There’s a serious problem with Morgans Hotels’ new Web site, which launches today. It’s such an engaging experience, you may forget to book a room.
Morgans Hotel Group was the crew that originally launched the boutique hotel phenomenon, which subsequently spawned a flock of knock-offs. Now CMO Scott Williams is challenging his competitors to up the ante on hotel Web sites as well: “Our focus is 100% on building and maintaining brands, and branded experiences, that others want to copy," he said."If vibe can be copied...this site's up for counterfeiting”
Creating a cutting edge aesthetic has always been the driving force
behind the group, which counts on design and a sexy vibe to lure its
target audience. Don’t come to a Morgans Hotel if you want a nice
little Mr. Coffee pot in your room or a big desk where you can pore
over your spreadsheets. But if you revele in the scene, want to sip
exotic cocktails by a see-and-be-seen pool (no maillots, please!), and are willing to pay a premium for design elements that are often more visual than functional, this is your place. Designed to capture the Morgans vibe, the site is packed with video clips of designers talking about the ideas behind their creations, lists of cool things to do in the city in which you’re staying, and luscious photography of the rooms and hotel, all set to scene-appropriate music. Happily, it's also pretty Flash-free.
We tested the site in beta. Here’s what we liked the most:
Designer videos. Hear Wanders talk about how Sleeping Beauty inspired his design for the Mondrian Miami Beach, and Benjamin Noriega Ortiz (above) discuss the role of Alice in Wonderland in the Mondrian L.A. (What’s next in the recession? The Little Match Girl Takes Manhattan?) Be sure to click on Noriega Ortiz’s discussion of how Hollywood’s intrinsic vanity shaped his design. It will explain all those mirrors.
Room selector: Pick your city, click on the hotel, and a list of available rooms for the desired date appears, each with a description of the room’s amenities, and photos of what it looks like. Plus, there's a short list of cool things going on during the time you'll be in town.
The List: MHG partnered with UrbanDaddy to populate the site with activities, restaurants, shops, and clubs curated to the hotels’ target demo (a sampling of which comes up during the booking process). Fittingly, these tend to be heavy on design-themed locations. In London, for example, guests are directed to Damien Hirst’s new mass market shop, the Saatchi Collection, a sing-along for the Sound of Music, and (cool surprise!) the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race. Even if you're not planning to travel, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of the list for a specific city.
Here’s what’s less successful:
Shepard Fairey video. We love Shepard Fairey, but this one ran a little too long, and the editing was weird, with too many close-ups of his mouth. OK, so filming a guy just sitting talking in a chair is tough, but this started to make us uncomfortable. Splicing in shots of his work would help, especially for folks who don't know him beyond the Obama poster.
Sparse content on the older hotels: After reveling in the designer's fantasies for the Mondrians, it's a little disappointing to find so little for the Delano, the Hudson, or the Paramount. Granted, now that Starck's gone over to the competition, MHG can't bring him back to babble on about the chandeliers in the Delano's Rose Ba, but the sheer richness of the other hotels' content makes the older ones seem more conventional by comparison. According to Williams, the content on these hotels will be built out over the next few months. And by next week, the site will start featuring "The Recess Sessions," videos of established and upcoming musical artists, all shot in the hotels.
Finally: would this site tempt us to book a room? For somebody who's no longer 26, and tends to arrive with a battered suitcase and a laptop in tow (yes, even, sadly, while on vacation), the sheer cool quotient of the site is almost intimidating. I am not worthy! But if I were younger, richer, taller, thinner, tanner, blonder, and had cooler jeans, I'd be reaching for my charge card.
If you’ve been pining after Tejo Remy’s drunken chest of drawers--with its secret compartment containing a gold gun, a line of cocaine, and a diamond ring--but can’t tear yourself away from the plunging Nasdaq to get to Amsterdam to score one, take heart. Droog, the devilish Dutch outfit that first introduced the iconic piece opens its flagship store in New York City today.
Droog is an Amsterdam-based design collective launched in 1993 by Renny Ramakers and Gijs Bakker. It first caught the attention of the international design world at the Milan Furniture Fair, where the group staged an exhibit featuring designers who shared the collective’s sensibility, such as Marcel Wanders, Hella Jongerius, and Remy, who have since become contemporary masters.
