So You Want to Be a Product Designer—Design Within Reach

JOHN EDELMAN, President and CEO
KARI WOLDUM, Vice President of Merchandising

The $64,000 Question
John Edelman: What do we look for? Someone who has the ability to look
at the marketplace and at our assortment and find a void, who then has the vision to design something that fills the void, but stays in line with the mix of products that we have. It’s a very difficult thing.

Kari Woldum: There are plenty of designers out there who act as their own inspiration, but when it comes to translating that into something that is scalable, a lot of them are challenged.

Leave Your Ego at the Door
JE: Designers need to strip their ego off first and ask, “What problem am I solving? What purpose will the product have? Is there a way to produce it?” A lot of them don’t want to do that. They get caught up in getting editorial. Selling three of something is not that hard. Selling 300 of something gets really hard.

Total Immersion
KW: What gets my attention is designers who come to the table immersed in our brand, who spent a ton of time in our stores and poring over every page of the catalog before they approached us with a concept. It’s very clear from the get-go who’s done this. I always joke: “It’s like they’ve been sitting behind my desk all day long and listening to everything we say about the brand.”

The Market-Savvy Rule
JE: If you want to design an injection-molded chair, you’d better know that you can sell a bunch of them. Otherwise, they’re not producible. A sofa, on the other hand, has lower minimums. So you must understand production capabilities and minimums. We have limited real estate in which to show products. Our stores aren’t big enough in many cases. To make it onto the floor, you have to serve a purpose.

KW: So if you’re offering up the next hot table, you better be real confident that it can replace one of the three tables that are on the floor right now, and understand why it can do that.