Stuck in an unfamiliar part of town with an urgent case of diarrhea? Have no fear. Just whip out your iPhone, go to Diaroogle.com, and type in the cross streets. In addition to locating the nearest toilets, it gives you pictures, ratings, and reviews. Quoted from their site:

"Diaroogle helps you find quality public toilets from your mobile phone. It's for the discerning, on-the-go defecator who is brave enough to use a public bathroom, but still demands a hygienic and private bathroom experience."



I really respect people who take seemingly silly ideas and make them a reality. A lot of people have fun ideas, but not many people follow through.

E: Today's frameworks and technologies have solved most of the "hard parts" of web development, letting people really focus on what makes their website unique / better / cooler. And with today's Twitter culture, getting your site noticed, if it's good, is also relatively easy. So at this point if you have a web idea and you don't try it, that's just laziness.

K: It's inspiring to me that we can take an idea and, in a really short amount of time, actually turn it into something usable.

Where is your favorite bathroom in New York?

E: Five-star hotels are the best. Steak houses are also pretty serious. Marble bathrooms, wood floors, gold hardware... Any time there is a bathroom that is semi-public and it's nicer than the one in your own apartment, that's a huge win. The Waldorf is pretty sweet.

K: The Bryant Park bathroom is also a favorite. Anybody can walk in, plus it's shockingly nice.

E: It's key to find a place where you don't feel uncomfortable if you're there solely to use their bathroom. That goes a long way for me.

How did this project start?

E: I had the name before I had the concept fully formed. Some friends and I were goofing around with names at a party. I first wanted it to be called Poogle. We were joking, but we also thought that we could actually make this work. I rolled out a really rough version. Then I happened to bounce the idea and the name off Kevin, who thought it was an awesome idea.

K: At first he just wanted a logo. I took a picture of the toilet in my office and based the illustration on that.

E: Almost instantly we had a really good working relationship. He does the design part of it, the visual presentation, and I do the programming side. He was able to transform it from a hacked-together toilet site to this really legit-looking thing.

How did you jump from having a good idea and a logo to creating a whole interactive site?

E: Websites are what we do for a living, so it was relatively easy. Some of the tools and technologies we use are specifically geared toward rapid development. And Google Maps, which is a huge part of it, obviously existed already. I don't want to trivialize what we did, because it was a lot of work, but it wasn't really that hard to get it up and running.

K: It's like what we do during the day, but with a focus on all the things that are fun about our jobs.

So did you review the first bathrooms yourself, and then it grew into the public putting up reviews?

K: We did about 10 initial reviews before we started getting press. And then we were playing catch-up. Every day I was trying to photograph one. I would be carrying my camera with me, looking into a Kinko's, peering through the window, wondering if there's a bathroom in there!

E: But once it caught on, our job was done for us, which was amazing. Now we add 10% of the content, if that, and our users do the rest.



Once you had the site together, how did you introduce it to the world?

K: I think I did the first blog post about it. A couple of people who have a lot of followers re-posted it, and it spread from there. We got linked to on a bunch of sites.

We discovered you from the Thrillist mailing list.

E: It was weird and it was inspiring how quickly it caught on. Kevin's post was pretty casual. There was no campaign or marketing strategy. The tipping point was getting some big posts, like Lifehacker, Thrillist...

K: Well, our first big coverage was in the Village Voice. And they trashed us. We weren't really ready yet; we had about ten listings and we were just testing the waters. They said something like, "Diaroogle Disappoints."

E: On the one hand, it was cool that we got in the Village Voice. But we learned the lesson that we should have had a better launch strategy... We had no idea that it was going to be so popular. The next thing you know, we're getting reviewed.

Do you have plans for bringing this to other cities?

K: We've already expanded to London and San Francisco.



E: It's hard for us, because you can't really show someone the site until you have a good foundation of content there, enough to get people excited and make it usable. But we live in New York, and can't do those first reviews for other cities. We have had a few offers from people willing to represent the cities for us.

