Hasta La Ideas

This is the fourth post in our interview series with ten influential I.D. curators, retailers and creative directors. Yesterday, we talked to Odile Hainaut of Gallery R’Pure and WantedDesign.

Emmanuel Plat has been the Director of Merchandising for the Museum of Modern Art for just 18 months. In that short time, he’s developed a multi-point plan to overhaul the museum’s retail division. Along with helping consumers make a stronger connection between purchasing products from the MoMA Design Store and supporting the museum’s mission, Plat is also intent on elevating the store’s offerings. With a mix of affordable commodity objects and more iconic pieces of design, Plat is pushing to launch new products and showcase emerging designers and new talent. Before joining MoMA last year, he worked for the Conran Group both in his native France and in the U.S. as head of the company’s New York shop.

How do you find out about new designers?

We travel a lot. We probably spend about 60 days a year on the road. We go to trade shows: Maison et Objet in Paris, Ambiente in Frankfurt, 100% Design in London, and Salone del Mobile in Milan. This year I also plan to attend the New York Gift Show and Tokyo Design Week. We do what other people do as well, we scour the world to look for product. We have a very strong relationship with Japanese companies, and we spend two weeks a year there. Whenever we travel, we have an agent locally who has connections in the field. We meet with both companies that we currently work with and new people and designers. For instance, next week we’re going to Paris. We have two days of meetings, some of them with designers we’ve never met before. Sometimes you immediately find something that suits you. Most of the time we meet with them and have a great conversation, but it doesn’t necessarily end up in a business relationship.

One of the best examples we have is the long history of MoMA wholesale products. For 25 or 30 years, we have been developing products under the MoMA brand. The most iconic one is the Sky Umbrella developed by Tibor Kalman and Emanuela Frattini Magnusson, which has been a bestseller for 20 years. Fifteen years ago in Milan, in the Satellite section of the furniture fair, which showcases young talent, we found the designer Carlo Contine. He had this fruit bowl called the Satellite Bowl. We were immediately interested and placed an order of 50 units. It sold very fast, and we reordered. After a few months he called us in panic and said, “Look I’m making this product in the garage of my mom and dad. You guys are ordering too many and I cannot keep up!” So, long story short, we ended up taking over the production and over 15 years we’ve sold probably 75,000 pieces. We are definitely hungry for these kinds of stories, but it’s more difficult than it seems to find what fits with this assortment.

The Destination series we’ve done for the past 11 years has been another great way to find new talent. Traditionally, we will go to a market—Argentina, Mexico, Berlin, Helsinki, Portugal—and work with a local design school or other connections we may have, to find products that are not available in the U.S. Each time we end up with somewhere between 100 to 150 products. Beyond the six to eight weeks of installation around these products, there’s always one or two from a destination that will remain. The last series we had was about New York designers; it was called Destination: NYC. It just finished a few weeks ago, and there are a few products from that collection now featured in our fall catalog that will stay in the store for years to come. The beauty of a program like this is it enables you to take risks or showcase things that would not make sense otherwise.

The BIKE ID Svart by the Swedish company DND and Sons

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Max Lipsey‘s studio

For the past ten weeks, I’ve been talking to a variety of American design entrepreneurs about the realities of running an I.D. business today. The designers I interviewed work on a diverse range of products, from antler lamps to gaming headphones, lawn darts to wine-bottle carriers, stacking chairs to Mushroom Insulation. But their day-to-day work lives have a lot in common. This was especially apparent when I asked them to share some advice for other design entrepreneurs—over and over, certain common lessons (and warnings) cropped up in their answers.

So to cap off this profile series, I wanted to share the following seven key recommendations for aspiring and practicing I.D. entrepreneurs. These tips can’t guarantee success (nothing can do that), but they should at least steer you in the right direction.

1. Make a business plan . . . eventually
A surprising number of the entrepreneurs I interviewed admitted to having no traditional business plan at the start. “My studio was totally organic,” Jason Miller told me. “It started from nothing and became a small but functioning business.” What each person did have, however, was passion for their work and a clear vision for what they wanted to achieve. Eventually, a business plan becomes a necessity—but at least at the outset, don’t let your ideas get straightjacketed by a too-rigid focus on business objectives.

2. Let focus be a priority
For hungry young designers bursting with ideas and enthusiasm, one of the biggest challenges is forcing yourself to not pursue every idea. “When you’re starting out, you can do any project,” says ODLCO’s Lisa Smith. “Learning to say no and pick your projects is really important.” Max Lipsey expressed a similar sentiment, ticking off all the questions he asks himself before he pursues a new design idea. Jenie Fu of OgoSport would agree: “Whenever we have these new ideas, we compare the concept against our mission and quickly realize which will work and not work.” Built NY also uses a mission statement to stay true to its core values. And Just Mobile is a good example of a company that has found success by relentlessly focusing on a specific niche.

