Supermarket is an innovative website which allows independent designers to sell their wares. Curated by its founders, it has a wide range of objects, but not so wide that it overwhelms you. It's a fantastic venue for designers to put their work up for sale online without dealing with headaches like coding a website or setting up a merchant account. www.supermarkethq.com



Ryan, you have a webstore, Elsewares, which came before Supermarket. Tell me a little about how that got started.

Ryan: I had a previous life as a documentary filmmaker, and at the tail end of a PBS project I realized that I enjoyed making the film's web site as much as, maybe more than, the process of making the film. Around the same time, in 2003, a friend of mine came up with an agitprop product called Bush Cards, and I helped him build an online store that was extremely successful. I wanted to repeat that experience, so I turned to other products that I thought the world should know about, and - thats how Elsewares started.

Randy, what is your background?

Randy: In design, as a graphic designer. I started working with Ryan through Elsewares, and it really just evolved. We committed to the idea of Supermarket, and decided to turn it into something.

So what made you want to expand into new online territory and create Supermarket?

Ryan: Supermarket came out of what Elsewares wasn't. Elsewares is a traditional online retailer: it holds stock, carries inventory and we ship all the products. There's always been a limit to how large it could get, and how large we wanted it to get, and that in turn has always limited the number of designers and great products we could work with.



How do you curate the designers on Supermarket?

Ryan: What we aim to do, by curating the collection, is not create something that's exclusive, but rather the inverse - create a site, a platform which attracts as much good work as possible. We find that good work attracts good work, so we just try to follow this vein of good design, and there are things which naturally fit into that.

Randy: It's very intuitive, kind of a gut reaction - it's what would you buy yourself? Can I be a fan of this product?

Ryan: If there is any criteria it's, "Would I buy this, and tell my friends about it?"

Randy: It's a rare occasion when we have to ask each other, "Do you think this fits?"

Do you have any loose figures about how many designers there are on the site, and how many products?

Ryan: The last time we published figures it was several hundred designers, and more then 6000 products. But it's not quantity, its quality - we want people to have a sense that they can always go to Supermarket, see and find cool stuff, and not be overwhelmed.

It's interesting when compared to Etsy, which has blown up into this massive thing. How do you feel the two sites relate?

Ryan: Etsy has obviously tapped into a big handmade thing. There's some overlap between designers that sell at Supermarket and Etsy, but beyond that we're different web sites offering different experiences, which works for us.

What kind of traffic do you get, and how have you built it?

Randy: We started with what was happening organically, and tried to amplify it. Based on the reputations, and the visibility of many of the designers selling on the site, we were already generating a lot of traffic. Everyone thats selling gets to benefit from the traffic funneling in, so some of the less popular designers, or people who don't have the name recognition, get to benefit from those who do.

We started to see two things happening simultaneously: one was that some mainstream blogs would have things to say often about specific products or designers, and occasional about the site at large, and at the same time, very personal blogs, where people journal about their personal shopping experience or day, were writing about their experience on Supermarket. We started looking at both those responses, and reaching out to people where the site, or specific products and designers represented on the site, seemed like a good match. Traffic has been pretty organic. Its not as though were sending "please blog us!" emails. We were just forming relationships.

Ryan: Often it starts with a blog mentioning us, and we'll take a moment to reach out and thank them. Blogs of all kinds are really important, not just the superstar ones. We also have our newsletter which goes out every two weeks, and we try to keep it, like the site, regular and bite sized. Its not trying to stop your other train of thought to digest it, but rather act as an introduction to get to the site and check it out. Its hard to strike that right tone between interruption and offer, and keep someone interested without pestering them.



One thing that you have that's really useful is the collective blog, could you talk a little more about that?

Ryan: We started blogging about cool products, before Supermarket was ready to go. I couldn't just sit around and hold it in till we were ready. It was a way to draw attention, and get people to join the site, but also to share information, and have a continual conversation with our customers, without always being in sales mode.

