Scott Henderson is an American designer who heads the New York based design studio Scott Henderson Inc. and is also Principal and Co-Founder of MINT where he designs, manufacturers and distributes home accessory objects to over 250 retailers and museums throughout the world including The Museum of Modern Art and Design Within Reach.



MINT Inc.
601 W. 26th St.
Suite 1820A
New York, NY 10001
www.mintnyc.com

How did MINT begin?

I was working at Smart Design, and Tony and Alberto, who are the other guys in MINT, were subletting space in the Smart office. We were all there in that space.

Alberto designed the Hug salt and pepper shakers as a personal exploration before we decided to start MINT. No client, he just had the idea so he made these little models. Simultaneously, and unrelatedly, I was also working on a personal design exploration, which was a mortar and pestle. I made a model of it in our rapid prototyping machine that we had there. Alberto was walking past and he saw it and thought it was great. Then he showed me his salt and pepper shakers.

We sat there and looked at them and thought that they were related, that they worked well together. So we decided to try to make more designs and see if we could start a little company.



When did you first launch the products, or show them to other people?

Right after the mortar and pestle and the salt and pepper shakers, I designed a salad bowl design called the Ensalada. It was related to the design of the mortar and pestle in that it has full-contacting surfaces. I made a model of it, and we took those three products to Umbra. At the time we weren't sure that we wanted to start manufacturing these things ourselves. At first, the idea was just to license the designs to established companies for a royalty.

Umbra rejected the salt and pepper shakers.

No!

Yeah, they said that it was too cute and not Umbra-like. We also took them to the Museum of Modern Art. We showed them to buyers I knew there, and they didn't like them either.

This is so weird to hear.

When we went to Umbra, they did like the Ensalada bowl and they took that design and manufactured it, paying us a royalty. It's still an Umbra product and we still get royalties from it. Now, we wouldn't take that approach. We manufacture everything ourselves and we don't submit our designs to companies seeking royalties. In the beginning, when our company was just getting going, we didn't know what direction we wanted to take it yet.

Then we decided that since the mortar and pestle and the salt and pepper shakers were both made out of ceramic, we could manufacture them ourselves. There aren't a whole lot of barriers to entry as far as spending money on tooling for that manufacturing process. We just said, ‘okay, you know what, let's make a run of these and then incorporate our business and try to sell them ourselves’. We each put $5,000 down. At this point, Tony Baxter got involved. He worked with Alberto in their other consulting company called Curev ID. We had 2,000 of the salt and pepper shakers made.

We went back to the MoMA and submitted it again. We told them we had stock and they decided that they would try it, even though, as far as I can remember, they didn't really think it was all that great.

They were skeptical?

Yeah. Luckily, though, they tried it and all of a sudden it became this huge hit. They sold all of them and then they reordered, and they sold all of those. It was a monster hit right from the start. We couldn't make them fast enough. We went from our first order, which was the manufacturer's minimum order quantity of 2000 pieces, to ordering them 20,000 pieces at a time. We sell through them quickly-- about 25-30,000 each year.

Why do you think they didn't get it?

The people who are experts in design seem to hold onto this idea of modernism-- that things have to be austere and minimal, and that form follows function. The Hug salt and pepper shakers don't really adhere to that. They've got this emotional component. It's not austere, it's not about minimalism, because it goes to another level with these black and white forms hugging each other. It's a statement, and it's romantic. It has all these emotional connotations that are totally unrelated to modernism. And it appeals to people who aren't design experts. It appeals universally.

I've seen knock-offs of the Hug salt and paper shakers floating around. Are any of your products patented? Have you tried to shut that down?

All of our stuff is patented. We've tried to shut it down, but it's very expensive to do. Our lawyer tried to serve one company that we know is knocking it off in China. It's very difficult to take legal action against them since they're all the way over there. They make counterfeits that look identical to ours, right down to the packaging. We go after the American retailers who are selling the fakes and they stop selling them. But it's a lot of work to get people so stop doing it.



What have you learned since starting MINT?

As a designer, you're in a really bad position when take a design that you do one spec on around and show it to companies. In a way you're kind of begging them to make it, and to give you a little royalty. The money that you get from royalties is usually disappointing. They give you something small, like 2% of net sales. You wind up getting checks once a quarter, for $100 or something pathetic.

And it's hard to even get to that point. There are a few companies, like Magis, who designers look up to because they're so design-focused. If you try to approach them, you'll find that you are one of many, many, many designers who are doing the same thing. That makes it hard to get their attention.

MINT allows us to put whatever cool little idea we have into reality. And it's really hard to do that any other way.

We found with MINT that taking a small risk on the product, manufacturing it, and warehousing a quantity of it, instantly set us apart. It dramatically narrows the field of competition. Carrying stock and managing the logistics of it is a step that most designers won't take. So when you do take it, all of a sudden things became very easy. We found, when we started Mint, that it wasn't hard to get our products into a lot of stores. We found that the sales pitch was easy. We asked the little design boutiques if they'd like to buy this, and they said yes!

What do you consider to be your greatest achievement with MINT?

Definitely the strength of the Mint brand. I'm always amazed how strong it is as a brand. People know it, everywhere. And it's a really small little venture, just the three of us. I'm proud of the fact that we've managed such global penetration.



Is MINT still coming out with new products? Are you guys still throwing ideas around?

Yeah, I just finished a new piece called Bud. It's a vase for a single flower, but it looks like a terracotta flower pot. It's a simple idea.

Could you tell me a little about your design consultancy, Scott Henderson Inc.?

I actually spend more time doing my consulting work than working on MINT. As a designer, I like to work on a variety things. The consulting lets me do housewares, medical products, consumer electronics, computer design... Stuff like that. I think if I was only doing these clever, intellectual statements for the gift industry, it would be too much. I would get bored of it.