wearing shellac-encrusted jeans to dressing in a button-down shirt and tie every day and working in a cubicle was total culture shock. The people who I worked with were all branding experts, and that job was an immersion in how companies brand themselves. We were designing collections of furniture to go into different hotels, depending on where they were. For a coastal hotel, we would do a coastal scheme. That was so foreign to me. Now, it makes so much sense, but coming out of college I had no awareness of how the world organized itself.

So I did that for three years. Then I continued the brand education – I went to work for ducduc. And that was the total opposite extreme, because it was a startup company.

What was working for a startup like?

I showed up for work the first day and we didn’t have computers or seats to sit in. We literally took an open floorplan of a loft in SoHo, built walls, painted, set up desks. Man, you could not get a more complete crash course on how to start a business from the very beginning. And then once we were set up, we started prototyping furniture. We produced 5 lines of furniture, and it was basically just four of us. Because it was just us, we did everything. We designed the postcards, we designed the website, we designed the furniture. Everything you can possibly think of.

So when did you start Matthew Fairbank Design?

Sort of on the sidelines of all of that stuff, around 2005, I decided that I was going crazy being away from the shop. My sanity depended upon having more hands-on experiences. So I decided to look on Craigslist for people out there who were looking to share space. I met this guy who was a guitar maker, and we rented an illegal woodshop on the Lower East Side. I had that shop for a couple years. No ventilation, no light, no freight elevator… You had to carry everything. Imagine carrying a 4′ x 8′ sheet of plywood up a stairwell as narrow as a fire escape. One time I made a project and I had to cut it in half because it didn’t fit out the door.

Oh boy. That’s a design challenge in and of itself.

That’s an ongoing challenge – getting pieces into elevators and stairwells.

Otley chest of drawers by MFD – pickled oak cabinet & hand rubbed lacquer drawers

Can you describe what MFD does?

Well, from the time of the Lower East Side shop, I’ve been making furniture for other people. A homeowner comes to me and says, “I saw this coffee table but it’s not the right size. Can we do some things differently?”

I’m both a designer and a fabricator. 90% of what I’m asked to do, at this point, is other people’s designs. Maybe there will come a day when I say, “These are the pieces that I make. If you want to buy one of them, that’s great, and if not, you’re shopping at the wrong store.” Sure, that would be a lovely day. But for now, I’m billing myself as a custom fabricator who also designs his own collection of furniture.

At BKLYN Designs, the pieces I showed were suggestions for what I could do – but they could be any size, any shape, any color. It could be your own design. I really just wanted to show that I do a lot of materials. I specialize in lacquer, I specialize in solid wood joinery, I specialize in metals.

How did BKLYN Designs end up for you?

The show was great. For me, personally, it was kind of a benchmark. It really forced me to crack down and do all the official stuff for my business, like getting an EIN number. In addition to that, the feedback has been tremendous. From consumers, homeowners, and also design professionals – architects and interior designers. Although I’m finding that a lot of this feedback isn’t materializing into anything yet. Since it was my first time doing the show, I can’t gauge if it’s because of the economy, or because it just takes time and a lot of follow-up work, or because BKLYN Designs is a great PR show but not a great business-generating show. So it’s a lot of things that I’m trying to figure out.

Rhodes chaise lounge by MFD – saddle leather, bronze nail head, & pickled oak frame

It’s probably a combination of all of those. Although, in our experience, you have to do a ton of follow-up work after a show. Lots of emails and phone calls to actually hammer things down.

There’s one client that came out of the show, who I started doing two pieces of furniture with, and now she’s got about five more that she wants me to bid on for her. That’s incredible. Even if it’s just that one client, that’s worth it.

Right now I’m still working 3 days a week for my day job that I’ve had for the last 3 years. And then I’m MFD two days a week, plus weekends. I think the secret for me has been always being really transparent about what I’m doing. I’m not trying to appear bigger than I am.

Would you like to have your work produced by other people, or do you want to stay both the designer and the maker?

I think both! Do I outsource things? Of course. Do I do lathe turning? No. Do I do my own veneering and cutting joinery? Yes. I think I do more myself than a lot of designers do, and that gives me the advantage of quality control.