The way it works on Supermarket is that designers can actually add to the blog. Sometimes its a post about their new product, and sometimes they'll be blogging about other things which are tangentially related - like a new store, or show they're in, and thats great.

Are there any new projects on the back-burner or new branches? Where do you see the Supermarket heading?

Ryan: Well now that we're a year in, we see these things within Supermarket where we've only touched upon the potential. There's no small number of things we have to work on. We do have some other things on the burner, that we think might be graceful outgrowths of Supermarket - but they aren't ready yet.

Randy: I think one of the other things, other then the software development per se, is the idea that we can help designers to figure out how to do the stuff were doing. The blog being there, shows the importance of taking a good photograph, announcing new products in multiple venues, writing a good description - all things that work to the designers benefit. And just on a very human level, allows us to reach out to designers and help them think of things they might not have. We can reach out to designers and say: hey maybe you want to try this, maybe you want to reorganize your store this way, have you considered using these tags, heres some links to other photographs of products like yours. We're doing this in a very manual way, but we've definitely touched on ideas on how to take our business insight if you will, or marketing insight, and hand it over to people as often as possible.

Ryan: Exactly, and some of these are things that designers might not spend their time thinking about, because they think its some business problem, that you can just make good products and surely they'll sell. We're excited to share the information we have, and highlight examples of things being done well by other sellers, so that people can learn, and not just do what they're already doing, but grow their business.

One of the things thats really interesting about Supermarket is that its looking at the bigger picture, its about creating a system rather then a product or webstore - could you talk about this?

Randy: Supermarket really is a system. Your designing this set of tools for people to use, thats not isolated in a storefront product , but exists in this space where people are already comfortable. Its a bridge between the business world and the personal. No one wants to deal with software, they just want to sell the stuff online. No one wants to deal with a merchant account, they just want to get paid. No one wants to have to install the blog, they just want to express themselves. There are a whole bunch of designers, with a lot of ambition, who have developed their skills in this we can do anything moment, where all the boundaries are blurring, that the assumption is that they can do everything. Supermarket helps facilitate that.



I think it's a big design challenge, for Supermarket, that it has to be a store which fits all different types of products - in some ways it really has to recede. How did this affect the design of the site?

Randy: We definitely approached that when designing the experience of using the site. Its important that when you go to the site you see your screen filled up with other people's work, we just create the context.

Ryan: We've also been impressed by how much people appreciate not just the product but the person, the designer, and the story behind what's for sale.

What do you consider your biggest success so far?

Ryan: It's satisfying to have something that people appreciate, that gets them talking, and which leads to more people seeking us out.

Randy: Interestingly, its funny: if you google Supermarket, we're the first thing that comes up - above any national food chain. It wasn't like we sat down and tried to make this happen, it happened organically, the pieces just fell into place.

What advice do you have for creative entrepreneurs?

Randy: It's important to break things down into really small pieces. The idea of Supermarket is pretty lofty and open, you've got all these types of people and product, and we got the most traction and tangible results, when we focused on one or two things for a period of time, accomplished them, and then focused on one or two other things.

Ryan: I also think it's important to be authentic. Don't be tempted to "stage manage" your business to look like anyone else's. Be yourself, speak in your own voice, and just use the tools at your disposal to get your message and your products out there. Forget the press release.


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Harry Allen opened his New York studio 15 years ago, and has created a solid business encompassing both product and interior design. He is best known for designing the Moss interior in SoHo and the Reality line of products, including his piggy bank which is cast from an actual pig. Read on for his story and wisdom on starting a creative business. www.harryallendesign.com



What do you think is the biggest stumbling block when starting a business as a designer?

I think the whole designer/maker thing is a bit of a trap. Where you start a studio, you buy a bandsaw, and you start making things out of wood and then you're selling those things. The problem that I've always seen with that is, first of all, you'll make the same thing over and over again. Which is fine, some people like that, it's admirable, and there's part of me that wants to do that. But I also think it's very limiting and you can get sort of stuck in a rut and it's hard to get out of it. You tend to not actually charge for your time; you're charging for the piece. You figure it out and you're making $15/hr, you might as well be a janitor. To avoid that trap, I always had other people make things, and I always paid them, and added whatever profit I wanted to make to that, and then try to sell it to the stores.

