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    ENTREPRENEURSHIP
    Podcast 13 min read

    The Art of Everyday Innovation w/ Paul Rowan

    with Paul Rowan

    Paul Rowan and Chris Do examine how ordinary household problems become products that sustain a design business.

    Chris Do

    Chris Do

    Founder, The Futur™ · November 8, 2025

    The first product was not the business

    A company's first product can fail without making the company a failure. Paul Rowan, co-founder of Umbra, describes exactly that beginning: window shades that eventually stopped working as a business, but opened the door to a much larger one. Having handled design, marketing, sales, and manufacturing himself, he understands the distance between an appealing object and a sustainable enterprise.

    In conversation with Chris Do, Rowan returns to that distance repeatedly. His account is not a clean procession from inspiration to commercial success. It is a story of incomplete information, retailers willing to experiment, suppliers willing to participate, and products that needed another attempt.

    The first problem was close enough to touch. Rowan had moved into an apartment with bare windows and could not find a covering he liked. He bought Japanese architectural paper, attached it to roller blinds, and began adding graphics.

    Visitors noticed. More important, they wanted to know where the shades could be purchased. What began as a personal solution started to look like something other people wanted in their homes.

    Rowan took the idea to his future business partner in Toronto. There was no elaborate research program behind the decision, he recalls. They began making the product locally, and Rowan loaded samples into his car to show retailers.

    The shades found an audience during what he describes as a broader shift toward casual living. His product fit that sensibility: less formal, more contemporary, and accessible enough to belong in an ordinary apartment.

    Then the original product failed.

    A first product can create access without becoming the lasting business. The shades had placed Umbra inside a commercial network. Salespeople now had something to sell, retailers knew the company, and those relationships generated a new request: more products.

    That request mattered more than continued attachment to the original idea. Rowan began designing other household objects, responding to opportunities that became visible only after the company entered the market.

    The brand followed the work. Rather than starting with a fully articulated identity and forcing products into it, Rowan says Umbra gradually recognized a consistent character across its designs. Affordable, modern, and contemporary became guiding terms because those qualities were already emerging from the objects.

    This is not an argument against strategy. It is an account of strategy becoming more informed through contact with customers, production, and distribution. The company learned what it could credibly promise by making things and watching what happened.

    The distinction sits at the center of the transition explored by the title Moving from Makers to Entrepreneurs: making an object and building an enterprise are related activities, but they are not identical responsibilities.

    Rowan's early shades accomplished something valuable even though they did not remain the answer. They exposed the company to a market that could ask better questions than its founders could ask alone.

    The useful measure was not whether the first idea survived unchanged. It was whether the people behind it could recognize what that idea had made possible.

    A hardware store is a map of unfinished lives

    Rowan's preparation began in his father's hardware store. He remembers working there as a child, learning the products and the practical problems they addressed. Long before designing housewares, he was surrounded by evidence that ordinary life needed constant adjustment.

    He calls the store "applied technology." The phrase is less glamorous than an innovation laboratory, but more precise about the work involved. Someone needs to attach, repair, hang, seal, align, replace, or improve something, and the store contains possible answers.

    For Rowan, the deeper observation is that the built environment is unfinished. Houses do not arrive perfectly adapted to their occupants. Objects do not satisfy every requirement. People keep buying additions because the original arrangements leave something unresolved.

    "Everything is sort of incomplete in life," he says.

    His career grew from that incompleteness. He looked at familiar hardware and household products and saw function without enough attention to appearance or contemporary living. The opportunity was not always to invent a new activity. Often it was to improve an object people already needed.

    Everyday inconvenience is useful design evidence. Rowan's examples range from unfinished living spaces to protective phone cases. An accessory, in his reading, often reveals something the original product does not fully handle.

    That perspective produces a particular kind of attention:

    • Window coverings can satisfy a practical need without matching someone's taste.
    • Household hardware can work properly while remaining visually unappealing.
    • Protective accessories can reveal vulnerabilities in otherwise sophisticated products.