Rite of Spring cantilevered storage by Takeshi Miyakawa

The Rite of Spring piece you showed at BKLYN Designs is incredible. How did that come about?

BKLYN Designs and ICFF both don’t have pieces like this. People just have a booth to sell their products. I decided to do an installation like this on a bigger scale, something more interactive that can inspire people .

If you go to Milan, which I haven’t, but I’ve heard stories about how they have many amazing installations. I wanted to do something like that. Not quite the same because I don’t have that kind of budget. If you spend $100,000, you can do something impressive, no matter what. I wanted to see what we could do with, say, $1,000. The idea was to do something really unique using a minimum budget and minimum material. Our ceilings aren’t high enough in the studio, so we asked the landlord to let us us build it in the loading dock! I think it came out quite successfully.

It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before. It is inspiring. I think that’s one good thing about this recession – it’s an opportunity to prove that you can still do great things without throwing a lot of money around.

You just have to have a good idea – a good concept.

Used To Be Affordable Housing cabinet by Takeshi Miyakawa

How do you come up with your concepts?

I think it depends on the project. Some of the ideas come from purely geometric studies. Some of them are based more on the shapes of nature. Or some of them, like this one, the Used To Be Affordable Housing cabinet, come from my observation of the world around me. Fragments of my daily life.

Gang of Four, that bookshelf you see [below], that’s four pieces together, and they’re leaning against each other. So individually, they do not work as a free-standing piece. Same with these chairs – they do not have any back legs, but they’re leaning against each other. That’s why I named them Family Chairs.

Suck Your Friend’s Money is very conceptual, more of a statement about design and the recession, like your Dow Jones Hanky.

Suck Your Friend’s Money – a sculptural piece in which quarters run through the elaborately constructed path. The track is built so that all smaller coins are rejected and returned. The owner gets to collect their friends’ money.

Did you study design?

I studied architecture a long time ago in Tokyo. After architecture school, I went to work for a construction company for years, and then I came to New York. About a year later I found a job in this cabinet shop, here in Williamsburg, and that’s when I thought, “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

So what brought you to New York?

I was just fascinated by the city. Everything – the music, the people. I came here when I was in college, and I was just captured by it. I knew I was going to go back to Tokyo, but I decided to come back here some day.

Fractal 23 by Takeshi Miyakawa

When did you start making your furniture?

That was about 8 years ago. I first set up my shop in Tribeca. Slowly. I didn’t have any finance. Luckily I know many architects and interior designers, so they asked me to do some things for their clients. I don’t have any mass-produced pieces, yet. So everything I do is custom, made-to-order.

Do you want to head towards mass production?

Yeah, I feel that’s the only way I can survive. I am lucky to have a job I can work half my time at Rafael Viñoly Architects, making architectural models. That allows me to do more experimental things here. But many designers I know just end up being custom fabricators. It’s not easy to continue designing & selling your own stuff.

Rabbit Chair by Takeshi Miyakawa – Folding children’s chair

Have you had any manufacturers approach you?

Well last year, since the show went so well, I was about to contact somebody. And then the economy crashed, so it wasn’t good timing to talk to anybody. Now, I think the economy is going up a bit, so hopefully I will find someone to work with. I think the studio is in transition right now, from custom fabrication to mass-production. I think I will continue doing both sculptural pieces and more commercial work.

Gang of Four leaning bookshelves by Takeshi Miyakawa

How did you get into design?

I graduated from the industrial design program at RISD, but that’s not really where the story starts. When I was a little kid I wanted to design toys, and then as I got older, I wanted to design bikes. But I never knew that was actually a career field. Then I found the University of Cincinnati’s ID program. There is a huge ID world in Cincinnati because of all the manufacturing.

I did the foundation year and one quarter there, and totally hated it. The problem was they were just making junk. Teaching how to turn out design, fast. I was the outsider there. I was totally psyched about having discovered ID, and yet totally bummed because it wasn’t quite right.

I also took some classes at Art Center. They really teach you skills. But once again, I was also the outsider. Day one, we learned how to draw a sphere. Day two we drew a shiny sphere. Day three we drew a shiny sphere on a mirror. Day four we were drawing a shiny sphere on a checkered mirror. By that point I asked, “Why are we drawing this on a checkered mirror?” And it was like everything stopped, the record scratched, fingers pointed, “You do not fit in!”