Also, in the beginning, I was doing things that when I look at them now are totally impractical. I'm glad I did those things, but now I know why I didn't sell those things. There's always that fine line between doing things that are useful and can fit into people's lives, and doing things that are artistic. Though there is now room to be that art/designer, thanks to Moss and Wallpaper. You can sort of be that person who sells $50,000 one-off tables. But it's about as predictable a road to success as being an artist, which is a really hard thing to do. If you want to make one thing, if you want to sit in the studio and make something that's a real personal expression, and it's going to be cast in diamond, and it's going to cost $8 million, yeah, that's a business plan. That's one way to go. But you sort of have to think about who it's going to.



As a designer, I feel like in the beginning I made things harder than they needed to be. People like Target, they really just want a pillow with a little chick on it. In a way, you have to figure out how to give them that pillow with a chick on it, with an edge. Or, it needs to be YOUR pillow with a chick on it. Or you don't give them the pillow with a chick on it, you give them something else, but you give them something else that that person can relate to. And you think about who's going to be buying it.

When I started designing, it was really hard for me to get out of my own life. Really, people want a lamp with a base that sits on a table next to a sofa that fits into the format of their life. You can break that format, and you're going to find a few people that want a broken format, that are attracted to that, or you can stick in the format, and you can reach that much of the population. There are a lot of really interesting things to do right in the format. You don't always have to break all the rules.

I feel like the core point there is to really think about who you're selling to. Especially if you're a designer/maker, you can get caught up in "I'm doing this because I feel a need to create this thing." But if you want to step it up into a business, then it's not centrally important that you feel a need to make these things. It's more important who is going to consume them.

Exactly. Really, the business plan is to say, "OK, what's missing in the world? I'm going to make that thing!" And maybe it's, oh, the world needs Calvin Klein underwear. You're satisfying this need for something that was not there. But the problem with that is it's not always fun. I can't imagine that underwear was hugely rewarding for Calvin, except for the fact that it made him billions of dollars! But that's why he kept doing the collection, to feel creatively rewarded. I think you've gotta do a little bit of everything.

What I love about my Reality line is that it actually does both things. A lot of people want it, and I enjoy it. That's the sweet spot. That's where you want to be. But it's hard to get there.

You managed to turn your school thesis project into a business. Could you tell us a little about that transition?

My design degree is my grad degree. My undergraduate degree was in political science. I did the whole "academic" thing and I got that out of my system, basically because my parents highly recommended that I do that. So I did it. I'm not bad at that stuff; I graduated cum laude and I can read and I can write and analyze things. I'm very happy that I have that degree. But then I moved back to the city and started realizing that everything that I enjoyed doing was creative, was what I had done in high school. You don't change. You don't just go off and study political science and then decide to be a political scientist. It was innate in me that I was going to be creative.

So I went and took some classes, and ended up at Pratt. But then I was 27, so when I got out of school, I was like, "I've gotta figure this thing out." I went to work at a cosmetics firm called Prescriptives, which is a very high-design branch of Estee Lauder. They hired me in store design. I worked there for a couple of years. One of the guys who I worked with also did furniture, and had shown in the furniture fair for a couple of years. I looked at him, and I thought, "God, that's what I want to do." I quit my job, and I took some freelance work, but basically I took the whole spring off and I took my thesis and I turned it into real product. I had it made, etc. My grandmother had died and she left me a little bit of cash, so I took that money and I funneled it starting a little furniture business.

At the time, I had studied under the big shadow of Philippe Starck. He was THE design star at the moment. Everything was shaped like a horn. Prescriptives was a totally different influence - they were very modern, everything was Jacobsen chairs. My furniture was a reaction to what was going on at the time, all the trendy Philippe Starck stuff.