Have you found a way to turn a profit from this yet, or is it still a hobby?

K: We use Google AdSense. But that's pretty tiny.

E: We figure if we want to make anything substantial we're going to have to create direct relationships with advertisers. And probably not just within the "toilet industry". While someone like Charmin might want to put some money behind it, we'd probably do best with something geared towards a younger, hipper, Gawker-esque, shows-at-McCarren-pool crowd.

Are you getting enough traffic that you think this could lead to viable advertising opportunities?

E: Yeah, we get pretty solid numbers. Pretty surprising numbers, actually. I'm semi-ashamed to say that this is probably the most heavily trafficked website that I've done, outside of...

There are a lot of people out there who need to go to the bathroom!

K: It's definitely got universal appeal.

E: Girls have been really receptive to it, obviously, because they have much higher standards for what then need from a bathroom experience. Commuters also use the site to map out bathrooms on the route they take to work everyday.

What are your future plans? Do you have any more sites on the back burner? More cities?

K: We've talked a bunch of ideas back and forth. We're formulating our strategy.

E: It's not 100% official. We still feel like there's so much to be done in New York alone. However, the New York user base has a ceiling, and at that point we'll have to branch out. So branching out into other cities is pretty much inevitable. And then from a business standpoint, we have some partnership ideas in the works.

K: Getting to the point we're at now was crystal clear. We knew exactly what we needed to do, and what that end result was going to be. Now that we've achieved it, we have to figure out where to go from here.

That's a big turning point.

E: We're now the undisputed kings of the New York toilet scene.
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Robert was the teacher who taught Kegan and I to love the technical side of manufacturing processes. In his studio, we designed Egg Pants and the Smoking Gun. Needless to say, he was hugely influential in the development of Design Glut. We decided to interview him about what it's like to be both a designer and an educator, and how the two paths inform each other.



Robert Langhorn
robertlanghorn.com

What is your advice for students making that leap from design student to design professional?

I think it's incredibly hard. You have to be lucky, gregarious and tenacious.

An ability to network is critical. You can't be a wallflower. You have to be out there, going to the events, parties etc. You've got to be ballsy and you've got to put your face in front of people and not be afraid of rejection. And you do have to have a personality. There are very few designers that I know who are quiet, who get by solely on talent. It's unfortunate, but there it is.

You also have to be flexible. Clients are often not easy people to deal with. They'll tell you one thing one day, and you'll show them something and you think you know what they're talking about. You come back the next day and they say, "That was not what I was talking about." And, well, okay, you're back to the drawing board. It's not that they're wrong, either. If you're taking on that kind of work, work that's not self-generated and self-funded, then that's part of the relationship and you have to deal with that.

What's interesting to me now, and I've been doing a lot of thinking about this, is that there are too many designers. When I started, about twenty years ago, it wasn't a profession that was terribly sexy. There were certain people who you admired but they weren't really in the public eye. Over the last twenty years, it's snowballed, and the media has taken up design wholesale. It's this very fashionable thing that everybody talks about. Now everybody wants to be a designer. A lot of work I see these days makes me wonder if designers are setting their sights on end-users, or if they're just designing to fit in with what's happening this season.



How did you get into teaching?

I'd just completed my undergraduate degree, and at that time I was very interested in Japanese youth culture and the effect of post-war American occupation on Japanese architecture and design. Japan is incredibly expensive, so I had to find a means of getting out there. There is a program, the JET program, which takes young graduates and places them in Japanese high schools as English teachers. I got into the program and did a two-month intensive teaching course which was the scariest thing I ever did in my life.

I am naturally a very shy person. I don't take to standing in front of people and talking. I still find it a little bit difficult, even today. For this teaching course, they did teaching theory in the morning and then they'd just throw you in front of students in the afternoon. From the first day. So I had to teach a group of twenty people how to speak English after three hours of teaching practice.

