Hasta La Ideas

In Part 3 of the Hellman-Chang story, co-founder Eric Chang mentioned that “You’ve got to be willing to step over the ledge and see where it takes you.” What he didn’t mention was that there’s more than one ledge.

Here in Part 4, Eric and partner Dan Hellman have made the fateful decision to participate in their first-ever ICFF. Among the 20,000 attendees was one who could make a huge difference in their fledgling business, a representative from a highly-influential furniture showroom. And when he wants to visit your production facility, according to Eric’s ledge-stepping philosophy you say “Yes.” But what do you do when you don’t have a production facility? Read on.

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It’s Hellman-Chang’s first-ever ICFF, and you guys approached it pretty strategically.
Dan: We had a pretty good location and a decent size-booth. When we got a 10×20 we specifically made sure that it was island, three-sided, open. That was important for the brand.

Eric: Right, so we could capture a lot of aisles. When you do trades shows, location is very important.

For those that have never done the ICFF, paint us a picture. You’ve put in the work to populate the booth, and now you’re standing there and people are walking through it. What did you feel, was it going well?
Eric: We’d never done a show before [so had nothing to compare it to], but I would say that we felt it was going well from the moment the show started. We had so much foot traffic, so many people and designers stopping and oohing and awing. People looking at something of ours and saying “Oh, this is beautiful,” that kind of thing.

Dan: And that was our first exposure to meeting interior designers and potential clients. We were coming into an industry cold turkey with no experience, no contacts. And the response was very good. We got a lot of press.

Let’s talk about that. It can be difficult to quantify the results of what is essentially putting on an exhibition, and you guys had sunk tens of thousands of dollars into this. As up-and-comers, how do you know when it’s worth it? What are the concrete business differences you felt after doing the show compared to before?
Dan: Leading up to the show we’d get maybe one or two phone calls a month from designers who saw us in the magazine for the award.

Eric: Those phone calls were only from the exposure that the brand Hellman-Chang had in the December issue of Interior Design magazine. That was it. No other websites linked to our website. We hadn’t advertised. Nobody knew of us unless we told them about it. And even the few designers who actually took the time to Google us would find the website buried, probably in the second page of results. [Hence we were only getting] a call or two a month.

Dan: But during the first hour of the ICFF, we probably got 50 or 100 business cards from interior designers. At that point we didn’t know who was serious and who wasn’t, but it was like the flood gates opened for contacts.

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