I had some luck with it. I did that for a couple of years and sold quite a bit of it. But then a got a little bored, actually. Bored, and it was so scary. Because you're making things that cost $3,000, and I'd have to lay out the money, and then it breaks or something... It scared the hell out of me. I got through a couple years of it. Plus I just kept making the same thing over and over again. Even though it was this really flexible system, and you could do a lot of things with it, I just realized I was going to be doing the same thing over and over again. So I stopped doing it. And then I designed another line of furniture, I did some lighting, I started adding to it, and then some of the interior work kicked in. That was when Murray found me and I did Moss.



What's really cool about your work is that you do everything from spaces down to tiny objects. Could you talk a little bit about getting into interiors?

Prescriptives was what got me into interiors. The art director there hired me to be in the interior design department, even though I was an industrial designer. And that was pretty visionary, actually. The United States is all about pigeon-holing people. It's like, if you've designed one thing, then they'll come back to you and you'll design the same thing over and over again. It's very hard to do different things. So here's this guy hiring me to do interiors. He had the ability to see that someone could do other things. That was where I got the experience. And then when I broke out on my own, a second visionary person came along, and that was Murray Moss.

He saw my furniture, and asked me to design a store for him. That was a nice little job, at the time, and it's turned into much more because the store has gotten so famous. At the time it was a little job down in SoHo!

I realized that interiors was a potential source of income and I couldn't ignore it, even though I really wanted to be doing the furniture and lighting and product design. That was really where my heart was. And now, my business is about 50/50, if you can believe it, interiors/product design. It's split right down the middle, and I like both equally.

There are a lot of things about interiors that are different. You need more people. It was really difficult when I was doing it by myself. Now I have a very competent staff. There are so many more details. You can really get your head around a product. You know all the details really intimately and you can go deeper and deeper and deeper into the details, whereas in interiors you can just never get that deep into everything. Also, if you have that product design experience it's like, I'm used to telling them where the screw goes, you know? So then you're like spending all your time worrying about where the screws are going, when what you really want to be doing is defining the big picture. It's a very different game.

But doing one informs the other. I love having both of them. I do believe that all designers should have the opportunity, or, that you become a better designer if you have the opportunity, to cross fields. It's good for your head. I learn one thing one place and bring it to something else and it's more expansive, in a way. It's all sort of the same thing, you know? And now I'm doing a whole bunch of graphics, too, which is a whole other thing. But I've really consciously... I'm just doing that graphic project on my own, because no one's going to hire me to do it until they see what I do. If you want to go somewhere, I always say this to people, it's like, I would just tell people, "I'm a furniture designer." And then all of a sudden you become a furniture designer.



So that was the story of how you went from furniture to "bigger" things. How did you go from furniture to "smaller" things, like the Reality line that you're so well known for?

It's hard doing product design, getting people to believe in you enough to do a piece of injection-molded plastic for them. It's very difficult to build enough confidence in people. But I managed to do all that; I had a few people who believed in me a lot and allowed me to do all that stuff.

A couple years a go, I looked at my roster of clients: Target, Estee Lauder, Corian, which is DuPont, and there might have been another one in there... They were these big corporate clients. Which is great. That's what you aspire to. But then you get there, and you realize that all you're doing is sitting in these big meetings and trying to satisfy a team of eighteen people. I do love that work; I love coming out of a meeting, listening to all these different things and you find the one sweet spot where everyone's happy with it. That's really exciting, it's really fun, it's a very satisfying experience. But it's also very different than just going, "Eh, I want to cast a pig today."

It's a very different thing. What makes one fun makes the other one fun too. It makes the other one the opposite, the antithesis of it. While on one side, there's a brand you've got to work within, or you're helping to shape a brand, or solve a problem, or whatever it is you're doing for your corporate client, the other side is like, "What do I want to do today?"