It championed economy, simplicity, responsibility and wit (droog is Dutch for “dry” or “wry”). In many ways, their aesthetic was a reaction against the excesses of the 1980s (sound familiar?). They were early advocates of designs that emphasized ingenuity over extravagance, often using found objects assembled in unexpected ways to create something entirely new and delightful.
Remy’s chest, called “You Can’t Lay Down Your Memory,” is now in MOMA. The limited edition version, which is on display at Droog’s new store at 76 Greene Street in New York’s SOHO district, features a secret compartment containing a gold-plated revolver, a line of cocaine, a string of pearls, and a diamond ring. In short, all the stuff you might hide in your bedroom dresser. NB, NYPD: the stuff is encased in acrylic resin, so nobody's stopping by for a snort.
Designer Ted Noten first created the secret drawer for an exhibition at Art Basel in 2007. It’s on sale now for the princely sum of $142,500. But think what you’ll save in air fare and hotels by not having to travel to Amsterdam!
Here are a few other iconic pieces on display at the store.
Tree Trunk Bench by Jurgen Bey
Red Blue Lego Chair by Mario Minale
Crystal Virus: Massive Infection by Pieke Bergmans
By turns testy, reproachful, defensive and self-congratulatory, Italian executives took the stage at New York's Museum of Arts and Design last night to insure America that, despite the wilting economy, in Milan, the furniture show will still go on. Along the way, they couldn't resist throwing brickbats at Wall Street, pointing out that if the U.S.'s profligate and irresponsible bankers would stop just futzing with money and do something useful -- like make a chair or sofa, like they do -- we wouldn't all be in this predicament.
Taking aim at both real estate flippers and those who enabled them, Carlo Guglielmi, president of Cosmit, the organization that puts on the Milan Furniture Fair, the world's biggest, said, "Our country prefers industry to finance, work to speculation. Life depends on the ability to create something. No one can prove to me that a piece of paper or a check can give you the same satisfaction as a beautiful garment or a chair."
While noting that the recession had certainly reached even their little corner of northern Italy, the three took pains to insist that Saloni Internationale del Mobile 2009 would be as big and glamorous as ever. More than 2,500 exhibitors are expected to show some 12,000 products over the vast 220K square meters of the Milan Fairgrounds. The event kicks off on April 22 and runs through the 27th. Still, despite the happy talk, there were signs that even I Saloni ("The Event") wasn't immune to the larger forces affecting the global economy. Asked about reports that three big Italian manufacturers, Cassina, Cappellini, and Poltrona Frau had pulled out of the fair, Guglielmi (below, at right), speaking via a simultaneous translation, sputtered a bit, flailing for the right words to frame this striking defection.
"Those companies prefer savings to passion," Guglielmi said, noting that the three companies, which are held by the Charme Group, an Italian luxury goods manufacturer, had hoped to land a deal to supply a new hotel in the UAE. When that failed, they pulled out of the fair. Then he added: "Poltrona Frau's global sales lately were made mostly of seats for cars. Since this sector is feeling the crisis, the company is undergoing a difficult period. They thought it was more important to invest in other things." It was not, he added, how the Italians like to respond to such things, noting that in the past, some great design has emerged during hard times. "You need to be willing to get down and dirty," he said. "But not dirty like in finance." (zing!) And, he said, there are waiting lists for booths, and the hotels are full, with people having to book rooms outside the city. "If we had more space, we could host even more," he said.
The group also revealed this year's special artist, Cerith Wyn Evans, whose work melds light and sculpture. Evans is most famous for his chandeliers which blink out poetry in Morse code. Bloomberg headquarters in New York has a large black glass Evans chandelier that sputters poetry over the flashing terminals. For this show, Evans has created a 7 meter wide neon sculpture (see below) that forms a kind of luminescent cloud. It was, he said, inspired by "the trajectory of a firework, the scan of a mobile telephone, the vapours of a jet stream," and the "bafflingly chaotic ways" of a firefly.
