Epduic

Designed for class

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Shellhammer, What a Name...

Last Thursday April 23rd, we were visited in our classroom by Bradford Shellhammer via Skype. I new this was going to be a great talk when he Shared with us his musical talent that he does whenever he's drunk. Then at this party he got a spot in a band with some big named designers because one of them overheard him. It was a great random story.Shellhammer had a shit ton of experience under his belt which allowed him to know exactly what role he wants to play in the design industry. His story of figuring himself out through working & studying different things allowed him to realize that he wanted to promote a sense of universal design for everyone, where "design isn't behind a glass case."His biggest success as well as let down was Fab. Fab was like an Etsy where designers and artisans could sell there stuff online. It took 3 months to build fab and he turned it into a billion dollar company! Great success but then the relationship within the company went south because of different interest in mind and shit hit the fan. But nonetheless the fab experience gave him "street cred" which allowed him to start up his own business model with just his vision. Bizar is a business that empowers entrepreneurs  and not crafty people like etsy does.

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When you're hot, you're hot. When you're not, you're not.

Brandford Shellhammer, CEO of Bizar, explaining the fluctuating dynamics of the design life.

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Drifting through

On April 16th we visitied Chris Mantz, the creator of Drift eyewear, at his Lake Street workshop space. It was a shady place with no correct address and the door was left unlocked for us to walk in but with no idea if that was the right place. Inside was a comfortably sized studio with tooling and machines all lined up that were all needed to create a set of Drift glasses. 

Mantz story of how he got to where he was at was really intriguing. He graduated as a mechanical engineer and worked at a manufacturing factory making bank but didn’t know much about making physical things, his job was just to make things work. So he quit his manufacturing job and got a fabrication job making a great less amount of money but he was learning a whole lot about fabrication.

When asked about why he went into eyewear he said it found him. At the time (4 years ago) the market for fashionable eyeware was limited and wooden oculus were rare to exist because of how poorly they handled the lenses. He had an idea and ran with it even though he didn't have everything figured out ( taking risk is probably one of the best ways to learn and your sort of forced to learn).

Drift seems like its in a bind where they have high demand but there only so small of a business to fill all the orders. In the early stages of drift just as they were becoming a hot item around fashion stores, he increased the price in order to slow down orders but it did the opposite effect... He was really hesitant to source anything out and take drift to a larger scale because he stated that he would need to change his branding in order to fit the masses. The way I see it is that he wants to keep his brand original and not have it turn into something that's disconnected from his ideal vision.  Especially that it’s an awesome sustainable business and having it go large scale might affect that important aspect.

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We're three years behind in style, but as long as your in the game. . . your in the game.

Chris Mantz, founder of Drift eyeware, speaking to UIC students about his business. 

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Sweatshop time!

Production has started on King Cup two weeks ago! Its hitting a slow zone currently with school and work taking a toll. But one thing that I didn’t expect with fulfillment is the logistics that goes behind every decision!

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Talking with CEO’s

When I saw Kegan schouwenburgs video on customized foot wear, I doubted its effectiveness thinking on how three flat pictures will surly provide comfort without any consideration of other ergonomic factors... But then she said something that provided me some comfort in her business model which was, "at the end of the day, we make software. Software is what provides mass customization." That statement captured the power that might possibly be behind the three picture algorithm computations. I still have my doubts but at this day in age it seems like it has the potential to work and eliminate the expensive orthopedic visit.  Kegan was an amazing library of knowledge & expertise in scaling up and running a business... I mean she is CEO of Soles. She stated that as CEO she's in charge of choosing the right people to work for her, keeping the team functional, strategy, and money flow. She never mentioned designing as part of that. I could completely relate to her, and learned that I don’t want to be the person who deals with all the ‘non-fun’ things of overlooking a business. The way I see it is that your doing things that you weren't interested in doing but are sort of lead to doing based on your skill-sets. 

One thing I found interesting is that almost every person has a CEO coach which = mentor.

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Entrepreneurship has changed from individually having an idea and becoming rich. Now its how to turn this into a business

It was either Pepin Gelardi or Dean DiPietro from Tomorrow Lab. Flip a coin

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Pepin n’ Dean 

4/2/15

The biggest thing I'll take away would be the response given to Bindle from Pepin Gelardi about using sustainable practices. He made me realize that if you work at a consultancy you are in the unique power position to be able to push change in designing products to be sustainable. You are essentially the biggest "hippie" in a products life, as he stated in his response. He made me realize that working at a consultancy mean that you have businesses coming to you for design, so you essentially have the power to output sustainable designs that clients would potentially be in favor of. Pepin made it sound so easy and it potentially might be, but thinking about it I question if it really is. He did put into context how easy it can be by explaining the significance if you shave off a gram of plastic from your design that means one gram x 900000. But then, I think about how unpractical it might be for a larger business to adopt new manufacturing methods AND rebrand itself in order to accommodate a sustainable practice. So to Pepins point of shaving off a gram of plastic from a design, is by far an attractive method to be a sustainable designer. Which brings me back to Prof. Melameds teaching of sustainability: design products with less parts. The practical way to sustainable design seems to be to alter the product for manufacturing efficiency and not by using new sustainable materials.