I really missed that. I thought, "I want to give that manufacturing thing another go." And I had the idea for the Reality stuff. I did the hands, the candlesticks, and the pig first. Honestly, what I liked about them was that they were small goods. And the reason that I thought I could give a go at the manufacturing business again was because they were these small goods. That was why I got out of manufacturing the furniture. When I say "manufacturing," it was like, I had a wood guy, I had a metal guy, I had a basement. I wasn't like a factory or anything. This time it was, I had a guy who could cast the resin and I had a basement. It was no different. But you can fit a whole lot more pigs in a basement than tables. I knew that it was a different formula, and I had a feeling that I could make it work.



The piggy bank kind of started it. I was like, "This is a great idea to do the cast piggy bank from a real pig!" And I wanted to get it out there before anyone else did. Sometimes you get that frantic feeling like you have this good idea and you've gotta gotta get it out. I showed it to Mr. Alessi, I showed it to the guy who owns Magis, Mr. Perazza, I showed it to Umbra, I showed it to a bunch of people and everyone rejected it. They were like, "No, you know, we're not doing pigs this year." But I knew it was a good idea, so that was what prompted me to just make it, get it out there, and start selling it. At that point in my career, I'd been designing store interiors for years. So that all of a sudden when I had goods to sell again, it wasn't like when I was doing the furniture, which was just like a shot in the dark. I knew all these people, and they were really great, they bought into it.

I had it for about a year, maybe a little bit more, making them and selling them. And then I showed with an old friend at the furniture fair, Ross Menuez. He's a great designer and he has this company called Salvor. He was doing all these animal prints, and we sort of saw a pig, an owl, let's put them together, so we did. We showed together. And then it turned out that his business partner in Salvor ended up picking up the production of the Reality line, and that whole company became Areaware. Which is the company that makes and sells them now. They have great distribution, and sales have done very very well all over the place.

I liked what you said about your initial furniture line being a reaction to the Philippe Starck style, and then the Reality line being a reaction to what you were doing in the corporate world. Is that a big part of your design philosophy?

I never really thought about it like that before.

Do you have a design philosophy that you apply?

I like to think that I'm broader than one philosophy. I like to think that I'm not the person who takes the same aesthetic and sort of stamps it on a bunch of things. My work is appropriate to what I'm doing, and I have enough stuff going on that I can draw from a variety of places. I'm interested in your question about the reaction, though. It's very interesting. I don't know, I think I could probably write a whole dissertation on it!

As a student, that's what everyone does. You're in this rebellious period and you see what's going on out there and you're like, I'm not gonna do that! Or, I'm gonna do something DIFFERENT, I'm gonna make my name, or whatever. So I think that's kind of a student thing. And then, maybe I just haven't grown up! [Laughs.] Really, though, life is a series of actions and reactions, so I have a feeling that it's more that than it is any philosophy. I'd like to build it into a whole thesis, though!

What advice do you have for young designers?

When you're young, everything seems very very precious. You have an idea and it's the most precious thing in the world. Everyone always wants to know how to protect it. And then as you get older, you realize people will not steal an idea unless it's already making someone money. You only steal an idea that's valuable. Just an idea is not valuable, unless it's been tested. That's what I've experienced, anyway.

What you realize is, the hardest part is making it. That's where the commitment comes. I always liken it to the birth process. Conception is really easy, but it's the labor, and then the birth, and then the nurturing, that's the hard part. The idea part is great, but its worthless unless you make it into something and you demonstrate it to people.



I think that's a big part of what sets apart people who actually make a career for themselves, is that follow-through. I think that's really what separates people. Exactly what you just said - it's easy to have a prototype, but to have something that can wholesale is much, much more work.

Yeah, price structure, or whatever. And I used to think that was like magic, that the business people stepped in and they figured it out. But then you realize that many of these small companies are figuring it out the same way you would. You sort of think that "business" is "objective." Like it's this world in which you deal with people in a "business" sense. And then you realize that the people who you do the most work for are people who you get along with. They're people who you would have played around in the schoolyard with, you know? There's not some magic, objective playing field. It's very subjective. And you really only want to work with the people that you get along with and have a like mind with, and that's how good things happen. All those myths just get broken down over time.