    These are not interchangeable problems. Their connection is the habit of noticing the distance between an object's assigned function and the experience of actually living with it.

    Do recognizes the habit. As a child, he spent hours exploring a nearby Home Depot, trying to understand what each device did. His recollection of bringing a chalk line to his father illustrates the same pattern: curiosity became useful when a real task appeared.

    But familiarity with tools was only part of Rowan's preparation. He also studied graphic design at George Brown College in Toronto. He credits that education with teaching him how to communicate ideas, not simply have them.

    He later worked at a digital typography startup, where he gained business experience alongside technical exposure. The combination matters: practical product knowledge, visual communication, and an understanding of how a company operates reinforced one another.

    When Umbra began, those capabilities were not neatly divided into departments. Rowan designed products, made brochures, developed trade show displays, handled sales, and dealt with manufacturing. His argument for generalists comes from the demands of that experience, not from dismissing specialist expertise.

    Knowing the work made it easier to understand the jobs the business would eventually need other people to perform. It also kept design connected to the conditions required to produce and sell it.

    The relevant companion here is How to stay curious. Rowan's version of curiosity has a distinctly practical destination: understanding an ordinary object well enough to see how it could be better.

    The hardware store did not supply a signature aesthetic. It supplied a way of looking.

    The sale starts before the pitch

    Rowan's early sales method sounds uncomplicated: put samples in the car, find shops, walk inside. Do presses for the missing detail because that description skips the part many designers find hardest. Having something to show does not automatically make approaching a buyer comfortable.

    Rowan rejects the suggestion that his ease in conversation reflects a naturally outgoing personality. He describes himself as deeply shy. As a teenager, he needed encouragement from friends to sing at the front of a band, despite being the person they believed could do it.

    Business did not erase that discomfort. It gave him reasons to act despite it. Later, the livelihoods attached to Umbra made public speaking and continued product development responsibilities rather than optional expressions of confidence.

    His first retail approaches were selective. He avoided large, corporate hardware stores because they seemed inaccessible. Instead, he sought independent retailers whose existing selections suggested an interest in contemporary, unusual, or more artisanal objects.

    That selection was part of the pitch before a word was spoken.

    A relevant buyer matters more than a polished performance. Rowan could look around a shop and see whether its owner had already made choices compatible with his product. He was not asking every retailer to develop a new taste.

    The verbal request was equally direct. He had something new, people had responded positively, and he wanted the retailer to try it. His remembered appeal ends with "please try it. Test it."

    The ingredients were concrete:

    • Show something the buyer can evaluate. Rowan brought physical samples that were already being manufactured.
    • Choose retailers whose existing products suggest a compatible customer.
    • Ask for a test rather than treating enthusiasm as a guaranteed order.

    This was not a substitute for product strength. It was a way to put that strength in front of someone positioned to recognize it. The audience question connects naturally to Know your audience, but Rowan's account makes it tangible: the evidence was sitting on the retailer's shelves.

    Even a retailer's agreement did not settle the central question. Stores need merchandise, and a buyer can place an order for many reasons. Rowan distinguishes that transaction from the moment an individual customer decides the object deserves a place at home.

    Someone taking out money to buy the product was his strongest validation. The idea had survived beyond a friendly compliment, a sales presentation, and a wholesale decision. It had become useful or desirable enough for a person to pay.

    The distinction also explains his frustration with inventors who refuse to reveal their products because protection is still pending. In the situation he describes, the secrecy prevented even a prospective commercial partner from evaluating the idea.

    His point is about exposure to judgment, not a complete legal strategy. A concealed product cannot generate the response its creator needs to understand demand.

    Later, stronger relationships changed how Umbra could sell. Trusted customers could review renderings, models, and 3D-printed concepts before production because they were planning further ahead. Those privileges rested on a history of delivery.

    The first sales call did not need to look like that mature relationship. It needed to begin one.

    The breakthrough was a different size

    A trash can is an unlikely object around which to build an argument about aspiration. Its job is to hold what someone no longer wants. Rowan and designer Karim Rashid saw an opportunity in precisely that neglect.