So finally, a couple of years later, after taking time off and making money and doing woodworking, I applied to RISD. I liked the school a lot. I think they do a good job of teaching how you can discover what design means to you, and teaching the different applications of creative thought.

Step Stools – Inspired by the simple versatility of American Shaker furniture, these nesting stools pull out to make a set of steps.

I think that’s what art school is best at – helping you discover your individual path and nurturing your vision.

Ideally it does.

After school, how did you transition into the “real world”of design?

When I graduated, one of my professors asked if I was looking for a job. He knew this guy John Davies, who designed chairs and furniture. He was looking for some help with actual design work – not just building. The only catch was that I would have to relocate to Brooklyn – which sounded great to me! I ended up working for him for a year pretty much full time. It was basically an apprenticeship where he taught me to draw full-scale, factory-ready drawings.

These drawings were mind crunchers to say the least. Getting everything to line up, doing top, front, and side views, takes a long of discipline. That was probably the main thing I learned from him – the nuances of form, and how that intersects with constructing the pieces. We would spend months on these drawings, print them out, pin then up, tweak little details by hand, and then take them back into the computer.

I think it was a good exercise in how to understand form and how to communicate it to someone else. Wrapping your head around the idea of communicating to someone in a factory who doesn’t necessarily speak the same language as you.

Broken Mirrors – Street refuse given new life. Found pieces of broken glass are inset into reclaimed heart pine.

That’s something a lot of designers don’t learn when they make everything themselves. If you have to communicate your idea to a fabricator, you have to design it more thoroughly – there’s no room to fudge things in the shop.

A lot of my friends from RISD never made the differentiation between discovering and understanding form, and communicating it. For me, there are different levels of communication. Renderings are about selling the concept. They’re about seducing people to work with you and getting them to believe in your idea. Many times people will look at your idea and say that it’s impossible to make. Well, the shittier your drawing, the more impossible it seems to people. This is the first phase of bringing people in.

Final fabrication drawings are about communicating every detail of the idea and getting it made correctly. If those drawings don’t have a certain level of beauty, you will end up with a very different mass-produced project. John Davies used to talk about “seducing the cabinetmaker” – this level of bringing people into the spirit of your design that actually changes the quality of work you get in the end.

Shelf Space – The result of an experimental collaboration with an aerospace machinery manufacturer, this shelf’s fluid form pushes the limits of wood engineering and advanced machining technology.

When did you make the jump to starting your own studio?

I worked for John for about a year, pretty much exclusively. I would spend eight hours on drawings, come back here, and work on my own projects. Eventually I stopped doing as many things for him, picked up other freelance work, and kept doing my own projects. I feel like I’ve freelanced for almost everyone in NY who produces furniture! I’ve worked for individuals, and big companies like Williams Sonoma and Martha Stewart.

I think it’s important to understand how a big design house works. I’ve been to factories all over China that these big companies work with. I think it’s a super important part of the process. A lot of the clients I work with now don’t want to send me to their factories because everything is on such a trimmed budget. It was important that I got that experience early on.

Where do you see your studio going?

I definitely see my practice getting bigger. I see myself working with more established companies, having the ability to push my creative explorations in more grandiose ways and being able to explore ideas on a large scale. I can picture myself working with the government on a NASA type scale. That’s my abstract vision.

What has been the hardest lesson to learn about turning this into a business?

For me it’s probably been the salesmanship aspect. Having to sell my products as objects is a really challenging thing. They are not objects to me; that is their base level of existence. When someone contacts me and immediately wants to discuss my work as these retail objects, and discuss the audience as consumers, it becomes hard. I don’t think of people as just consumers. That’s not my world. That’s what I’m working against.

Half Mirror – This project exposes the two most interesting parts of a mirror that are never seen: the ‘cross-section’ of the frame, and the glowing edge of the mirrored glass. A moment of decorative surrealism.

What’s your advice for making it as a designer?