One of my questions was how you got clients when you were just starting out, and I think you already sort of answered it in that they were people who you already knew, which I think ties into what you just said about working with people who you're friends with.

What's so weird is that all these people who I was starting out with, we were all in the design trenches at Prescriptives or wherever, the first couple of jobs that I had... I wish I actually had had more of that. I wish I had worked at about five companies before I broke out on my own, because all of those people that I worked with have gone off and become creative directors and now they can give me work. Or they tell two friends who tell two friends. It's amazing how that network grows and changes and morphs into people who are actually of influence and can actually make decisions and can actually sign a check. It's like, Wow! How'd that happen?

Once again, they were just people that you were going out to drinks with after work, or whatever it was. It's also weird what comes around. You'll be focused really hard on trying to go after some job, and then the next day someone from your past calls and he's like, "Oh, hey, how are you, my sister Bonnie's starting a blah blah blah," and then that ends up being your next job. It wasn't what you were focusing on it all, it's some curveball. I always say to the guys in the back, you won't even believe how work gets generated in here. But it's about having those sorts of ties, those long tentacles, the deep roots. Continue Reading....

redstr/collective is the collective effort of Alex Valich and Christine Warren. A step ahead of most designers, rather than just talking about the things they don't like in the world around them, they design responses. And their actions speak much, much louder than words. www.redstrcollective.com



I read your philosophy on your website, and it mentioned how you see yourselves as "DJs of design, sampling, mixing and spinning together from different sources to create something entirely unique." I think that's a fantastic analogy. Could you talk a little about that?

Christine: Well it kind of goes back to, there aren't any new ideas. You can't be truly original. Everything is built upon something that came before. So you have to take that into consideration when you're creating something. Why start from scratch? Find a couple of things that are doing something well and bring them together and mix them up. Musicians sample sounds. We sample form, or color, or texture.

Alex: But it's like the difference between a late-'90s Puff Daddy song and a really good Chemical Brothers song. We'll take stuff, and sample it, and abstract it, rather than just sample the exact thing. We won't take what we call the "Cast This" route, which is just taking something you find and casting it. That's the Puff Daddy version.



In my opinion, in order for sampling to work well you have to go the "idea" route. If you're going to copy something that already exists in the world, it can be really cool, but there has to be a conceptual reason behind it. Your version has to illuminate some deeper meaning in that common object.

Alex: I also think part of it is that casting is a very simple manufacturing method. For example, when you first learn to slip-cast porcelain, the first couple molds you're going to make will be of something you have in your house. You'll cast a tabasco bottle or something. And it will look pretty cool. But you shouldn't think it's anything more than that.

Christine: It's an easy trap to fall into. An important part of "sampling" is "editing". That's what makes a great designer - someone who can really edit.

That's where having two people helps.

Christine: Exactly.

Alex: And that's another reason why it's great to collaborate with other people. Say it's the two of us collaborating with two others. It really makes it even better. You come up with some really good stuff together. I always enjoy it. We're going to be collaborating with Scrapile on a furniture line for ICFF this year.

Christine: With the right people, you can get better, cooperative work.

Alex: The one person design "star", or whatever the fuck they want to call it, pretty much puts out the same shit over and over again. Their stuff all looks the same.

Christine: And that's definitely not what our work is about. We're always thinking what would be most appropriate.

You started redstr/collective in 2003. What gave you the confidence to strike out on your own?

Christine: I don't even know if it was confidence. We were just jobless, and we had nothing else to do, so we were like, "Might as well make our own stuff."

Alex: I always tell people the same thing. Sheer stupidity. I really go with that. The other thing, too, is that we were given a good opportunity. At the time we were both freelancing for random people. Christine was working for Boym Patners, where she worked for 8 years or so.