    In Rowan's telling, the category was dominated by straightforward geometric forms. Rashid proposed something curvier, with a shaped body, oval handles, and a distinctive top. The Garbo treated a low-status household object as something worth looking at.

    Do remembers the appeal from the customer's side. He had owned one of Umbra's recognizable cans before knowing the people behind it. Its form registered first; the business and authorship came later.

    That is an important reversal for designers accustomed to explaining their intentions. The product had to communicate through the object itself. A buyer did not need the founder's biography to decide it belonged in a bathroom.

    Yet the familiar smaller version was not the original commercial proposition. Rowan says the company first produced a larger can, imagined for offices and other uses that called for a substantial receptacle. It sold, but a more consequential opportunity remained.

    Umbra reconsidered the scale. A smaller version could fit a bathroom, where the same visual character answered a different spatial requirement. The company invested again rather than treating the original dimensions as inseparable from the design.

    Rowan recalls a dramatic increase in unit sales after that change. His figures are recollections rather than an audited account in the conversation, but the decision he describes is clear: the company retained the idea and altered its fit with daily life.

    The right concept can still be the wrong size.

    That is more useful than the familiar claim that persistence produces success. Persistence alone would have meant continuing to make the larger can. Umbra's move required confidence in the design and skepticism about its first commercial expression.

    The source of the observation was not a solitary flash of genius. Rowan describes product meetings involving sales managers, product managers, and others watching the marketplace. He does not identify one definitive person who proposed the smaller version.

    That uncertainty deserves to remain intact. Do offers a simplified version in which someone on the sales team suggests the change, but Rowan's own answer points to a collaborative environment rather than a clean origin story.

    The financial stakes made the adjustment meaningful. Injection molding requires commitment before finished products appear. A new size is not simply a new line in a sketchbook; it requires production decisions and another investment.

    For Rowan, that expense strengthens the argument for careful design. The thought placed into a mold can be reproduced across every object it makes. Conversely, careless decisions can be reproduced just as efficiently.

    Affordable manufacturing is not an excuse for weak design. It makes the quality of the original decisions more consequential because those decisions travel so far.

    Do puts the principle plainly: "It's not that design has to be expensive." Rowan's ambition was to make contemporary objects accessible, not to reserve visual intelligence for expensive materials or limited production.

    The smaller can makes the point without requiring a manifesto. Beauty helped establish its appeal. Changing the dimensions helped it belong somewhere specific.

    Creativity needs people outside the studio

    The tooling required to make a product creates a problem that enthusiasm cannot solve alone. Rowan recalls an early trash-can mold that Umbra could not comfortably finance. A manufacturing supplier agreed to back the tool because he believed in the concept and would be making the product.

    This is one of the less romantic details in the story, and one of the most instructive. The supplier was not merely executing a finished vision. His willingness to participate helped determine whether the vision could become an object at all.

    Rowan sees vendors as potential stakeholders. When they have committed resources, their interest in a successful outcome is not abstract. Design quality, manufacturing quality, and commercial viability become concerns they share with the company.

    Do notes that such support is unusual. Suppliers commonly expect the customer to pay for tooling. Rowan's experience is therefore an example of what a strong relationship can make possible, not a promise that manufacturers will routinely finance new founders.

    The same outward-looking approach shaped Umbra's design capacity. Rowan initially designed the products himself, then recognized that demand exceeded what one person could sustainably supply. He began reaching into design schools and working with other designers.

    Young designers brought current instincts about how they wanted to live. Experienced designers helped translate those instincts into forms and manufacturing decisions that could survive production. Rowan values the combination, not youth or experience in isolation.

    His account of a collaboration with Pratt centers on the Conceal Bookshelf, which makes books appear to float against a wall. Rowan describes a student project that became a manufactured product, with royalties benefiting both its designer and the school.

    What matters in that account is the structure of the exchange:

    • Share the value created by collaboration. Rowan describes royalties for both the student designer and the school.
    • Give new designers access to a real product-development opportunity.
    • Connect fresh ideas with the production knowledge needed to realize them.