Be prolific. At this point, I’ve been working in NY for eight years, and I’ve seen a few people come and go. Prolific designers are doing it because they love design. There are people who do a few things, and then spend all this time trying to find the perfect licensing deal, or position themselves properly in the market, and they are just losing time designing. You get better and better the more work you do.

My role models are Picasso and Philippe Starck, because they did so much. They touched so many things, for so long, and eventually reached a level where everything they touched became interesting.

I always talk with my dad about business strategy and marketing, and recently he quoted this woodworker who had made a very precious wooden object. He was selling it to some guy who said, “$2,000 for one week’s work?” And the woodworker said, “No, $2,000 for 30 years plus one week’s work.” That’s what being prolific is about. Everything keeps building on your prior experience, and you keep offering more.

Chippenchair – Look closely! Yes, that’s a spurting oil rig and the letter “W”

Bilge Lounge, made from reclaimed bourbon barrel staves and truck springs.

Could you talk a little about the Uhuru philosophy? It’s very rooted in our local culture.

D: Our big concern is with sustainability, and building local. It’s what we’re known for. We’re interested in finding out what goes on in this area, and then finding reusable waste products. For the past 3 years, we’ve been finding new types of products that we can use. It started with scrap wood. Bill, one of the founders, had worked for a couple of shops beforehand, so we started out collecting from them. Then we reached out to some bigger companies. The challenge is to try to find a material that won’t run out.

What other upcycled materials are you using?

D: Jason, the other founder, is from Kentucky, and so he’d always wanted to do something with bourbon barrels. The key to upcycling is taking a waste material and making it into something that’s really nice. With our Küpe line, you can still see it’s a barrel, but it’s also taken very far out of that context. Bill was actually just out at a place looking at old beams, which is a material we’re starting to use a lot of.

Beam Coffee Table

B: Yeah, some of the beams are made of yellow hard pine, original growth, which is from when the forests were really dense in the Northeast. It was over-logged and it’s hard to find these days. The growth rings are super tight, because the trees were all fighting for light. It’s a really, really nice material.

D: We found a beam on the street one time, and that’s how it all started. And then we had to find a source for that again, because we obviously couldn’t just count on taking stuff off the street.

Can you tell us about any new projects?

B: We’re doing some chairs that we’re going to launch at Brooklyn Designs in May. It’s an interesting story. There’s a place called “Build It Green” in Long Island City. It’s an architectural salvage place, and they have everything from tubs, refrigerators, doors, chairs… We bought sixteen of these chair parts, basically the back of a chair including the back legs. They were from a chair factory in Long Island City that went out of business. We’re building a front part to the chairs that’s going to be more modern.

How did Uhuru start?

B: Jason and I basically started with $1,000 in our pocket. Our friend’s dad, who used to have a cabinet shop, gave us a bunch of tools. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without that. Below where I was living, this girl needed to sublet her extra space out. We told her we needed somewhere to set up all our tools, and she said OK. I don’t know how she dealt with it, though. We were in there grinding metal in the middle of the night! Jason was still working at an interior design firm, so we worked on our own stuff whenever we could, all kinds of odd hours.

Chime Mirror, made from reclaimed bourbon barrels.

D: As it started growing, and they had a little bit more money, they did Brooklyn Designs. That’s when they really launched their product. I started working here right after that. At that point, there were four of us, only three full-time, and it was still pretty slow. I could see the progression after that summer. It was probably a six-month time period where you really started seeing stuff from the show starting to sell.

B: Originally our work was just custom stuff for interior designers. Brooklyn Designs really pushed us to get our own work together. We signed up for it, had our projects that we’d designed along the way, and then sort of filled that out and turned it into our first line.

Bill Hilgendorf and Jason Horvath

Were you under the name Uhuru already?

B: Yeah, we were. That was from the beginning. Our vision was always there, it just took a while to actually come up with a line of furniture. But every year, that show has been a great push for us to come out with new stuff. That’s usually when we launch stuff, in May, between Brooklyn Designs and ICFF and all the other events that go on.

Do you guys sell through showrooms?