For a man who loves spectacle, it's hard to match Hollywood's annual love-fest in the Kodak Theater. So for New York architect David Rockwell, last night's crystal-swagged extravaganza was about as good as it gets--especially since he was the man draping the stage with 100,000 of the Swarovski dazzlers. Rockwell was the first architect ever to be invited to design the show's sets, but he was no stranger to the theater, having designed the Kodak itself. Speaking prior to the broadcast, Rockwell said, "I know a project is good for me when it's 50% terror, and 50% thrill."
For months, Rockwell has been shuttling between New York and LA, overseeing the set's design, which borrowed equally from Busby Berkeley musicals and Michelangelo's Piazza di Campidoglio in Rome. The tiles on the stage mimicked the kaleidoscopic paving on that square--a favorite Rockwell theme; his Union Square office is filled with kaleidoscopes of all sizes.
The main goal, said Rockwell Group's Barry Richards (pictured below with Rockwell Group's Joan McKeith), who had just flown in from Hollywood for an Oscar party in David's honor at the Carlton Hotel, was "to make the event more like Broadway, where the action is married to the show's narrative." That meant designing a set where the sets could move in full view of the viewing audience, rather than during commercials, as in previous years.
Broadway staging is something of a Rockwell specialty; his group has designed sets for a variety of Broadway shows including "Hairspray," and they're currently working on staging the upcoming "Catch Me If You Can." The crystal curtain, which weighed three tons, took four days to mount. "We knew what it was supposed to look like, not how to put it together," Richards confessed. "Hanging them precisely was a very slow process."
In his book, Spectacle, Rockwell writes, "I am as Blackberry-addicted as they come; however the experience of virtual community pales in the face of the physical experience of spectacle. Spectacles are larger than life. They imprint memories. They induce a heightened state that can only be experienced in the flesh."
It was that goal that drove the set's design, Rockwell says. "The most important thing design can contribute is creating this magical sense of occasion, and the feeling that this can only happen this one night."
The Carlton party, attended by a few dozen of Rockwell's New York design industry pals, was a little short on crystals -- although there were some lovely chandeliers in the hotel's lobby, as well as a mesmerizing snowy painting of old New York lit with fiber optics, which Rockwell had also designed. But there was plenty of champagne, and lots of Oscar cookies.
In a toast, Cindy Allen, editor of Interior Design magazine and the evening's hostess, raised her glass to Rockwell. "At the end of the day, design happens everywhere," she said, "even in Hollywood. So to honor that, we wanted to be together, and share a little love in these hard times."
Laid up with the flu recently, my daughter sent her boyfriend out for chicken soup and orange juice. What he brought back appalled her. "There was this carton of juice on the counter that looked like the generic supermarket brand," she told me. "I thought--gee, he doesn't think I'm worth the good stuff?" She was wrong; he had bought the ‘good stuff'--her favorite brand, Tropicana--but the juice's new packaging was so bland and undistinguished it looked like the low rent made-from-concentrate stuff.
Melissa was not alone in her confusion. Outraged Tropicana loyalists have been flooding the blogs for months to protest the brand's lackluster redesign, calling it everything from "ugly" to "stupid" to "generic." Now, Pepsi execs are finally conceding defeat. They announced late last week that they're bringing back the old look--the classic orange with the straw poking out--that consumers loved…or at least didn't find as offensive as the new look.
It's another embarrassment among several recently that can be traced back to the Arnell Group, the design and branding firm responsible for the Tropicana packaging, the new Pepsi logo, and the crazy brand manifesto, "Breathtaking," that traces Pepsi's brand back to Da Vinci's Vitruvian man and compares the logo's gravitational pull to that of the sun.
That piece of work has been the talk of the chattering classes in New York for weeks, and the butt of a million blog postings online. Following the launch of the company's SuperBowl ads (during which Arnell famously compared himself to Thomas Edison for his brilliance in creating a 3-D ad for the game), I had a chance to sit down with Pepsi execs to talk a bit about their brand strategy.
Even then, they were chagrined about the failure of the Tropicana redesign. "Sometimes you land in a great place, and sometimes you don't. And when you don't, you need to find a better place. Fast," Pepsi's CMO, David Burwick conceded. At the end of the table, one of his lieutenants could barely conceal a snicker. "Words like 'tweak' are in order," he said. "Or beyond 'tweak.'"