What has teaching design taught you as a designer, and has it affected your approach in your own design work?

The main thing I like about teaching is it keeps you frosty as a designer. I think you can get too stuck in your own ways, and it's nice to know that there's going to be at least a couple of opportunities a week where you can go into a room full of people (in my case it's usually about fifteen individuals) with very different perspectives.

That's what's nice about studio class: it's a middle ground, a meeting of minds. I have a certain agenda in class, but then I have to try to tailor that to meet individual needs.



Have you discovered methods for pushing students to generate ideas?

I think it's different for everybody. There is no formula.

So it's more about what it takes to push people on their different paths?

It's the final year of undergraduate. It's not school anymore. I see the final year as a transition into professional practice. You've had three years to acquire a reasonably broad skill-set, and now it's time to ask yourself what's going on in your head, how that interfaces with the outside world and how do you marry that with those technical skills you've learned over the past three years.

What do you think is the hardest lesson for students to grasp, as they're
making that transition?

Balancing individual creative needs whilst fulfilling the design brief or the client requirements. Students often try too hard to please. When you get out into the world of work, it's good to have the attitude of trying to surprise the client. If they don't bite, then you can always go back to Plan B, which is supplying them with what they want.

Do you think it's beneficial for teachers to also be practicing in the
industry?

You should be practicing, but there has to be a balance, I think. You have to be committed to teaching. There are people who teach because they feel that they're doing something altruistic. But they're not really teaching, they're doing it because it's good for their profile. On the other hand, you also have people who are teaching because that's all they can do. Which is equally as bad.

There certainly has to be an altruistic element, because you're not getting paid that much so you have to get something outside of that. At the same time, you've got to teach. You've got to be able to teach. That's an acquired skill. Especially at college level where you don't need to have trained as a teacher to get a position. You don't necessarily need to train, but I think it really helps.



As someone who came from Europe, what do you see as the big difference between American and European approaches to design?

Here we go, this is the big question. I have to say that I was horrified when I first arrived here. I came to New York in 2003. I was looking for the design scene, and there wasn't very much going on. They had things like First Stop [founded by Klaus Rosburg], which was an open-studio event and sort of a precursor to Brooklyn Designs.

It seemed to me like it was either cottage industry or hard, industrial design. There wasn't much of a middle ground. Designers who I've spoken to who do work for large companies say it's very, very safe here in the US. If you're working for a large company they won't take on projects that are experimental.

As a culture, what worries me, and I think it's the same in Europe now, is that design has become extremely fashionable. It's about fashion as opposed to something deeper. And it's, there's just... I hate to use the word, but there's a glut. A glut of design.

Oh, we like that, we're definitely going to use that!

There's a glut in the market. I look at the blogs and I just feel... nauseous. There's so much stuff. And filtering it all... After a while, you just don't care. I can walk around ICFF, and, if I'm lucky, I'll see a couple of things that make me really happy.

This is what my perception is. This is not what someone else might see. It's a really difficult thing to talk about, because individuals need to create, and what they create is personal. When looking at something, I often say to myself... I don't like this, but somebody's obviously felt that it was necessary to make it. I think that's just part of the human condition. How do you deal with the world on a day-to-day basis? Some people write, some paint or sculpt and others make objects as a means of externalizing their thoughts and feelings.



I'm very much in the latter category. I was an average student at school, but never really engaged. I never understood why I had to do things like mathematics. I'm not good at mathematics. And not because I'm stupid, but because nobody told me why it was important. And this might be another reason why I teach. I didn't get excited about my education until I got into art school. Suddenly all of those things came into play: mathematics, physics... I became interested in everything, because everything was relevant. It had a context.

It's fascinating to hear you say that, because in the early years of college I sat through several classes about manufacturing techniques and didn't absorb a thing... I couldn't understand for the life of me why I had to learn about the machines and the engineering end of things. It wasn't until your class until I felt like someone finally told me WHY it was important. I suddenly thought it was really interesting!