B: We do. There’s a place in TriBeCa that we sell through, called Room. And we also have a showroom in LA. While it’s good to be able to say that we have these showrooms that represent us, it’s easier in terms of pricing for us to sell directly. Wholesale pricing is hard, especially for high-end pieces which people aren’t going to buy ten of. Selling through the trade has been the best for us, through architects and interior designers.

How do your customers find you?

D: People find us on blogs. Magazines. Sometimes you have to go out and try to sell yourself, as well. But most of it’s just been word-of-mouth and through publications. One of the nice things about doing shows is that interior designers come out from lots of different places.

How have you learned the business side, coming out of art school?

B: The year after I graduated from RISD, I worked for the guy who was just starting out for himself. I was his first employee ever. That was like a crash course in business. I got a real sense, from watching him, of how to deal with clients and where to get materials. And I did an internship, the summer of my junior year, for this guy who did custom furniture. I learned a lot from him; he was a one-man operation.

Stoolen, made from local scrap wood, optional bicycle rim.

D: You kind of learn a lot as you go on. You talk to people that are in the business.

B: I’ve been teaching myself QuickBooks; that’s been huge. I don’t know how I survived without it. And American Express! Big time help. The 30-day loan. In most of the work we do, we’ll get a deposit, but we don’t get a large amount of money until the end. Other than that… The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce has actually been pretty cool. They have seminars all the time, dealing with different topics like employees and health insurance.

D: For me, learning how to run a business has kind of been one of the fun parts.

B: As long as it doesn’t destroy you! But I have no regrets, even though it’s been incredibly difficult, and there’s 80-hour, 90-hour weeks, and craziness, it’s definitely worth it. I’d much rather be doing this than anything else.

This story is about how awesome Karl’s work is. He creates conceptual objects that we are huge fans of. His work is available here, in his online store. The story of how he started his studio is below. And there’s even more good stuff at http://www.oboiler.com

How did you get into design?

I wanted to do product design because I wanted to learn how everything was made, and to be able to make it. That sort of drives the way I think about design. The fabrication technique really informs what something will look like in the end.

What techniques/materials do you work with?

Metal, wood, plastics, resins… Everything. I figure out what the project needs.

I had a really challenging project recently that involved a lot of gears and springs and wind-up things. I was talking to a company about manufacturing it. They liked the idea, but wanted to see it in action. So I made a really crude model. You had to spin it really fast, but it worked! I made this little video and showed it to them. And they said, “That’s great, but can you make it really work?”

It was a real challenge. I ended up making a proof-of-concept dummy. It was a block, rather than the form it’s supposed to be in, but it was a block that they could take to China and say, “Here. Refine this and make it more efficient.” It had all kinds of crazy parts, things that I took from a Spirograph and gears from a dissected critter toy. But it really worked! Whew. After the fourth prototype and countless hours, I got it to work.

You studied product design at RISD. Did you come straight to New York?

After school, I went to San Francisco for four years. Until I got fed up with how slowly things move out there!

I was doing interior architecture and fabrication for a company called Sand Studios. I learned a lot about making really big, heavy stuff. Working with metal is fascinating. It takes so much precision and attention to detail. So I learned about that, but I was also interested in doing smaller products. I worked on my own projects in tandem with that job, making my own stuff on the side while building windows and doors and staircases for them.

When you moved to New York, did you take a job here?

No, when I left Sand Studios, it was sort of the understanding that I would help them for a little while and do freelance for them, because they had a lot of projects they had to finish up. But I was really interested in taking my own projects that I had begun, running with them, and seeing how far I could go.

And I had some friends here, you guys know them, Jan and Alissia. They’re nice product-design folks. I shared a studio with them. So it was really nice to get to New York and right away settle into a spot where I could work. I needed to have a shop so I could keep making things and prototyping. It’s really hard to have a bandsaw next to your bed!

How did you promote your own products that you were doing on the side?

The first time that I showed at ICFF was through DesignBoom. They’re nice folks. I sold a little metal campfire, that looks like logs made of metal. And I showed the thermotropic light that I designed. That was the first thing I actually committed to and went the whole nine yards – designed it, designed packaging and promoted it. That was a pretty cool little thing to do. I also had lace-patterned packaging tape, which I still sell. I got orders today! I’m surprised that thing is still going. That’s one of the cool things about the life of your products – they wander about on the internet and you don’t know where they’re going, but you get orders from Rio and Taiwan.

