Hasta La Ideas

Editor: Here in Part 5, Accidental Designer gets a taste of the Big Time with a little help from Hollywood; pisses off several hundred propmasters; and finds himself faced with a serious production challenge.

Tradeshows are expensive to get into, but they can be an important part of growing your furniture business. You never know who’s going to walk into your booth and change your life.

I’d started selling my tall, padded folding chairs at movie industry trade shows, and there would be a line leading to my booth. The chairs were apparently perfect for Hollywood sets. The orders were still individually small, five chairs here, ten chairs there, some orders as small as one. But I didn’t care how small they were and I’d still deliver the units myself. In fact, I’d stopped driving the Ford Ranger pickup and bought a used 15-passenger van from a Korean church; I’d ripped out all of the seats to turn it into a cargo van.

Anyways, one of the people that came into my booth was a makeup artist with a small order. I delivered the three chairs myself to the Warner Brothers lot in Hollywood.

Well, turns out that person was one of three makeup artists for The Drew Carey Show. This was the ’90s, and the peak of that show’s success. And I found myself hauling those chairs onto that set.

I’m setting one of them up, and who should walk past but Drew Carey himself.

“Hey,” he says, pointing at the chair, “whatcha got there?”

I told him that I designed, built and sold these chairs, and started pointing out the various features. Drew seemed interested. “You mind if I—” he gestured, then sat down in the chair himself to try it out. He wriggled around a bit to get comfortable.

“These are so cool!” he exclaimed. He jumped up out of the chair. “Give me one of these for everybody on the set!” He then hustled off to do something else.

I looked around, trying to figure out how many people were on this set. I’m naively thinking it’s a couple dozen, and I’m standing there counting people with my fingers when one of Drew’s headset-wearing assistants hustles over to me with a clipboard. She places an order with me for 120 chairs.

(more…)

Editor: Have you ever been tempted to take someone else’s design? What do you think would happen to you if you did? Here we’ve got Part 3 of “Accidental Designer’s” story, as he follows through on a fateful decision.

Missed the last one? Catch up here.

At a craft fair I’d spotted this guy, I’ll call him Rusty, selling these chairs he had made. As soon as I saw his design, I realized I could build them myself, even better than he had. And I darn sure had enough wood to make them. Now I have to point out that these chairs were not my design. But before we talk design theft, I have to detour into auto theft. Because in my life there were two cases where people were getting rid of a boatload of wood and it worked out in my favor, and with the first one I ended up getting my car stolen.

Some guy was selling a garageful of teak, which I’d mentioned earlier. These were huge pieces of rough-cut lumber and you couldn’t believe how much of it there was. The guy’s grandfather had brought it all over from India on a ship in the 1950s. I had this crappy Chevy Astro van, and each trip I loaded it up to the brim with wood, so badly that the van was practically bottoming out. It was a 1.5-hour round trip and it took me six freaking trips to get all of the wood back to the boatyard where I was living.

By the time I made it back with the final load, it was late at night and I was dead tired. I couldn’t lift my arms to unload that last batch and figured I’d get to it in the morning, so I left the car in the lot, staggered back into my sailboat and fell asleep with my boots on.

In the morning I got up and went out to finish the job. But my van was gone. I always parked in the same spot so it’s not like I misplaced it, and the keys were still in my pocket, so it’s not like a buddy of mine had moved it. It had just disappeared, along with its load of valuable teak.

(more…)

Editor: Here “Accidental Designer” tells us the epic tale of how he backed into a career in designing and building by discovering something no one else had. We won’t tell you the name of our protagonist for now, as we don’t want you to Google him yet and find out how the story ends. Just sit back, enjoy, and see how a man with no formal industrial design training launched into a career many of us would envy.

I knew that I’d screwed up, but knowing it didn’t make it any better. I was made to stand up in front of the class, where thirty pairs of wide eyes all stared at me, afraid of what was going to come next, yet glad that it wasn’t one of them up there.

You see, before I had any inclination that design was going to make me a success, and before I even learned how to design, I learned how to build. I read in a previous True I.D. Story that the designer learned how to build in his grandfather’s woodshop as a kid. Well, I didn’t have a kindly grandfather teaching me: Instead I had a hard-ass I’ll call Mr. Barkington, who ran the Wood Shop class in my high school. And I thought he was a complete asshole.