    The arrangement made commercial success useful to more than the manufacturer. It also gave Rowan a continuing reason to remain close to schools rather than treating graduation as the end of their relevance.

    He extends the argument into management. Designers are not interchangeable sources of concepts; their circumstances affect their work. Rowan remembers conversations that moved beyond assignments into the personal conditions behind confidence, difficulty, and productivity.

    The relationship between instruction and sustained support belongs alongside The Importance Of Mentors. In Rowan's account, the strongest evidence of mentorship is not a formal program but former colleagues contacting him decades later.

    Relationships also had a harder commercial edge. When cheaper imitations appeared, Umbra could offer retailers something a copied product could not: continued access to new designs. Rowan says the company used that ongoing freshness to defend its customer relationships.

    Creativity was therefore more than an internal cultural preference. It was part of the company's negotiating position. A retailer choosing only the cheaper copy risked losing the next original product.

    The business depended on a network that could make, evaluate, improve, distribute, and renew the work. None of those functions could be replaced by admiration for the designer.

    The next product cannot wait for certainty

    Rowan once imagined that reaching a comfortable sales level would let him relax. The business did not behave that way. Employees depended on it, retailers wanted fresh products, competitors applied pressure, and growth created new obligations instead of removing uncertainty.

    That pressure could have narrowed the company's appetite for experimentation. Instead, Rowan describes a business that continued developing many ideas while relying on particular successful products to carry profitability. Not everything in the collection needed to become the defining hit.

    He remembers Rashid arriving with books full of sketches and moving rapidly through possibilities. The value was not simply prolific output. A designer rarely knows everything about a client's plans, priorities, or coming requirements, so a range of concepts creates more opportunities for a useful match.

    Volume did not eliminate judgment. It gave judgment more material to work with. The task remained finding the idea worth developing, then making the decisions that would allow it to succeed outside the presentation.

    Rowan also acknowledges the burden of an expanding catalog. Retailers want more products when they reset space, and manufacturers want to protect their presence. The resulting accumulation can become excessive even when each addition once had a commercial rationale.

    More ideas and more permanent inventory are not the same ambition.

    A difficult market sharpened that distinction. Rowan recalls an executive approaching Umbra during the financial crisis and delivering a specific warning: "don't cut your design department." The advice stayed with him because design represented the company's ability to emerge with something new.

    Protect the capability that produces the next opportunity. In this business, reducing development was not just a way to lower present costs. It threatened the future flow of products on which retailer interest and differentiation depended.

    Rowan does not present a named framework or a guaranteed sequence. His practical counsel is embedded in the situations he describes:

    • Keep developing alternatives instead of placing every hope in one protected idea.
    • Show concepts to customers whose needs and planning cycles make evaluation useful.
    • Listen to sales and product teams when the market exposes a mismatch.
    • Seek supplier participation where belief in the product creates shared interests.
    • Reinvest when evidence supports a better version rather than defending the original automatically.

    These choices require discrimination. A failed product is not automatically a reason to persist, and a promising reaction is not automatically proof of demand. Rowan's stronger examples include something observable: retailer requests, purchases, manufacturing commitment, or a clearer place for the product to live.

    The founder's conviction still matters. Without it, the samples never leave the car, the supplier never sees the concept, and the second mold never gets discussed. But conviction becomes useful when it can coexist with correction.

    For a designer protecting a single idea, Rowan's account sets a harder standard than originality alone. The work must be shown, produced, paid for, and improved. Each encounter supplies information the private sketch cannot.

    Umbra's first shades opened a door. Its trash can needed a different scale. The creative act was not complete when the shape looked right.

    The market does not buy the courage it took to make the first version. It buys the version that belongs in someone's life.