DesignBoom was good, it got me somewhere, on the internet at least. I got some blog attention and some press out of it. More than anything, it was approval. I learned, yeah, you can do this. It was very encouraging.

So where are you heading? What’s next on your plate?

For one, I’d love to do more furniture. Also, I would really like to start working with companies and having things produced. One of my ambitions is to have the luxury of giving a company a design, and then that’s it! Oh man, that’d be sweet. And I’d like to work with other people. I’ve been doing the freelance thing by myself for a year. After hashing the same ideas out in your head for a while, you start doubting whether or not they’re good. Finding other people to work with, and doing collaborative stuff, would be interesting.

What’s your advice for creatives setting out on their own?

Some friends of mine were recently asked that question, and their response was fantastic. It was, “Don’t be shitty.” That’s it. That’s the advice. Be nice to the people that you’re talking to. Be a good, honest person, and it will take you so far.

Also, it’s hard to go in with a plan of attack. You can say, “I want a business plan, and I want to talk to these people and have them produce my stuff.” But it’ll never work out according to plan. You have to just dive in.

What led you to start your own business? That’s a huge leap.

Nikki: Yeah, Art school does not prepare you for that. Sam and I went to University of Florida together. And Jesse, one of the other designers that works here, was also with us there in the art department. We all kind of ended up here in Brooklyn and just started building furniture for our apartments.

Oh really? Is that how it started?

Sam: Jesse and I were doing really crappy renovation work. Taking down drywall, moving walls over and putting them back up, building lofts, and all of this back-breaking work. And we thought, wait a minute, we have all these tools, and we’ve been trained in sculpture. Let’s make some furniture. We made a bunch of stuff in his tiny basement with seven foot ceilings and then did the Brooklyn Designs show. That was our launch.

Nikki: We’d gone to the first Brooklyn Designs and just walked around. We thought, ” Wow, look at all these people doing what we want to do! We could totally do this.” Designing the furniture came first. And then we were like, “Oh, we need to incorporate, I think! There’s legal stuff that goes along with all this, if we sell anything.” So we incorporated, in 2004.

Sam: And that’s when Nikki quit bartending.

Nikki: Oh yeah, that was so nice.

Who did you start selling to?

Nikki: The Brooklyn Designs show is really kind of different from other shows, because you get people who are just walking through and want to buy furniture. Other shows cater a lot more to the trade and to press. Brooklyn Designs has a little bit of that too, but you’re face-to-face with a lot of clients. A lot of people tend to come in and say, “Oh, this is a great piece, you should make it do this and this and this.”

Did you do custom work?

Nikki: Yeah, we did a lot of custom work, and we still do a lot of custom work. It makes up a good amount of our sales. It’s also fun; it has these continuing challenges.

Sam: And it usually ends up creating some new product. It tells you, “Oh yeah, there’s a need for side tables,” or something.

Nikki: The Planar Storage line came from a custom solution. This guy needed storage for all of his media – cassettes, records, every kind of media under the sun. He didn’t want to get rid of them or transfer them to digital because he wanted to keep them for his kid.

Where would you like this to go? What’s your dream for it?

Sam: I think eventually we’ll be at the point where we can concentrate more on the design and the prototyping. We’d like to free ourselves up from managing the business all the time, and have time to be more creative.

Nikki: The day-to-day stuff really sucks you in. It’s hard to have the oversight and perspective you need to think about where you want the business to go, while you’re working on the day-to-day things.

Sam: It’s really nice, though, to have your hand in every single aspect of your business, from the start. You learn what it is that you want each part of your business to do, so that if you can eventually hire someone else, you can direct them well. You learn from the personal experience whether it is clamping up in the shop or writing the invoices or creating your legal documents. Nikki’s gotten good at QuickBooks!

Nikki: Yeah, and talk about a learning curve. It’s like I had to grow that part of my brain. I had to dig it out from somewhere. But organizing and setting up systems is super important.

Sam: And being a Jack-of-all-trades, too. We’ve been lucky to have someone in-house, Jesse, who’s done all of our web work and set up our online store. Which, you know, is a tricky thing. You have to get all your credit card processors and things set up, etc.

