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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