Models for Jonathan Olivares‘s recent OAC chair for Knoll

3. Find another way to make some cash
Most new design businesses do not make much money at first, so you’d do well to figure out some other method of paying the rent—especially if it complements your design enterprise. Jonathan Olivares has financed his design office largely through writing and research projects. Max Lipsey stays afloat by taking on occasional welding jobs. The founders of ODLCO both teach. Laurene Leon Boym teaches and does consulting work for businesses and cultural organizations. Kevin Williams ran a product-design consultancy while launching OgoSport. Having another source of income can also keep you from rushing a product to the market or otherwise moving too fast in your business venture.

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Eben Bayer (left) and Gavin McIntyre founded Ecovative in 2007.

This is the ninth profile in our series on American design entrepreneurs, looking at how they got where they are, what they do all day, and what advice they have for other designers running their own businesses. Read last week’s profile here.

In June, the Green Island, New York company Ecovative “grew” a house. From mushrooms. This is just the latest radical experiment from the materials-production outfit known for using mycelium—or the roots of mushrooms—to create biomaterials for everyday applications like wall insulation and packaging. For the aforementioned house, the company filled the pine tongue-and-groove walls of a 60-square-foot structure with its fire-resistant, environmentally-friendly Mushroom Insulation. “That house is still alive,” says Ecovative’s 28-year-old co-founder Eben Bayer. “If you were to cut a hole in the wall to run wiring, for example, the material would be dry. If you spritzed it with water, it would grow back and close in around the wiring.”

The idea to grow home-compostable bioplastics from living materials began in 2007 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), when Bayer and fellow student Gavin McIntyre first used mycelium to create a rigid, moldable material. With the encouragement of a professor, Bayer and McIntyre founded Ecovative out of RPI’s Business Incubator—which turned out to be a valuable resource for the budding entrepreneurs. “Depending on the one you’re in, [business incubators] can provide a lot of services like networking and coaching,” Bayer says. “But the thing that RPI did for us that was life-changing was that for the first six months they gave us free office space.”

Bayer says that they also benefitted from being left alone. “What we really needed was a wet lab,” Bayer says. “Trying to do biology with carpeting is not easy. We put up walls so people wouldn’t know what we were doing, and there was steam coming out from under our door. They ignored us.”

Eben Bayer with a sheet of Ecovative’s Mushroom Insulation

Mushroom Packaging used for wine shipping

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This is the seventh profile in our series on American design entrepreneurs, looking at how they got where they are, what they do all day, and what advice they have for other designers running their own businesses. Read last week’s profile here.

In 2007, Dwell magazine described the Brooklyn-based designer Jason Miller as witty, youthful and enjoying a “meteoric rise” in the U.S. design scene. Today, Miller, 41, laughs at the notion of sudden success. “I’ve been doing this for many years,” he says, “so it doesn’t feel meteoric.”

Still, Miller did cause a splash when he opened Jason Miller Studio in 2001 and released lighting designs like his Antlers series, which captured the animal-head-as-decor trend with a chandelier composed of glazed ceramic replicas of deer antlers.

In 2010, Miller spun off a new company, Roll & Hill, to manufacture high-end contemporary lights by a variety of designers. “We sell relatively expensive things, we make them on demand, and we make them to the customer’s specifications,” Miller explains. “While we are a manufacturing company, we are not a mass producer; we still make everything to order.”

Above and below: Miller’s office in his Brooklyn studio

Miller now helms his studio and serves as the creative director and CEO of Roll & Hill. He has 20 employees between the two businesses and is having to deal with fast expansion. This, ahem, meteoric rise in company growth means that staff needs have outpaced the infrastructure of business management. “When you have two or three people working with you, it’s easy to stop in the hall and ask questions and have an impromptu meeting,” Miller says. “But now that I have 20 employees, it’s easy to get lost in that world. It’s easy to be in meetings all day. My door, unfortunately, is glass, so people peer in thinking that any minute I’ll be free.”

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Jonathan Olivares with models of the new Olivares Aluminum Chair for Knoll. Photo by Yoo Jean Han.

This is the fifth profile in our series on American design entrepreneurs, looking at how they got where they are, what they do all day, and what advice they have for other designers running their own businesses. Read last week’s profile here.

Jonathan Olivares wants to let you in on a secret. “Los Angeles is the largest industrial center in the U.S., and you can basically get anything made here fast, cheap and with a smile,” he says.

This comes in handy if, like Olivares, you employ a rigorous prototyping process for your furniture designs, as he did when developing the new OAC chair for Knoll. The outdoor stacking chair is made of thin cast aluminum and “we made 50 prototypes,” Olivares, 31, says. “We have great aluminum foundries out here.”

When Olivares launched his company, Jonathan Olivares Design Research (JODR), in 2006, he knew that he wanted to build relationships with clients in order to design mass-produced objects, in the spirit of designers like Charles and Ray Eames. “I like the idea of serial production,” he says, “and of getting something that’s the result of advanced technology and getting it at a good price and making lots of them.”

The final OAC stacking chair for Knoll

Above and below: OAC models

Olivares started JODR in his mother’s garage in Boston less than 18 months out of Pratt Institute’s industrial design program. He had just returned from a post-graduate apprenticeship with the Munich-based designer Konstantin Grcic. Olivares says that he went abroad after Pratt because, “if you go back to 2005, and you look at what the American furniture companies were doing, there wasn’t as much action as there is now. Back then it was dismal.”

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