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.

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