To its credit, the larger, $35M campaign, based on the idea of "Squeeze" has been more successful, and Arnell's clever little cap, shaped like half an orange, will still be used in Trop 50, the company's lower calorie juice.
But you have to wonder what's being said behind closed doors up in Purchase, and if the three strikes rule applies to branding consultants as well as major league batters and felons in California.
The most heartwarming story to come out of Fashion Week is taking place far across town from the posh tents at Bryant Park, in the slightly down-at-the-heels precincts of New York's East Village.
Up three flights of steep, bright red stairs in a converted firehouse, Natalie Chanin, founder of Alabama Chanin, is showing a beguiling collection of hand-made clothes to a select audience of buyers and Chanin groupies.
Chanin's label, formerly known as Project Alabama, is that rarity in the fashion biz -- a totally grown-to-sewn-in-the-USA line. In this case, the garments are crafted by a cadre of stitchery wizards in Chanin's tiny hometown of Florence, Alabama.
The clothes, which are all organic cottons, are lavished with quilting and embroidery techniques from the Depression-era South. Chanin, who was a finalist for the National Design Award for Fashion, based her company on the idea that good design should be part of everyday living, and that the artisanship of the past should be kept alive. To that end, stitchers in their early 20s work alongside those in their 70s, producing garments in the spirit of the traditional quilting bee.
Their appeal is primal. "People throughout the world have memories of some textile from our childhood," Chanin says, over fried chicken and potato salad at her show. "It might be a baby blanket, or a favorite item of clothing. So people respond to these clothes because they're handmade."
Despite their down-home DNA, these are hardly thrift shop garments. Chernin's line is available at such tony shops as Barney's, Bergdorf Goodman, and Harvey Nichols.
But in the bleak topography of current retail, where even the luxury labels are getting battered, Chanin's added layer of meaning is proving a potent force. "We haven't seen any effects of the recession," she says. "People who do have money now want to spend it on something with meaning."
Chanin's latest venture ramps that social entrepreneurship up another level. For her denim line, she's turned to Father Andrew, a young Catholic priest in the Bronx who is part of a venture called Goods of Conscience. He employs Guatemalan and El Salvadoran parishioners to dye indigo in the church's basement. "These clothes have the feeling of being old, but new, all at the same time."
Shai Agassi’s electric car service station company, Better Place, was the subject of a page one business story in today’s New York Times. While Agassi estimates his dream of a network of such stations in the US is unlikely to be up and running until 2012, Israel is already much farther along in setting up car charging stations.
Gadi Amit, the CEO of San Francisco strategic design firm, New Deal Design, shared some photos of the docking stations, which his company designed. In December, Better Place Israel debuted the first electric parking lot in Tel Aviv, at the Cinema City parking lot in Pi-Glilot. The company’s CEO, Moshe Kaplinsky, said Better Place Israel has plans to expand the network to Haifa, Kefar Sava, Holon and Jerusalem. (Israeli venture capitalists are helping to underwrite the company.)
The charge spot is designed to be small, easy to use, and to blend in with the environment. “In designing and deploying the charge spot, our top priority is the driver’s experience,” says Tal Agassi, director of international deployment development. “We set out to design a user friendly and simple charging experience for the user that will encourage drivers to switch from the pump to the plug.”
On April 1, Ideo founder David Kelley will be awarded the Edison Achievement Award by the Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University for his “pioneering contributions to the design of breakthrough products, services, and experiences for consumers, as well as his development of an innovative culture that has broad impact.”
Past recipients of the award include Ted Turner, Robert Woodruff of Coca-Cola, Martha Stewart, Nolan Archibald of Black & Decker, J. Williard Marriott, Jr. of Mariott International, Frank Perdue, Herb Baum of Campbell Soup Company, and Paul Kahn of At&T, among others.
“David’s leadership in the education of multiple generations of thinkers stands as a testment to his extraordinary vision for our nation’s future,” says Sarah Miller Caldicott, great grandniece of Thomas Edison, and chairperson of the award’s steering committee.
Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellman, president of product development at Genentech, will also receive the prize. She’s being honored for her groundbreaking work in transforming cancer drug development and cancer treatment options.
It was a Power Point slide of Ettore Sottsass in a bowling shirt that first made Jim Hackett, CEO of Steelcase, want to get to know David Kelley.
