Hasta La Ideas

Hellman-Chang’s ground-floor Brooklyn facility has the offices in the front and the shop area in the back. Until their upcoming expansion brings their own finishing facility online, they’re currently building the pieces in-house, then trucking them over to a finishing facility a few blocks away. What’s interesting is that the pieces don’t go from the shop area to be loaded onto a truck out back, as you’d expect; they go out through the front. The workers carry each and every piece through the office, meaning that even while on the phone or sending e-mails, Dan and Eric can eyeball the pieces as they go out of the door.

“We’ve made changes at the 11th hour, before it goes into finishing,” says Eric. “If we see something, some portion that we’re not happy with, we can go back in and make a change. The danger of a designer who doesn’t make their own product is, they’ll draw something on paper, send it out to someone to make, get it back and not be happy with it, because they’re not a part of that production process.”

Dan and Eric were kind enough to give Core77 their full story, describing how they built their business up from nothing into the highly successful brand that is the Hellman-Chang of today, with clients ranging from hotels to Hollywood, partners ranging from Showtime to Swarovski. A lot of their individual clients (whose names we cannot print here) include movie stars, CEOs, owners of sports teams, owners of department stores, and at least one Middle Eastern princess, who commissioned a Hellman-Chang table to be finished with a custom tabletop made from bone by craftsmen in India. (Sadly, the tabletop did not weather the transoceanic journey from India to Brooklyn very well, and a warped version of it is now holding up magazines and Snapples in the shop area’s break room. Undaunted, the princess ordered more from the Indian craftsmen, and three tops later, Dan and Eric received one good enough to fulfill the order.)

We knew the story of how they’ve gotten to where they are would be of interest to up-and-coming designers, and Dan and Eric are no strangers to the concept of lending a helping hand. As a highly successful business in their own right, Hellman-Chang makes it a point to help the creative community develop in what ways they can, as evidenced by the rear of their shop area, which they rent out to fellow craftsmen.

“Dan and I started at the co-op in Brooklyn, sharing space with a dozen other woodworkers and artists. We all traded ideas, discussed fabrication techniques and created bonds,” Eric explains. “That was an important part of Hellman-Chang’s early days as a Brooklyn-based studio. When we opened up our own space, we wanted to maintain that energy and sense of community, so we set aside around 2500 square feet for rental and brought many members of our old co-op with us. We all built the new shop together – it was a great bonding experience, and now they each have their own bench space where everyone can communicate, bond, and work together.”

Now that they’ve given us their history, it’s Hellman-Chang’s turn to tell us about some of their pieces. We asked them to walk us through some of their classic and current projects, so you can see what the company they’ve built is now capable of producing:

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