It’s a lot of headaches. But at the same time, I feel like through the internet, all of the stuff we’re talking about is actually possible. I don’t know how the hell anyone was an entrepreneur without the internet.

Sam: It’s nice because it allows you to look a little bigger than you are. Though sometimes we’re fighting between, “OK, is our presence online a really, really professional company? Are people expecting that type of service?” Or do we want them to know, “Hey, we’re a Mom-and-Pop, husband and wife team here.” So we almost have to downplay the professionalism, which is a weird balance to hit.

Yeah, that’s a really hard balance to hit. You can’t make everybody happy.

Nikki: Oh, and that was an issue we faced in setting our prices. We had to figure out how high-end we were going to be. We started out wanting ourselves, and people like us, to be able to afford to buy something from us. But then we realized, “No, because all we can afford is IKEA!” It was so hard to let go of, because we wanted all our friends to be able to buy from us. But you can’t compete with IKEA and manufacture the way that we do. Complicated joinery, and things like that, take time.

Sam: We’re making stuff in Brooklyn. We’re not going overseas. We’re doing it ourselves, by hand, in small batches. Everything is sustainable and high-quality. People can get behind that and if we can keep the price down low enough, then it will sell.

We just interviewed David Weeks and he made a comment about the low-end market kind of being covered by IKEA. It’s saturated and you can’t compete with that; you have to go higher end.

Sam: When the Tetrad shelving first came out, they really caught on, because they had the tech-y angle. (We called it Tetris shelving before we got the cease-and-desist notice and realized we had to change our name.) We had all of these kids seeing it in gaming magazines, and just ranting about the price. And not understanding where we were coming from. They just assumed that some multi-national corporation was making these.

Nikki: The first shelves we came out with were the Mega’s. They were an inch and a half thick, walnut and ash. Because when you’re a designer, you want to make the best possible thing.

Sam: The Mega’s are huge, luxury objects. We kept trying to make cheaper versions. We came up with some other styles that we really like, but we could never get it as cheap as people wanted. They were mad because they couldn’t own them. So all these separate people started making them themselves.

Nikki: They wanted it to be $10 to $15 a block. That’s impossible for us. At some point you just have to be like, “Well we designed this, we put it out into the world, now we’re going to let it go. It went up on Instructables, how to make a cheap version. Which is fine and kind of funny at the same time.

That’s a great story. It shows how you’re holding to your ethos of local production and sustainability. What’s next?

Nikki: We just came out with the Prism Stool. It can be used as a stool or an end table, and it’s made out of the scraps from the Tetrad Mega. Every bevel that’s c
ut on those leaves a scrap, and then we laminate them together to make this.

Sam: Imagine those long strips being bundled together and then sliced, with the legs being left long and tapered.

This makes so much sense for you guys, because you’ve got the material lying around. And from a sustainability perspective, it’s perfect.

Nikki: We were trying to do the same thing with the Coat Range. Whenever we would make a Brave Lounge Chair, we would have extra space on our cut sheets. So we made the first Coat Range prototype out of that. The only problem was that the Coat Ranges started selling so much faster than the Brave Lounges! Which kind of defeated the purpose, but what can you do?

Sam: Still, when you put a lot of Coat Ranges on a sheet, they nest together closely.

Nikki: Yeah. When you’re CNC-ing things, it’s really important to think about material waste.

Do you guys have your own CNC machine?

Sam: No, talking about the dream of where we’d like to go… Just us, in a room, with our CNC machine, playing around all day!

Nikki: That would be pretty great.

What advice do you have for someone setting out on this crazy path?

Sam: You just have to do it, and you can’t be afraid to go in debt in the beginning.

Nikki: And you have to allow yourself to mess up a lot. You’re going to make mistakes, and you have to deal with it and keep making decisions and keep moving. Even in this new economy.

That’s the interesting thing about this economy. Nobody knows how to deal with it. We’re all kind of in the same boat, even the big guys.

Nikki: I always like to think that in a recession, there’s a certain amount of ingenuity and resourcefulness that can come from it. That could be a great thing.