Selling your stuff: are you ready to go public with your industrial designs? - practice

Residential Architect, April, 2003 by Cheryl Weber

Some years ago, Christopher Bardt and Kyna Leski, architecture professors at the Rhode Island School of Design and the founders of 3SIX0 in Providence, R.I., had a student whose thesis project was designing a house in Thailand for her parents. When the $5-million house was constructed, the parents invited Bardt and Leski to design the furnishings. The architects did, and enjoyed the process so much they decided to give the one-of-a-kind pieces another life. After making prototypes, they put photos of their work on their Web site (www.3six0.com) and began shopping it around. "Making one thing over a long period of time is a little arcane," Bardt says of doing architecture. "It's a consumer society, and it's exciting to see something reproduced in dazzling amounts."

Architects, by nature, are an exacting breed, looking to impose their sense of order as far down the design hierarchy as they can. Rather than confining their art to a house's fixed forms, most architects welcome the opportunity to design objects that can be sat upon, eaten at, and slept on. But while it's common to create furniture, glasswork, and metalwork for particular clients, some architects are exploring less-charted territory: selling their industrial designs to the public.

Actually, the connection between architecture and product design has a rich history. The leaders of the English Arts and Crafts movement, such as C.F.A. Voysey, C.R. Ashbee, and Philip Webb, were trained in architecture before they branched out into furniture and the decorative arts. Even William Morris studied architecture for a short time before taking up pattern design. "Architects are well-prepared for doing product design because they understand materials and structure pretty well," says Seth Stem, professor of industrial design at RISD.

Nevertheless, an architecture education leaves plenty of missing links. Whereas architects work in units of one, two, or three, industrial design is about creating hundreds or thousands. And therein lies the challenge. "The two professions share the central role of creating beautiful, passionate work, but the industrial design constraints are so different that people don't usually imagine them until faced with them," says Charles Austen Angell, executive vice president of the Industrial Design Society of America, McLean, Va., and chief design officer for Logic Product Development, Minneapolis. "Product design is a nice way to extend your creative horizons, but you have to decide how sophisticated you want your business model to be. There's a lot of sophistication needed in keeping the beauty and utility of the object, while addressing all the business constraints."

craft vs. mass

New York City architect Deborah Berke, Deborah Berke Architect & Partners, had been custom-designing furniture for clients for years, through her office's interiors department, before she launched her own line of furniture and accessories a year ago. "When we culled through the file of about 120 pieces, we realized there was the backbone of something that could be more general," says Berke, AIA. "We really winnowed it down and fleshed it out."

Berke has converted part of her office loft into a showroom for the high-end wood, metal, and upholstered pieces--about two dozen--which she sells to the trade. "We're coming to it not from a Michael Graves strategy with distribution networks, but from the opposite direction, taking something that was custom and trying to expand that into a small furniture business," Berke says. "I'm not looking to be Ikea or West Elm or Blu Dot, though I admire their work enormously."

If such speculative, limited-edition work seems straightforward, it's not. One potential obstacle is paying the start-up costs. Prototyping furniture is time-consuming and expensive, and decorators won't recommend pricey pieces without being able to see and touch them. It's a lesson 3SIX0 learned early on.

"We found out you can't get anyone's attention until you make a real piece," Bardt says. "All the drawings, models, and maquettes won't get you anywhere."

He and Leski spent several years and $10,000 prototyping and perfecting an exquisite glass-and-stainless steel "river bench." Each part was milled by a skilled machinist, and the glass was cast in plaster molds that had to be hand-made over and over again. "If you were producing 100 benches, you'd make a steel mold using computer numeric controlled (CNC) equipment," Bardt says, "but we're trying to move from one to 10 units."

Blu Dot, in Minneapolis, exemplifies an ambitious model for doing product design. With its emphasis on mass-produced, affordable design, it falls at the opposite end of the spectrum from Berke and Bardt. Together, co-founders John Christakos, Charles Lazor, and Maurice Blanks combine graduate degrees in business and architecture. "We built Blu Dot out of a simple proposition that we wanted to satisfy ourselves," Lazor says. "When you're in your 20s and early 30s trying to buy simple, intelligent, and inexpensive furniture in this country, there's not a lot to choose from. We had a hunch that a lot of people find catalog options unexciting or too historically concerned."