Dean DiPietro's mechanical engineer mindset was clearly showing as he spoke restrictively about design constraints and absolutes to manufacturing, leaving no room for 'up in the air' concepts. But it seems like the duo mind sets is what makes the branding of Tomorrow Lab products stronger. The interdisciplinary backgrounds is what ground ideas into marketable products.

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Licensor 

Bruce Tharp opened up my mind to the idea of licensing. I never new that you could make millions with just sharing a million dollar idea to a company. However, like Bruce reiterated, it's only a very slim marginal amount of licenses that do produce millions for the inventor like the case of Rodney Johnson.

The concept still seems weird to me that you could basically make a living by selling your ideas but I guess thats why its an extremely difficult game to get into. But, I’m glad that Tharp found his ideal role in design doing licensing after sharing with us his painful angst in the business/fulfillment side of design.   I learned a lot of terminology like what a provisional patent application (PPA) & how it works along with other terms like standard licensing agreement forms.

Tharp shed some light on an interesting point, which he describes as being market driven or design driven. He said it’s best to be market driven since you “easily know where the money is at” (in my words). It makes perfect sense to be market driven unless you have a new outstanding desirable design, if not, then it’s tougher for companies to want to license a new design because it’s a risk for them to take. On the other hand being market driven in design allows companies to take less of a risk already knowing that there is a market out there for whatever you designed in relation to the market. As Bruce and countless others have said, “Knowing your market is key.”

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Never Judge a Book... Rena Tom

Never judge a book by its cover they say, but I couldn't help but to judge the author after reading the content of her pricy PDF. Rena Tom turned out to be more informative than I expected with some new views on 'retail readiness'.

Rena expressed two major survival points as a small business: cash flow & time flow. She stated cash flow is important to keep you afloat till your next large wholesale season. If you don't have a steady cash flow then it becomes really difficult for you to explore new things to improve as a business, since the money will have to come out of debt or your own pocket and no one like that. Time flow is critical as well since there’s seasons of trade shows, holidays, and other events that 

She has experienced many roles in design from website development to jewelry with a strength in retail. Her main focus currently is Makeshift Society, which is shared workspaces for creative/business individuals to share the resources of each other. She quoted that it came about “from me being super lonely” as she was working from home. Which i bet is true because if your working from home and only make contact with people through phone or email, you lose the full human connection that happens between people. Rena also briefly talked about using the word society in Makeshift SOCIETY, and how important it was to use that word for its definition. Its sort of a defining feature of our era but in reality as humans, period. 

When Rena was pondering what the next step was for Makeshift next, I wanted to yell from the back of the room-- CHICAGO!

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Im looking for people who have more than just the 'one-pop-hit' [design]. And if they choose all these 'one-pop-hit' submissions, then they become that 'one-pop-hit' buisness

Lisa Smith, Design director at Areaware speaking to us about how Areaware is trying to brand itself. 

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Lisa Smith from Areaware

The biggest insight in Lisa Smith’s talk was that everyone wants to be a designer, but no one wants to facilitate the design and thats her biggest role currently at Areaware. She was hired to call the shots at Areawaer on making plans, and basically developing a brand style. To develop this brand, she’s moving away from the type of designers/artist that just submit random one hit wonder work to Areawear. Instead she wants people who have a specific design thinking that allows them to produce families of great products, and by doing that, she hopes that the branding starts to show through. 

She hates saying ‘no’ as a director which I can easily understand because if theres an awesome project that comes through, but it’s not in line with what the vision is then it has to regretfully be filed away...

The biggest thing she stresses is that sales is sooo much about deliverable based timings which to me just adds a whole layer of stress from deadlines, and communication. Also, the fact that design takes time to show deliverables seems like a huge disconnect with sales. I guess thats why it’s difficult for companies to wrap their heads around design. Its great to see how multiple disciplines, especially in design, are useful and able to help(or not) in the real world.   

