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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