Hasta La Ideas

It’s a red-letter week for Zaha Hadid. This past weekend, she found herself among the gilded few who make it onto the Sunday Times‘ annual “Rich List,” a cataloging of the most wealthy people in all of Britannia. In years past, we’ve reported on the list every few years, keeping tabs on the old design and architecture stalwarts like James Dyson and Norman Foster, but this is Hadid’s first entry into this grouping of people who can and should hold bags of money with dollar signs on them everywhere they go (or pounds, more fittingly). The Times‘ list is behind the very pay wall that is helping keep owner Rupert Murdoch up top, but Building Design reports that Hadid’s personal wealth comes in at an estimated £37 million, thus nabbing her a spot among the 2000 wealthiest people in the UK, but not yet to that top 1000 tier, which starts at roughly £70 million. Elsewhere with those usual suspects, BD reports that Dyson became a billionaire last year and rose up the ranks to #43, whereas Foster lost several million in 2010 and dropped nearly 50 places, coming in at #457 with a measly £168 million.

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Knot Cool: At left, designer Kiel Mead’s “Forget Me Knot” pieces and at right, those from the new “Tiffany Twist” collection from Tiffany & Co. (Photos: UnBeige and ©Tiffany & Co.)

With Mother’s Day approaching, Tiffany & Co. is pushing its new “Tiffany Twist” collection of jewelry “inspired by the time-honored craft of hand-twisting wire.” The real twist? Several pieces in the line bear a striking resemblance to the work of Brooklyn-based designer Kiel Mead, whose “Forget Me Knot” collection of hand-cast rings, earrings, and pendants debuted in 2005.

The Fredonia, New York native came up with the concept for his “Forget Me Knot” ring while a student at Pratt Institute, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial design in 2006. “My design is actually a piece of string that is molded and cast in various materials such as silver and gold,” Mead tells us. “It took some trial and error to get the final product to look like my conceptualization.”

He began work on the design in 2003, and it was first produced in 2005. The Shop at Cooper-Hewitt, the National Design Museum agreed to carry the piece before Mead had even picked up his Pratt diploma. Other early accounts included the Museum of Modern Art Store and New York design emporium The Future Perfect, where Mead worked during college.

The designer continues to experiment with variations on his original design, and has since introduced companion pieces as well as versions in brass, platinum, and colorful powder coats. Along the way, publications ranging from The New York Times and American Craft to Star and In Touch have taken notice. And apparently so did one of the world’s largest jewelry companies.

Tiffany & Co. introduced its “Tiffany Twist” bow pieces earlier this year. The rings, earrings, and pendants (pictured here beside Mead’s designs) are available in 18-karat gold and sterling silver. Among the few discernible differences between the “Tiffany Twist” pieces and Mead’s line are the prices. A “Forget Me Knot” ring in sterling silver retails for $50, while Tiffany offers its version for $225.
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The effects of whatever engineering team first managed to wedge a camera into a cell phone are incalculable. There are more dopey party photos of you on Facebook than you care to think about; parents are able to capture spontaneous and never-to-be-repeated moments of toddler hilarity that go viral on YouTube; citizen journalists lucky or unlucky enough to record plane crashes, disasters and explosions receive payouts from news outlets.

Now a company called Gigwalk aims to capitalize on the sheer ubiquity of cell phone cameras in a clever way. Gigwalk serves as a connector between companies that need data and the millions of us toting iPhones (yes, just iPhones, at least for now). Let’s say, for instance, TomTom needs verification that a particular street is one-way for their navigation services. The call goes out to a nearby Gigwalker—that’s one of you who’s signed up to offer your services—you snap a photo of the relevant street sign on your way to the subway, upload the photo, and are paid for your trouble.

It doesn’t stop there, of course.

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Fashion mogul Pierre Cardin, now 88 years old, has told the Wall Street Journal that he sees the writing on the wall that his time here is short and he now wants to sell his label, so that it can continue on without him. His set selling price? £1 Billion, or close to $1.5 billion in US dollars. Since the offer was announced, analysts have scoffed, claiming that Cardin’s business is worth roughly £200 million. At most, a mere fraction of what he’s asking. They’ve also brought up that he had no success just a few short years ago when he tried to sell off the company for £500 million. What’s more, the company is now famous (or infamous) for being licensed to the hilt, with his name on nearly every product one can stitch, print, or otherwise put a label on. Given that Cardin is a private company that “reports limited financial information,” it makes it even trickier to value the actual worth of the company. And last but not least, if someone does wind up forking over the £1 billion, “Mr Cardin told the WSJ that a condition of any sale would be that he remained as creative director.”

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No matter how you feel about those crowd-sourced, spec-based design outlets that have sprung up en masse over the last few years, one in particular has just gotten a big boost. Late last week, 99designs announced that it has received $35 million in funding from Accel Partners, the venture capital firm responsible for helping companies like Facebook, Etsy and Groupon grow and take over the world. The basic model for the business is that a company submits a brief, designers create samples based off that brief of logos or websites or whatever needs designing, and then the company picks a winner. Where the criticism lives is that sites like these devalue the design profession, as there are often hundreds of designers vying for small paychecks (some of the site’s examples show, for instance, that 1335 designs were submitted for a logo project that paid out just $605 in total). The “submit and see if you win” also toes the line between essentially working for free and the standard RFP, something that doesn’t always sit well with the no-spec crowd. We ourselves have specifically singled out 99designs over the years, from discussing their partnership with SXSW in 2009 and best-selling evangelist author Rick Warren using the site to crowdsource his latest book cover. But like them or not, this $35 million investment shows they’re here to stay. What’s more, according to Techcrunch, 99designs had been actively pushing away capital groups before signing on with Accel, so profitable had they been even without them.

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