When Home Depot hit Manhattan for the first time last summer, it knew it needed some particularly cool stuff to appeal to the picky denizens of the Big Apple. The retailer called on John Christakos, whose Blu Dot is a cult furniture designer. For Christakos, the Home Depot deal was a chance to stretch his company, part of his strategy to be the go-to outfit for big chain retailers looking for some Target-like design fairy dust. (Target already sells Blu Dot.) Christakos had just two weeks to design, prototype, and deliver product samples, normally a 12-week process, and "the price points were pretty extreme," he admits. But he came through, and sales so exceeded expectations (three times the rosiest projection) that he had to scramble to meet demand. Home Depot has yet to indicate if it will continue the relationship. But Christakos has his hands full anyway: His furniture will grace every babyGap outlet this year.
President and designer
Blu Dot Design & Manufacturing Inc.
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Read John's original entry:
We took our core strengths of intelligent, efficient furniture design originally marketed to a higher end consumer, such as Moss and Design Within Reach and translated these concepts for a broader market for Home Depot and Gap. While most furniture manufacturers choose to be in one or the other market, we made it feasible and actually beneficial to our business as a whole, to reach both markets. In this way we could maintain our niche brand which allows us to explore new ideas while playing with the mass marketers which is much more profitable.
The marketing strength of our higher end niche brand opened--and continues to open—the doors of the big guys. It’s our calling card. Although the premise of our niche brand has always been “affordable design” we have taken this concept to the “even MORE affordable” level for our big retailer clients addressing their specific needs and designing products with broader appeal, greater functional flexibility and much lower price points through less expensive materials and overseas production.
Time was one obstacle. For Home Depot, two new stores were opening in Manhattan and they gave us about two weeks to design, prototype and fly samples to Atlanta—a process that usually takes a minimum of 12 weeks. Tweaks were made, new samples produced and initial production completed in a mere 6 weeks. The other obstacle was “too much of a good thing” Sales at HD were much brisker than anticipated--about three times what our buyer had told us to expect as a “healthy sales rate”. From these two test stores, we were almost out of stock before we got going. We air freighted some fast moving items in and expedited production in our facility in Asia. With Gap, the challenge was also a fast pace and trying to incorporate numerous design changes on the fly as we built several prototype stores. Managing that change was a challenge.
This marketing approach of using our brand as a calling card has gotten us two big clients this year: the Gap and Home Depot. While our sales have grown by 50 percent over the past two years, we look at these new clients as a feather in our cap to prove that although a niche company, we are capable of handling these bigger clients. And this, we hope, will prove beneficial to our getting even more big clients.
Our goal is to grow both our high and low end product lines, extending the reach to other similar accounts. We hope to grow Sales by 40% in 2005. We want to begin to look at licensing opportunities to leverage the concept of “design you can actually afford” into other categories, such as lighting and office furniture, for which we do not necessarily want to set up manufacturing capacity or distribution.
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