It's fine to learn technique, but it's useless without actually doing something with it. It's like when you try to learn complex computer programs. It's quite abstract unless you've got something meaningful you want to use it for. You'll never learn one of those CAD programs by sitting and watching an instructor. You have to have a reason to use the tool.
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Jean Aw is the co-founder of NOTCOT, Inc. Her "jokingly-named NotEmpire of sites" are an inspirational resource for trendspotting and new ideas. We're avid fans and wanted to know how one goes about building, um, *not* an empire but something close to it. We found out that, like so many creative-types who are living the dream, she ended up on this path seemingly accidentally. Here's to happy accidents!



The NotEmpire:
NOTCOT.com
NOTCOT.org
NotCouture.com
Liqurious.com

How do you think the blogging explosion has helped facilitate the spread of design, and young designers ideas?

I love blogging because I see it as a tool to help humans filter the mass of information around us. With this oversaturated space (A glut, one might say, Jean?), it's often hard to figure out what to read or where to go. I love the blogs of designers, because it's a way see what everyone else is working on and getting excited about.

Since there is internet access nearly anywhere these days, it has really changed how quickly, easily, and cheaply, designers can now get their work out there. Designers can also get feedback on designs-in-progress in real time. At NOTCOT, we have both manufacturers and designers contacting us, looking for each other. It certainly feels like the internet is facilitating what was previously a much lengthier courting process.

One of the most amazing things for me has been watching the evolution of a design concept, seeing it brought into production, and then meeting those products in the real world. Like at ICFF, when we finally got to meet Design Glut!

Some days I look back on elementary-school projects, papers, and random fascinations I had as a kid. I wonder how much more we would have known if we could have researched things on the internet. The idea of looking up something like penguins in books and encyclopedias now seems so archaic compared to googling for it, watching live webcam streams, emailing with penguin experts instantly... The speed and thoroughness which we can now research is an incredible thing. There is so much inspiration at your fingertips constantly.



Will this trend continue? Have blogs and online news sources come to replace written press, or do they balance each other out? Is information available on the internet more temporary or more permanent than printed sources?

I don't see the blogs and online news sources as a trend, so much as a new medium. Nor do I consider books and magazines to be a trend... If anything, I think the digital medium is a nice supplement with many new opportunities: more immediacy, room for live conversation, video, and constant updates. If we're diligent about our backups and server maintenance, I wonder if it's really any less permanent?

NOTCOT seems to have been around forever. How and when did you decide you wanted to start a design blog?

Hmmm, forever, eh? Time travels so fast on the internet!

NOTCOT.com launched in spring 2005, and NOTCOT.org sprung up in spring 2006. The rest have been launching as we get excited and inspired. I never actually decided/wanted to start a design blog. I think in a way, it picked me?



It organically popped out of a combination of finishing up my design masters in Milan, coming back to California, and not being sure what I wanted to do. I ended up crashing on Dan's couch in San Diego. He set me to work, basically putting me through our own CSS bootcamp of sorts. I learned CSS by building a movable type blog. I needed content to design around, so I just started posting all the things I was already bombarding all my friends with over IM! And somewhere along the line other people found it. They kept reading, and I kept posting.

Of course, as you know, we've come a long way from that point, with our jokingly-named NotEmpire of sites growing constantly. As the blog did its thing, we were even more excited to play and design. We designed a new framework from scratch which lead to our Curated User Submission model of gridded polaroids that are now NOTCOT.org, NotCouture, and Liqurious.

This framework really lets us move quickly through content we love and find inspiring. With these sites, we can also get the most creative play with design, development, and user experience/usability, which we are especially passionate about! Recently Dan even left his day job at Yahoo to come play full time on NOTCOT with me. It's been an absolute dream. These sites are our shared digital replacements for studio inspiration boards filled with magazine clippings, comics, stickers, post-its and more.