Fifteen years ago, Hackett remembers, the Ideo founder had been summoned to Steelcase’s Grand Rapids boardroom to talk to the company’s executives about why the office furniture giant should be more design-driven. In prior weeks, other designers had trooped through with predictable presentations about metrics and ROI.
Then Kelley showed up and started talking about the intersection of humanity and design. He’s tooling through his presentation, and up pops a slide featuring the renowned Italian designer, the founder of Memphis, in a blue bowling shirt Kelley had given him with “Ettore” embroidered over the pocket. The point? That good design isn’t always about great luxury or something unattainable. It’s about a human connection. Your bowling partner. Your favorite mug. A great umbrella for a stormy day.
“I totally fell in love with the guy,” Hackett says.
Hackett is now CEO of Steelcase and, technically, Kelley’s boss. Ideo is privately held by Steelcase and Ideo’s leadership team, although the Palo Alto design firm is currently in the process of buying back its share. But Hackett and Kelley’s relationship transcends the ordinary hierarchical folderol. There is, for example, the matter of the worm hole.
Kelley has a screen in his office that links to Hackett’s; Hackett has one that links to Kelley’s. But for the occasional confidential meeting or phone call, the line between them is open 24/7. So, while Kelley is in California and Hackett is in Michigan, the two are virtually working side-by-side, every day.
We talked to Hackett about what Kelley has taught him–from the importance of prototyping to how to fight cancer with butcher paper.
FC: When you finally hired Kelley to do a project, what did you notice about how he tackled things?
Hackett: We had him work on home office products for Turnstone. He asked if we’d come out and go through a charrette. When we got to the part about doing prototyping, I ended up on the floor cutting foam core. I remember thinking it was so unconventional compared to the way things were then being done at Steelcase–with lots of meetings. He had a whole team of people who had mastered the idea of turning observations into prototypes to create a better outcome.
FC: That must have been an ‘a-ha!’ moment for you.
Hackett: Sure was. I bought hook line, and sinker into this theory of design thinking. Now, I get to run a company with the effect of that theory. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
FC: You’ve mentioned David’s affection for bowling shirts. Maybe that came out of his background. He’s a Midwesterner, isn’t he?
Hackett: We both grew up in Ohio and can’t escape our Midwestern roots. I went to the University of Michigan and played football, so Bo Schembechler was a hero to me. There’s a big sign as you’re entering Barberton, Ohio, where David grew up, that says “Welcome to Barberton, Home of Bo Schembechler.” And there’s a sign when you’re leaving that says, “Departing Barberton, Home of David Kelley.” He got nominated to his high school’s Hall of Fame. He went out of respect for his mom. The ceremony was held in a bowling alley.
FC: You mentioned that David has also mastered the knack for applying design thinking to just about any experience. What’s been the most unusual application of that?
Hackett: When he got cancer, he invented a new way for people to organize the many medicines you have to take. He got a roll of butcher paper and diagrammed his regimen, so he’d remember what day of the week he was supposed to take each drug. He rolled it out, and hung it in the bedroom, then drew a line through the regimen for each day. Dealing with cancer is a very complex experience. It’s a mix of technology and medicine and emotional issues. Design is about delayering complexity to understand and make it better. Making it better is innovation.
FC: That must have been a tough time for you, too, given how close you are.
Hackett: This is a man’s story. When he was sick, I wrote him a note and said, “Remember when you were a kid and you were best friends, and it got to be dusk and your mom was yelling that you had to come in? Remember the moment–how precious it was—under that streetlight? You felt like you’d never have a friendship like that again. That's the way I feel about this guy. When we're together, I have that feeling that I don’t want to come in. We are having so much fun.
David Kelley is well-known for his astute application of design thinking to many of life's intractable problems. Less known is that he's also a veritable Dr. Phil of good advice about life, careers, and the importance of not being a jerk.
"If you ask people, was there ever a teacher or mentor who changed your life, many hundreds of people would say that was David Kelley. I'm one of them," his brother, Tom Kelley, told me. "If they spread the word....you can figure the exponential effect."
