Hasta La Ideas

Built NY’s original neoprene wine tote

This is the third 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.

Growing up, Aaron Lown’s mom had a saying: “Why buy it when you can make it?”

That mantra inspired Lown, now 44, to launch the company Built NY in 2003 with business partner John Roscoe Swartz. Built’s first product was the now iconic neoprene wine-bottle carrier. When the totes debuted at the New York International Gift Fair in 2004, the company received $100,000 in orders within 48 hours. A year later, Built logged its millionth sale. “Wine was on the rise at the time, yet the wine accessories market had nothing young and hip and cool,” Lown says. “We had a great product and a niche in the market that wasn’t being filled.”

Aaron Lown (left) and his business partner, John Roscoe Swartz

So how do you grow a good idea and a modest $30,000 investment into a multimillion dollar company with a full line of products and 40 employees? Lown attributes his success, in part, to his upbringing in Bangor, Maine. “My mom played an important role in my ethos,” he says. “She taught me how to sew and there was always a crafts project happening.”

Meanwhile, Lown’s father ran a shoe manufacturing business and Lown remembers the smell of glue on the factory floor and seeing the components of shoe patterns strewn around their house. “The influence of my father gave me the entrepreneurial part of my personality, while my mom gave me the making gene,” Lown says. (Not to mention an uncle who invented the defibrillator.)

At 13, while his other friends were shipped off to sports camps, Lown threw pottery at a crafts retreat called Camp Horizons (where he accidentally broke fellow camper Jonathan Adler’s ankle in a basketball game.) After that summer, Lown built a woodshop in his parent’s basement where he made objects like jewelry boxes that he sold to local crafts stores. In high school, he and a friend became interested in skimboarding, “so we spent the winter coming up with a brand and making skimboards in the garage,” Lown says. “The first day out in the spring, we tested the prototype and I fell and broke my wrist. That was my first taste of failure, which is something that you have to let fly off your back.”

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This is the first profile in a new 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. We’ll have a new profile every Monday.

To understand the design philosophy of the Eindhoven-based American designer Max Lipsey, watch the making-of video for his latest project, the Temper Chair. Lipsey begins by welding steel to form a clean-lined seat with a curved back. The welds are barely buffed, allowing the bulbous seams to speak of the production process. The chair is then suspended inside an oven where high temperatures unleash the metal’s hidden hues. “Steel has within it these striking colors from straw yellow to red to deep blue, and I thought it made sense to let the color palette come from the material,” Lipsey says.

This is typical of Lipsey’s intuitive design approach, and it was this respect for raw materials and elemental production techniques that first led him to pursue design in Eindhoven. Born in California and raised in Colorado, the 29-year old received a B.A. from New York University in 2005 before entering the renowned Design Academy Eindhoven. The work of Dutch designers like Maarten Baas drew him to the Netherlands. “[Baas’s] Smoke series, where he burned furniture, really blew my mind in terms of how an object could have a sense of wry humor, be a little tongue-in-cheek, but also be poetic and very expressive,” Lipsey says.

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