I love NOTCOT, and want you to blog my new product. How should I approach you to actually make this happen?

Th best way to get our attention is through NOTCOT.org. This is a Curated User Submission Site. You just register and upload a great 250x250 image if your product. Then link to whatever page has more images and info, and give us an enticingly informative caption. If the editors love it, it will go up on the front page!

The other way is to drop us a line through the contact form. Link us to incredible images; blow our minds!

If you don't write back, should I keep trying?

Please feel free to keep trying with new projects. Trust that we pick what we love, and if you catch our eye it will go up. I'm just one girl going through over a hundred emails a day. One of the hardest things is when people take it too personally if we don't write about something. If I can't get back to you, please don't get upset. I'm doing what I can to keep all the sites fully stocked with inspiration!
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This week we've focused on talking to people in the gifty-housewares industry. (That might not be a technical industry term, but I think it's plenty descriptive.) I'd like to cap the week off with my first foray into gifty-housewares: the development of Egg Pants. I get asked a lot about the story of developing that product. Here it is, once and for all.



Egg Pants
$20 for a set of two
Available here

It was Fall 2006, and I was in my senior year at Pratt Institute, studying industrial design. My main studio for the semester centered on a single project. I was assigned to research manufacturing processes, choose one, and design a product for the home which would be manufactured using that technique.

I started my research, and when I discovered a process called dip-molding, I knew that this was going to be it. It was a relatively low-cost process for molding flexible plastic pieces. It had a lot of design constraints, which I saw as positive. The constraints gave me direction.

The biggest constraint of dip-molding is that little drippy blobs are going to occur on the bottom of your piece. I eventually realized that my mission was to come up with a form that embraced the drips, a form where the drips would make sense. I had the idea for a vessel which stood on three legs.

Stepping back and looking at it, I thought that the vessel would be pretty good for holding an egg.




I took this sketch into class, and my teacher encouraged me to take the next step and put it into Solidworks. I built the thing, rendered it out, and the direction for Egg Pants was set. I thought I pretty much had everything figured out at this point. It was mid-semester, and the design was done, right?


Oh boy, did I have a lot to learn. The design WAS done. However, like most design students, I had no idea how much engineering, marketing, and business would need to happen in order to complete the product development cycle. At this point, I could have made a representative model or rapid prototype, put the thing in my portfolio, and left it there to die.

Luckily, though, my teacher saw the potential for this to become a real product and pushed me to take it farther. It was still early enough in the semester that it seemed feasible to get the piece prototyped at an actual dip-molding factory by the end of the semester. So I started googling for dip-molders. I started making phone calls and sending emails with my Solidworks model. One factory got back to me with a $500 quote to make the prototype.

I was, like any college student, scared out of my mind by the $500 price tag. But again, my teacher pushed me to do it, and I threw down my savings/beer money on tooling for an egg cup.

Once I made the decision to do it, things really got stressful. I had to make a much more detailed drawing for the factory than the one I'd initially produced, I had to send them a purchase order, I had to talk shop about whether to cast or machine the aluminum tool, and I had to spec out the thickness and height of the final pieces. If I screwed this up, I was out $500 plus I wouldn't have enough time to make a new model before the crit.

Luckily, my paranoia and agony over the final drawings paid off, and the pieces I got back were almost perfect. My crit went smashingly. I was so excited that I continued working with the manufacturer over my winter break, and did another round of prototypes, tweaking the wall-thickness and ultimately deciding to do it with two colors: white on the outside and yellow on the inside.



The tooling was done, the manufacturing bugs had all been figured out, and now I wanted to introduce my little Egg Pants to the world. I asked a friend who had been working on developing a product himself for advice, and he told me to take pictures and send them to blogs. So that's what I did.

One of the blogs I sent it to was Design*Sponge, who put up this post almost right away.