    TRANSCRIPT

    Even though you're confident about what you're doing and you're moving forward in a great way, you don't know what you don't know about what's going to happen in the marketplace. But to have the courage to pivot and to reinvest, to figure it out, because you know you have something. but it's just not there yet. I mean, that was a huge turning point. You can imagine how financially sustainable we came after that. Hi, I'm Paul Rowan. Literally, you are listening to the future. I'd say imagination is the way to face the future. Can you, Paul, can you introduce yourself and tell us who you are so that we have some context here? Yeah, hi, I'm Paul Rowan, co-founder of Umbra. I did retire from Umbra a few years ago, and now I'm working on speaking engagements. I do a lot of outreach to colleges around the world. I'm lecturing, and it's about, for me, my next phase of my career is really about knowledge sharing. Look, I don't know much about you, but I do know your company. I know the products that you've designed. And when I was looking it up, I was thinking, I think at some point, like very shortly after college, I was probably at a container store. buying one of your famous iconic trash cans. And of course, I don't know it's you guys, but I just I know the brand. I'm like, this is cool. And then as I look into the other iconic things you've done, there's a kind of simplicity and humanity into the shapes and the forms of the things. Now, I'm curious, is Umbra a firm? Do you guys make products or you design them and then somebody manufactures them? What's going on? We're quite vertical. Like we started off designing product and even manufacturing in North America. So the first product we did were locally made. We did injection molded thermoplastic rubber. We did plastics. We did actually steel. We were really grew a lot of business in the window treatments and drapery rods. Anything casual and affordable and well designed, we did domestically. But then eventually there was so much pressure from all the knockoffs out there that were going to Asia. And when we got above the radar with our retailers, when they started offering really low prices, we knew we had to go to Asia. And we actually built a factory in Asia and employed a lot of people over there and a sales team and quality control and everything. It was a pretty big endeavor that really kept us alive. I would say, like, unless you're competitive in our business, I think you're going to be dead. The first product was something that was done really out of necessity. I'd moved into an apartment, new apartment, and I looked, the windows were bare and I went out into the marketplace and I couldn't find anything I liked. So I actually went out and bought some architectural paper, Japanese paper, and put them on roller blinds and then eventually started decorating them with graphics. My first one was a Haku-Sai wave. And so people came to my apartment and said, like, where can I buy these? We really love them. Well, I just made them myself. And I kept carrying that over and over. So I went to my future business partner, Les Manelbaum in Toronto, who started a small business. I said, Les, like, we got a great idea here. Let's just start making it. Like, okay, there was no market research. There was no strategy. Let's just figure it out. So we figured it out. We made it in Toronto, Canada. and started putting the samples in the back of my car, just driving it around, eventually driving to New York. And that was just, I guess it was really a great time for us because it was a movement called lifestyle in the 80s where it was about a casualization of living. Everything before that was very formal and kind of sticky. And all of a sudden it was like a kind of, it's a kind of a Euro style, I would say, casualization of things. I mean, people started, stopped wearing ties and all kinds of stuff and sneakers. So there was a casualization and we were part of that movement. So there was great reception to it. And then what happened was as a stepping point for the people that are listening, the first product actually did fail after a couple of years, but what it allowed us to do was get into the space and start thinking through the demands of the market started asking me, hey, like Paul, why don't you design other things where we got our sales force out there trying to sell this stuff. We need more stuff. So I just started inventing more houseware products, types of products. And that's how the brand was built. Very product focused, created the brand. And then after a while, we realized, Chris, that We had a certain ethos to the brand based on product experience and where we were going and the intuition of our designers and myself. And we started creating these keywords around who we were. And of course, one of them was affordable, modern and contemporary and so forth. So we had these keywords develop and that really guided us as a brand going forward. - If you take me back to the 80s when you have this idea, what is your background that you can just be like, you know, I'm just gonna design this and we'll just go make it and I'll be a salesperson. That's like a lot of hats you're wearing. - True. You know what, my dad had a hardware store and I think some of it, I've had people call me later, oh, my dad had a hardware store too. I was in the hardware store since the age of like seven years old. Don't tell anyone, it was probably illegal. But by the time I was 12 years old, I knew 50,000 SKUs, how to something. and how to like i know i call it