Wood Shop was a mandatory class, and Mr. Barkington was quite the ball-buster. For our first assignment, we had to make a checkerboard—pretty basic, cut squares out of two different colors of wood, then put them together in an alternating pattern. Well, I forgot to account for the kerf, the thickness of the blade, when I cut my pieces up. Add up a 3/32″ kerf across the entire board, and by the time I got it all together the damn thing was a couple inches too short on each side.

Mr. Barkington called me out in front of the entire class. “Take a look, everybody,” he said, “take a good look at what this fucking idiot did! Jesus Christ!” He held my board up so everyone could see. “Does that look right to you? Hey asshole, do you even know what a kerf is? Jesus, Saint Mary and Joseph!”

As you Millennials can probably tell, I went to high school a long time ago, back when it was perfectly acceptable for a teacher to say these kinds of things to a student. Today Mr. Barkington would probably have been fired, but back then, I dunno, I think we didn’t take stuff so personal, or we learned to endure it for our own betterment. When he humiliated me in front of the class, sure, my cheeks were burning, but I didn’t cry, or go tell the Principal (who wouldn’t have given a shit) or go whine to my parents. And no, I didn’t throw the checkerboard out; it became a cutting board for my mom.

(more…)

This is our first non-anonymous True I.D. Story.

As a musician and sound engineer, Stephen Ambrose spent the ’70s touring the world with hard rock acts. This led him to invent the world’s first in-ear monitor, essentially the progenitor to the modern-day earbud. In this True I.D. Story, Ambrose—who went on to commercialize his invention by founding Asius Technologies—reveals why Spinal Tap’s “11” is, in real life, more like a 3.5.

Editor’s Note: This story is primarily paraphrased from a conversation with Stephen Ambrose, and is not comprised of direct quotes. If there are any factual and technical errors here, they are mine, and not Ambrose’s.

As a sound engineer in the 1970s, roadies used to hate me because I’d show up for the tour with 23 flight cases and they all had to be hauled; musicians, especially the hard rock guys I was working with, need to hear themselves on stage, and they like to hear themselves LOUD, the thinking went. So there was a lot of gear.

Aside from the roadies, I had a financial incentive to develop an in-ear monitor; if I could make something that fit into your ear and gave you that crucial feedback, then you wouldn’t have to ship 10,000 pounds of speakers all around the world. The air freight on those speakers was pretty expensive.

A lot of [these rockers] had actually developed hearing damage from years of being up on stage, though they’d never admit it. Image, you know. So one challenge in designing my in-ear monitor was that it couldn’t look like a hearing aid, because no rocker wants to look like he’s wearing a hearing aid—even if he really needs one! So I made them out of gold so that they looked like jewelry.

(more…)

This is a true story. Descriptions of companies, clients, schools, projects, and designers may be altered and anonymized to protect the innocent.

Editor: The conclusion of “Family Man’s” cross-country tale! After he confronts his boss about shorting him on his salary, said boss suddenly drags him into another ID firm that shares the same building. How is this going to be a solution?

“[Jimmy the Bear], this is [Family Man],” Batcopter Boss said, introducing me. “He’s a talented designer. And right now he needs some extra work.”

I didn’t need extra work, as far as I was concerned; I needed to be paid the correct amount for the work I was already doing. But I kept my mouth shut for a second, to see just what the hell was going on here.

Jimmy the Bear got up and came around from behind the desk to shake my hand. I call him Jimmy the Bear because that’s what he looked like: A big, bearded gentle giant type, who moved and even blinked ponderously and deliberately. “How are you doing, Family Man,” he said, encasing my hand in his huge mitt. “So what’s your skillset?”

Batcopter Boss excused himself while I ran down my list of credentials. Jimmy motioned for me to follow him back out through the door and into yet another office.

In this room two guys were sitting in front of some monitors. They looked pretty young, I had at least ten years on both of them. On a large table against one wall were some drawings for the coffeemaker I’d seen the other guy working on in the model shop. Jimmy started describing where they were in the project and what more needed to be done, quizzing me on various parts of the drawings; I offered input and pointed out something on one of the drawings that I thought would be a problem to mold.

Underneath the messy stack of drawings was something that didn’t match, and I pulled it up to ask about it. They were drawings for a toy design, another ID area I had experience with. Soon Jimmy and I were talking about that project too. Now here’s the thing: At that point I didn’t have a lot of money, I didn’t have a lot of what I considered professional respect or renown, but I definitely had a shitload of experience. And in that 15 minutes, Jimmy saw it—because next thing I knew, he was asking me how I’d like to head those two projects up. A half an hour ago, he didn’t even know my name.

(more…)