In this spirit, we asked former students, co-workers and friends to share their favorite Kelley life lessons. Here's what they said:
"Success tends to focus your efforts, failure assures me that you try something different and eventually better." -- from Perry Kleban, CEO, Timbuk2
"You're the best version of yourself when you manage to have fun doing your work." -- from Chris Flink, Ideo
"You can't think your way through every problem. Trying things and engaging people helps you get unstuck." -- from George Kembel, executive director, Stanford d.school
"The greatest responsibility of any leader is to make new leaders. David knew that neither he, himself, nor any one person has all the answers. He empowers others to do stuff." -- from Tom Kelley, Ideo
"When I was going to design school in Chicago, at IIT, in 1989, a friend of mine and I went all the way to Evanston, a suburb that seemed unbelievably far away from school, to hear this guy David Kelley present at Northwestern University. The thing that was amazing to me was that he was talking about HOW designers should work, not about WHAT they should be working on. I remember thinking how right it sounded, and that it was a pretty fresh message among all the others I was getting about what it meant to be a designer in this world. I still hold true a lot of what he was saying then. -- from Ilya Prokopoff, Ideo
"The true brilliance of the human-centered design process is that it keeps us humble. I am in awe of his humbleness." -- from Susie Wise, Stanford d.school
"'Do not allow hierarchy and status into your teams, and your workplace because it will destroy collaboration." -- PK
"David can take the nature of any experience--from 'Let's go to the zoo to let's go to football game, to let's hear a speaker, to let's have cancer'--and bring the same intensity to all of them. He's in the moment like nobody I've ever known. He can take the naïve view of that moment and see what is unique about it, see its virtue and see what he can learn from it." -- from Jim Hackett, CEO, Steelcase
"David is one of those magical people who beams not only generous permission, but pure optimism, into anyone who works with him. His ability to empower others is built-in to the way he is, and the way he engages with people, and yet it is often nearly invisible at the moment of contact" -- from Tom Eich, Ideo
"There is no challenge, big or small, in the world that could not benefit from a healthy dose of cavalier creativity." -- CF
"Make the human element as important as the technical and business elements." -- GK
"Your failures interest me far more than your success." -- PK
"Leaders don't have to be scary. Or egomaniacal. Or people you have to watch yourself around. I've always felt like myself around him. I chalk this up to his being genuinely curious about what others have to say. -- IP
"David helped me realize that it's not what you work on, but whom you work with that makes all the difference. This, ironically, resonates even at a company that tackles some of the most exciting creative challenges in the world." -- CF
"Think with your hands, build something or try something, then talk about it, NOT the reverse." -- PK
"You don't have to choose between doing what you love and making a living." -- GK
"Better to be a jack of all trades than a master of one' (you will see more possibility then, you will be an empathetic leader to the experts, and you will be a more interesting person.)" -- PK
There’s a serious problem with Morgans Hotels’ new Web site, which launches today. It’s such an engaging experience, you may forget to book a room.
If you’ve been pining after Tejo Remy’s drunken chest of drawers--with its secret compartment containing a gold gun, a line of cocaine, and a diamond ring--but can’t tear yourself away from the plunging Nasdaq to get to Amsterdam to score one, take heart. 
By turns testy, reproachful, defensive and self-congratulatory, Italian executives took the stage at New York's Museum of Arts and Design last night to insure America that, despite the wilting economy, in Milan, the furniture show will still go on. Along the way, they couldn't resist throwing brickbats at Wall Street, pointing out that if the U.S.'s profligate and irresponsible bankers would stop just futzing with money and do something useful -- like make a chair or sofa, like they do -- we wouldn't all be in this predicament.
Melissa was not alone in her confusion. Outraged Tropicana loyalists have been flooding the blogs for months to protest the brand's lackluster redesign, calling it everything from "ugly" to "stupid" to "generic." Now, Pepsi execs are finally conceding defeat. They announced late last week that they're bringing back the old look--the classic orange with the straw poking out--that consumers loved…or at least didn't find as offensive as the new look.
The most heartwarming story to come out of Fashion Week is taking place far across town from the posh tents at Bryant Park, in the slightly down-at-the-heels precincts of New York's East Village.
But in the bleak topography of current retail, where even the luxury labels are getting battered, Chanin's added layer of meaning is proving a potent force. "We haven't seen any effects of the recession," she says. "People who do have money now want to spend it on something with meaning."