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Doing Simple Honest Work

Simple Scott Thomas provided us with a new look into design. He graduated as an architect which has shown influence through his process of website building. In the same way that architecture has shown him to walk through spaces, he walks through websites in a very computational order.

On a side note, during my summer internship I remember a coworker showing us a cool website design, specifically the scroll function of fast company (which has changed). Fast forward to February, and the guy behind the curtains was 3 ft in front of me...

Anyways... Simple Scott is mostly known for his Designing Obama book that he compiled with the works of various artist. He sold a great story about our nation being invigorated with the hope of a new honest president after a years of shit consistently hitting the fan. What was interesting was that Scott's project was one of the first projects to attract the attention of Max Temkin, Scott Wilson & many others to look into kickstarter. Scott couldn't find a publisher that met his terms so he turned to kickstarter for making his book, and thats what interested a lot of designers like Wilson because we often don't have the support of manufactures/investors to push out a great product since their main focus is the bottom line.

I really appreciate the fact that he was set on only making a limited amount of Designing Obama, and not giving in to the pressure of demand. Scarcity creates and maintains value. I just wished he would've directly spoken about his delays in production so that we might have been able to learn something from it.

Aside his other great work, one that I value most is The noun project. An awesome idea of "Creating, Sharing and Celebrating the World's Visual Language" that him and his college friend Edward created. It's those kinds of ideas that change the world in the simplest terms. The filtering process behind picking and choosing which icon best represents a word is a great refinement process of its own which leads to what Scott preaches, simplicity. 

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500%

Reflections on my first Kickstarter.

It was Friday 2/27/2015, 4:59pm. Bindle Stick, Hum, & I, watched our kickstarter project page countdown while multitasking on circuiting and coding. It was the same uneventful feeling as New Years Eve, once it hit zero, nothing happened besides our page locking down... No one in our class knew of the personal milestone that had just occurred except for us. We smiled knowing that everything we had dedicated ourselves to in the past months came to a successful end(but really only the start), and we officially have products under our name to give to the world...

Insights I learned...

Be organized with your media press files/photos! I remember Craighton told us this towards the beginning but I failed to follow through. I probably wasted 2 hours in total just clicking through my files looking for images of my project (among hundreds) to send out on demand.

Within the duration of your funding period, you have to live, breath, sleep your project. I surely could've done this more with King Cup, in fun ways too, but I was limited by certain circumstances. One thing I wish I could go back and do is be open to everyone about my project on a personal face to face level like when commuting, while waiting in line at a store, or even while urinating next to someone... I ride the CTA almost everyday with many people shuffling next to me every trip. If only I talked to everyone that sat next to me in the month of February I could've taped into them on a personal level & they would be inclined to check it out and share it. Thats probably the best consumer relationship to produce, but the problem was I would feel dirty since the basis of conversing with this stranger would be about backing King Cup and not about building a personal relationship.

Don't waste anyones time. If your writing to the media about your project be clear and concise, and give them all your links related to the project so they may easily research/reference. Tell them exactly why your project is worthy of fitting in with their work/media.

Guerrilla advertise if necessary. It allows you to get creative and adventurous with your marketing. For example, every time I went out to a social event (club/bar/party/meeting) I left about 5 cubed blocks with my KS info written on them, littered though-out bar tops/bathroom/couches ect. The bad thing is that your never know if they work unless a backer tells you. In my case one of my friends found one in a bathroom and texted me.

Have your closing images/info/links all ready way before hand. I was struggling with trying to  figure out how to create a mail chimp link. It was terrible.

It gets addicting. If you set a limited amount, don't count on it! As people nation wide personally express how much they love the project and really want one, you can't help but to say yes to a fan.

Just be Honest and Hustle.

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This mornings campus wide e-mail.

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Partnership is like marriage, and you know what happens to half of those...

Scott Wilson, Founder of Minimal

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I kind of kickstarted Kickstarter...

Scott Wilson interview

I always thought Scott Wilson was just a well known commercial designer, but haven't realized how many startups and kickstarter-like projects he has done. 

The thing that ran consistently throughout the interview was the emphasize on taking risk, and not having fear of failing (which he kind of contradicted himself in the beginning). Failing as we know by now, hopefully, is the best teacher and motivator. And Scott said to not be afraid of doing something controversial, which is great advise because thats often times what sets you apart and gets new ideas to evolve. He warns if we do make something controversial, make sure we have something for consumers to buy at the end of their viewing besides the controversial product.

One thing I found interesting was when Scott said "its not always the great product that wins.. it can depend on the marketing.." I automatically thought of Freakers.

One question that arose was, if the project for the creative tablet for Microsoft got denied but had so much potential and positivity around it why can't it be revived today?