About a week later, I got an email from one of the buyers at the MoMA Store, saying that they'd seen Egg Pants on Design*Sponge and would like a sample to review. Oh. My. God. I freaked out and screamed for a little, and then I packaged up my precious little prototypes and sent them on over to MoMA.

They ended up putting in an order. It was March 2007, I was a couple months from graduation, and MoMA wanted to order a product that I hadn't yet manufactured. This was not a bad problem to have, but it was a problem nonetheless.

I called up various members of my family, told them the story, and asked if they would consider giving me any graduation gifts in advance, so I could put the money into manufacturing these things. They thought I was relatively nuts. They also thought that out of all the things a 21-year-old could blow money a lot of money on, this was at least kind of productive. So I secured the funds, gave the go-ahead to the manufacturer, and had 2,500 Egg Pants made.

I was terrified.



I had to figure out packaging, sourcing boxes and labels. And I had to wait and pray that I wasn't going to end up with a couple thousand defective Egg Cups. When the production run came in, and everything looked right, I finally breathed a sigh of relief. NOW the product was done.

This was one of the scariest things I've ever done. It was also one of the most rewarding. I learned invaluable, real-world lessons about how to deal with manufacturers, buyers, and press. Most importantly, I gained the confidence to pursue what I love to do and turn it into a business.
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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.



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Here is the second half of our interview with Diane. If you haven't already, make sure to check out yesterday's post.



Domestic Aesthetic
www.domestic-aesthetic.com

...It was such a learning process for me. As this whole thing has been. For better or for worse, I really am in love with this process. Because you're just constantly learning something.

Yes, exactly!

Sometimes, obviously, you feel tired. You start to feel like you're on this treadmill and you can't get off.

Right. You feel like you can't get off, EVER.

That has definitely hit me before. If you talked to me in February, I would have said, "Oh my god, what am I doing? Nothing's happening!" And you feel like there's no progress, because you don't have any perspective and you're not getting any feedback. You have no idea what people are thinking and you're taking these little baby steps forward. You're just doing it and hoping for the best. The Incubator was very helpful in terms of getting advice and support and having people to talk to, especially in that first year, when everything is super, super hard.

It all sped up in May when we did ICFF. This theoretical thing suddenly turned into, "Oh shit, we're actually showing stuff!" It was kind of like what you described about your experience doing the Designboom Mart. You think, "I only have one product, and I need to have a lot more. So, hmmm, let’s just start busting stuff out!"



Totally.

And you just do it and see what happens.

Which is kind of great, because you get in this creative space where you have to come up with something, so you do.

You have to do it! Otherwise you just look lame.

What was the response like at ICFF?

ICFF was like a “soft-launch” for me because at that point we had prototypes but weren’t ready to take orders. I basically fell into it. Another group in the Incubator had actually gotten the space at the show, and then at the last minute decided they didn't want it and offered it to me. I decided it would be a great way to get feedback and it was pretty risk-free. I had no expectations for what would happen.

It ended up being hugely, hugely positive. Not to sound immodest, but I’ve been really pleased with the press we’ve gotten in such a short amount of time. ICFF was only 4 months ago. It started with coverage on Treehugger, which I was really happy about, and then New York Magazine last month, and then I just found out that the New York Times is doing something either this Sunday or next Sunday. I am so thrilled; I would never in a million years have expected it. It makes all the hard work seem worthwhile. I still don't know what's really going to happen though.



It seems to be in the nature of what we're doing that the next step is always kind of unpredictable. What advice do you have for someone embarking on the journey?

It's just such an incredibly complex animal. It forces you to be good at a lot of different things. And if you're not, you have to ask yourself what you're going to do about it. I'm always stepping back and asking, "What am I not that good at? And how am I going to address it?"

What other people do you work with?

As a one-person show, I would love to be designing all the time, but realistically I can't. I had to bring on people to help with the design. One of the benefits of the Design Incubator is that they connect you with Pratt students, so that brought Nick Foley on board. He walked in, I liked his portfolio and I just knew he was it.