Christine: I kind of knew the inside of the business, from them. They didn't make any money on product design. They'd get $8 royalty checks. That doesn't pay any bills. So they did all this exhibition design work. But it was interesting, they started doing the monuments and stuff then, and so it was like actually you could make a product, and sell it to a small base, and actually make some money. So it was like, well if they can do it... That kind of showed me that you can do your own stuff and make money. If you're smart about it.

Alex: And after that, we met with Dave Alhadeff from The Future Perfect, just when he was starting his store. He had like one piece of furniture in there.

Christine: He wasn't even open. Basically he needed to find people with stuff. Which was really key for us and for a lot of designers, because it brought a lot of people together. It was the right thing at the right time, and it just was great.

Alex: We didn't even have anything produced, yet. We just had ideas and random prototypes and we didn't know what we were going to do with it. We met with him, and he was like, "OK, I want this many of this product and this many of this product in 2 months." And then, fuck, we had to make them.

Christine: It was a good problem to have.

Alex: We had the ambition, we had the background to do it, and then we were given an opportunity. Those three things, I think, were vital to how we started.

Christine: One of our first products was the barf bags. We went to ICFF one year, maybe 2002, and it was just really horrible. It made us kind of ill, and we wanted to make a statement about it.



Wow. I love that product, and it makes it even better to know that it was a reaction to ICFF.

Christine: Yeah. We just had to do something to respond to it.

Alex: Our attitude is, if we see something we don't like, it's better to not just talk shit about it but actually design something as a response.

Christine: All designers can talk shit. It's easy to say, "That sucks," or "I had that idea last year."

I think that's a great way to turn a negative into something positive - to actively respond. And then, once you guys were making things, how did you get the word out about your work?

Alex: A lot of us who were connected through The Future Perfect - Jason Miller, Tobias Wong, Scrapile, and others - started doing group shows together. And that was really important, because it drove people to see the work. And off of that was the press vehicle.

Christine: People were dying to see something new and interesting, so I like to think a lot of it happened because the work was just good. But at the same time, you have to know how to get it out there.

Alex: I think we all had the feeling, at that point, that it was a lot better to get attention for us collectively as a community or a movement. And then the work on its own, each individual piece and person, kind of stands out.



Do you think this community/group of designers you've been talking about still exists?

Alex: Some of the people are still around, and some of them have splintered off. I think the nature of the design business was a certain way between 2003 and 2006, and after 2006, the things going on in the economy have kind of caused people to go their own ways. There aren't so many of these group shows. There aren't so many of the sponsors that want to pay for these group shows. Everyone started struggling more just to pay rent, and that kind of put a damper on it.

It's great that you brought up sponsors. Independent designers have to know how to approach that world and make them care about design. How did you guys get sponsors for your shows?

Alex: Sometimes we reached out, and sometimes people would come to us. A lot of times with the group shows, because they were done either through The Future Perfect or curated by Tobias Wong, there'd be a sponsor already in place.

Christine: Well anytime you're throwing a party, you've gotta have liquor, and you don't want to pay for it. Alcohol sponsors are so easy to get. They're whores.

Alex: A lot of times you can get the liquor sponsors not just to give you the free liquor but to pay for the invites, and staff, and bartenders and stuff.

Christine: And we've done some eco-products with sponsors that gave us new materials and asked us to do something with them. That's always fun.

Alex: Getting sponsored isn't just about having someone write you a check. Like Christine was saying, materials sponsors or vendors can pay for the production of things. We've done shows with Bettencourt Green Building Supplies, where they supplied all the materials. That helps the designers out a lot.



What do you consider to be your biggest success so far?

Christine: For me, probably the American Dollhouse show. We had a good body of work and it was a vision that we presented. I'm really proud of that. And also the cups, because we've gotten to sell them!

Alex: The cups have done really well. They've been in a lot of publications and magazines. The fact that the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA picked them up kind of made me the happiest. I think the cups combine everything we've learned both creatively and in terms of running a business.



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