What is a design entrepreneur?
Let's get our terms straight. I co-chair the School of Visual Arts MFA Design Program in New York, which is called the "designer as author" program. We've added "and entrepreneur" to our informal discussions but ostensibly we are teaching entrepreneurship. This means designers employ their skills and talents to create their own content, then package, fabricate and promote it, with the goal of selling it in the marketplace of ideas and goods. So a design entrepreneur is someone who practices this hybrid form of design. She is not a servant to a client but rather a self-motivator who has at least one big idea and realizes it by combining business and art.
Is this a fulltime profession?
Not necessarily. We tell our students that even if they never actually sell their wares, the fact they've gone the distance in creating and seeking a market will give them more confidence than if they never attempted it. Some of our students have succeeded in putting original products into the market and have started businesses. Others have stuck with their one big idea while continuing to work as traditional designers. It's whatever the market will bear and the individual's comfort level will tolerate.
What would you say is the epitome of design entrepreneurship?
In my book, The Education of a Design Entrepreneur, I feature many different examples, such as toy designer/makers like Higashi/Glaser and Richard McGuire. The former duo has created a medium-sized entrepreneurial business (Seabonz, shown at right, is one of their products), while the latter sees toys as part of a larger, holistic practice. J&M Martinez, two former advertising art directors who have gone into the upscale stationery and card business (example shown at left), sold their original company and restarted with a different line.
Of course, t-shirts and fashions are a favorite. GreenLady and Walking Man fit into these categories. They are, in fact, offshoots of more traditional design firms. Seymour Chwast's Push Pin Studios created lines of candy and boutique confections that were ancillary to the studio's commercial design work. While M&Co under Tibor and Maira Kalman was highly entrepreneurial with its clocks and paper weights.
Isn't a design firm in and of itself entrepreneurial?
You can say that, since it takes an entrepreneurial spirit to start any kind of business and a design firm is a business. However, I make the distinction between following a traditional course, like being a designer and starting a studio, versus being a designer and branching off into other realms of conception and production. So, it helps to have been in business as a designer to be a design entrepreneur, but it's not always necessary.
What is the most successful design entrepreneurial venture you know of?
Conran's stores fit that bill nicely. Sir Conran is a designer and he devoted his entire practice to propagating good design. He doesn't design all he sells but design is key to everything he does.
You spoke of authorship. Can an author be an entrepreneur? Just because you've written or designed a book, does this make you an entrepreneur?
Yes and no. If you are an author for hire, then I'd say no. Unless that is the title of your business, in which case you've established yourself as a commodity. But I'd say book packagers are entrepreneurs and many such packagers are also authors, designers, image makers, and so on. Richard Saul Wurman is a design entrepreneur because he created a product, his Access Guides, and then hired writers, designers and others to fulfill his vision. But he is credited as the author of record. It is his project, start to finish. Saxton Freymann, also featured in my book, is another paradigm. He started as an illustrator who made characters out of fresh fruits and vegetables, such as the example shown at left. Then he made an empire out of doing this in book, calendar, greeting card and other forms. His business now revolves around this quirky and delightful talent.
What else comprises entrepreneurship?
I think it's possible to make anything into a business, with magazines one obvious example. In the book I interview Hans Dieter Reichert, the publisher of a design magazine called Baseline. He is a designer with a thriving firm, but four times a year he carves a piece out of his business to publish an excellent magazine. Also interviewed is Marty Neumier, who published his own magazine called Critique. It too was about design. Sadly, if failed, but not before he published almost 20 issues. And then there is Rudy VanderLans, founder of Emigre, one of the most important design magazines of the 90s. He published it for fifteen years as an outgrowth of his type design business.
What are the risks?
Like Neumier, you can go into debt and have to haul yourself up by your bootstraps. He took a gamble that he'd get advertising and lost. But he made a publication to be proud of. Losing time, money and health is always a risk. That's why it's important to at least have a good business advisor. Making a business is not simply having the big idea and executing it: it requires going the entire distance—finding an audience, promoting to that audience, fulfilling the needs of that audience. If you build it, they won't necessarily come. That is the biggest risk of any business, not just design entrepreneurship.
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Adapted by permission from The Education of a Design Entrepreneur by
Steven Heller. This book is published by Allworth Press. For further
information or to purchase this book at a 20 percent discount, visit
Allworth Press.
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