I thought the dynamic would involve me dictating my design ideas to him, and he would do all the sketching and ideation. He's so talented, though, that it got to the point where I just said, take it. I put aside my ego and let him be the designer, while I was weighing in as creative director.

I never studied industrial design formally; I got into furniture design through just working for someone. As Domestic Aesthetic grew, I realized that I needed someone who really knew design, manufacturing, materials, and ideally sustainability. Then I met Kristina Drury. She became our design director, and she does a fantastic job because she brings all those things to the table.

How did you meet her?

I actually met her at Green Drinks. But ironically, she is also at Pratt as a grad student. She has a great background; she came from architecture originally and had familiarity with LEED certification, which is important. She is also one of the co-founders of Collective Four, which is a sustainable furniture-design studio.

Then ICFF happened and I needed more products, so I brought on another designer, Andrew Garrison.



How do you see your team growing?

I'd definitely like to work with more designers. I think that keeps things fresh. It's nice to have this constantly evolving team as long as I'm overseeing it as creative director and making sure that everything stays consistent.

That's one big way I'm evolving. The next way, now that the design team is kind of in place, is strengthening the business side. I'm bringing on, for lack of a better term or title, a Vice President. He's really good; he brings with him 10 years of consulting experience and also managed a textiles company, which means he knows the finance and production end of things.

He also has a genuine interest in helping to build the company. We’re still finalizing a lot of details, but it’s a really big step. In this business, it’s all about volume and growth and If you're not hitting that volume, you need to find people who can help you do that or at least prepare you to do that.

I'm excited about having another person with me there who can help strategize about these things. It's an interesting time right now.

Yes, that all sounds really exciting, it sounds like you're sort of nearing the tipping point.

That's kind of how I feel!
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Diane is the mastermind behind Domestic Aesthetic. Remember that name. It's a start-up sustainable housewares company that is gaining some serious momentum. Over the course of this interview we learned how one woman got her ideas onto the pages of the New York Times, found out what a Design Management degree is all about, and became seriously inspired.



Domestic Aesthetic
www.domestic-aesthetic.com

How did you make the decision to start Domestic Aesthetic?
It came from the fact that I don't want a 9-to-5 job. It became very clear that I'm just not built that way. It's really hard for anyone to figure out what they want to do professionally, or even with their life, or how to answer those big existential questions. When you realize you don't fit into the normal mold, it becomes that much more challenging. It's hard to draw support. Most of my friends were a bit skeptical and my family is very traditional.

And when did you make the decision?

I started around October 2006. I said, okay, this is it, I'm making this announcement. I don't know exactly what my first steps are going to be, but at least I've put it out there that this is the direction I'm going in. And everyone said, you know, "Good luck to you..." They didn't really get it, and were kind of obliged to be supportive, but ultimately supported that I was doing what I needed to do.

What is your background?

I went through the Design Management program at Pratt for my masters. Everyone in the program is a designer, and they go in and get this "MBA for designers." It's one of the best decisions I've made. It's an excellent program. I didn't want to go to business school; I knew that was not the route for me. I think it was important to be in an environment with other designers, so you all understand each other.

In the program you struggle to learn a new vocabulary, to learn how to speak in an articulate way about business concepts. You're challenged with learning about accounting, and finance, and international business law... The wonderful thing for me, when it came to starting Domestic Aesthetic, was that I now had enough experience in all of those areas to ask the right questions. While I didn't quite know enough to go be an accountant, I knew enough to hire someone effectively.



Wow, so you dealt with all that in the program? That sounds great!

It was. Of course, there are always pros and cons. For me, the pros definitely outweighed all of the cons. The big con was, similar to a liberal arts degree, what do you do with it once you graduate?

It gives you the mindset of thinking about design in a strategic way. Which is especially geared towards design in a corporate setting. You're thinking about how to communicate design to the finance department, how to make a case for the resources you need. You don't really get that in design school, which gives you how to communicate design as a philosophy.

Agreed. Design school teaches you to communicate design to yourself, and to other designers.

Exactly. And I think that's where design gets kind of incestuous. So the Design Management program was hugely beneficial. The con side was, though, I really didn't know what I wanted to do afterwards.

Yeah, especially if you don't want to go into that corporate management job, then what do you do?

You're feeling your way around, and you have this degree which is really great but no one knows how to evaluate it. You can say it's LIKE an MBA, but it's NOT an MBA. People ask, "What can you do? What does this mean now?" The struggle of articulating what I could do, and what skill set I had, became an uphill battle. It was really tough for a good, solid year after I graduated and I bounced from job to job. A lot of my classmates had similar experiences. But I think we all went on to do really great things. Slowly but surely, people made their way and found their own path.

After being in New York for a year after graduating, I saw a couple of options. I could go back to school and get a PhD in Design Management, which I had a lot of doubts about. Or, I could take that same time and money and do what I really wanted to do: start Domestic Aesthetic.



That's a huge decision. What steps did you take to make your dream a reality?

I started talking to Deb Johnson, the director of the Pratt Design Incubator (http://incubator.pratt.edu), in February 2007. I got more serious and started writing a business plan, getting it vetted. In May 2007, I was accepted into the Incubator. So that was the "official" starting point. The next year brought a lot of organic development, refining the business plan, and figuring out in more concrete terms what I wanted to do.

Could you explain the Incubator a little? It's a way of supporting small-businesses started by Pratt alumi, correct?

Right. It's open to alumni of all disciplines as long as your business is sustainably-focused. They are really selective about who they accept, but in many ways it is also self-selecting. The people who apply really want to start a business and are committed to being part of this community of entrepreneurs.

The great thing about being part of this community was that the Incubator created this pressure for me to report in every week, to report in my progress. It really motivated me. I always had to ask myself what I was going to say in that next meeting. They're expecting you to say something compelling and interesting, and to be taking this seriously.

Domestic Aesthetic is deeply rooted in a philosophy. Could you briefly explain what that is?

The mission of the company is to create sustainable products, products that are eco-friendly and socially responsible. A lot of that philosophy came from personal experience I had working in a furniture factory. I saw how much waste there was, and worked with people firsthand, and thought, "Wow, you're sawing a lot of MDF every day, and you're not wearing a mask. And it contains all this horrible formaldehyde." A lot of what goes on in manufacturing is just horrific, and when you work in a factory day in and day out it's that much more apparent to you.

All of these experiences led me to start Domestic Aesthetic , and being in the Incubator helped me begin to formalize a lot of stuff, like getting an Advisory Board together. I knew that would be important for getting any kind of credibility.



What is your Advisory Board?

They're people who I contacted from various industries who I felt were reputable. I worked on getting someone from marketing, someone who represented sustainability, another person from manufacturing, etc. I can then say, these people are tangentially a part of the company. I go to them for advice from time to time.

I took stock of my weaknesses. If I were ever to approach an investor or some larger entity, they would want to know who's managing my company. If I tell them, "Me," and I don't have any managerial experience, that's a very strong concern to anybody who's going to put money in. My Advisory Board gives people more confidence in the business.

The people on my Advisory Board were also really good about vetting my business plan. That was a huge help. I wrote this thing very theoretically. You write the strategy you have for going forwards and the sales projections, but none of it makes sense because you're not even really existing as a company yet. I hadn't even designed any products.

The whole thing seemed sort of an exercise in futility, but it ended up being very helpful. It gave me something to get feedback from. That, in and of itself, was hugely helpful. There were all these different directions I wanted to go in, and people who had experience could then say, "If you do that, be wary of this….."

It was such a learning process for me. As this whole thing has been. For better or for worse, I really am in love with this process. Because you're just constantly learning something.

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