applied technology the hardware store it's just an amazing place to absolutely learn everything in fact if i was going to redesign education today i would just put everybody in a hardware store in the last year of high school okay like and i've met kids i spent a lot of time in hardware stores i don't know if you like them or not but like when i go to a home depot or one of the other lows or whatever i just like hanging out and i'm amazed by I'm amazed by the product knowledge of the people that are there about their training. And so I just took that. What I realized was when I always wanted to build my own business and be entrepreneurial, and I realized that my whole mission was to reinvent what I saw in my dad's hardware store because everything was pretty just functional. It wasn't beautiful. And I didn't know about the price or anything like that, but I knew it had to be affordable to be able to create product and distribute it. But so, yeah, I just looked at everything and started modernizing it. And that was really just the background for everything. Like, look at everything and think, how can I contemporize it, make it more relevant for people? When I was a kid, before I could work, there was a Home Depot that opened up within blocks of our house. And I didn't even know what that was. But for some reason, I would get on my skateboard, I'd go to Home Depot, and I literally spent hours walking from aisle to aisle, looking at every product and thinking like, what is this tool or device invented for? What problems does it solve? And I would spend all this time. Then one time, my dad was building something in the back. And I said, Dad, don't you want to use the chalk line? He goes, what's that? well to make sure everything's level we snap the chalk because how would you even know that and i said wow i was at home depot and i was looking at this and that's what it's used for i'll be right back 15 minutes later go to the store and buy it whatever it is i bring it back and we snap a chalk line he's like huh how does my kid know how to do this and this kind of curiosity has guided me throughout my life whether it's the library the computer lab it just whatever you get into just really get into it and to this day It brings me a lot of joy to walk through an art store or a home supplier like Home Depot or Lowe's or something like that, just because I just like looking at potential objects that were meant to build something more. And with a little creativity and ingenuity, you can make anything. It's very empowering. That's right. Some of my first products were all just based on that. But I think for me, the overall problem around a hardware store is that it's just that life is too imperfect. Like if everything was perfect in your life, you wouldn't need a hardware store. You would go into a house, it would already have the deck, it would already have the living space perfect, it would have the things hanging on the wall perfectly. But everything is sort of incomplete in life. You need to figure out how to really complete your life and make yourself better. I think everybody walking through a hardware store is trying to make their lives better. by buying products, services, whatever they are there. And because life is not perfect. And for me, in a perfectly designed world, you wouldn't need a hardware store. Your houses would be perfect. Your car would be perfect. Everything in the, even the electronic stores, when you think about even the most advanced product, like an iPhone, they're selling cases, like millions of cases every year because iPhone is not perfect. If you drop it, it breaks. Why? So for me, everything I was add on is kind of like a hack for me. And I'm like, I sort of built my career on creating hacks like that, if you want to call it that. The difference between you and me, among many things, is my dad did not own a hardware store. So I just went there periodically and there were no child labor laws broken. But do you have formal training on industrial design, graphic design? No, it was all based on the hardware store. But then I did do two years for a graphic design certificate with George Brown College in Toronto. And actually, George Brown College was an amazing thing because it basically taught me how to communicate these ideas. Like I knew I had this background, very curious, as you said, about everything. But George Brown showed me how to really communicate these ideas. And I got my first job through them. I actually got my first freelance jobs after actually even going to school for six months. And I knew nothing about, I didn't even know what graphic design was. When I started Umbra, I really, you asked about all the hats. I I did everything. I did all the marketing. I did the brochures. I did the trade show booth. I did the product development. I just did everything. Well, actually, and the sales and manufacturing too, of course. For the entrepreneurs out there, you really have to know everything about how to make your product and how to do it. And then, you know, when it comes to expansion and everything, you know every job. Doesn't that make sense to you? Like, just know everything about everything you can about your product. It makes sense to me in some kind of crazy way. I'm sure of it. I think there's too much specialization maybe out there. Like people need to be generalists, I think first. But I was talking about education too. I think the foundation years of every design course or marketing, whatever should be, the foundation course should be that kind of generalist idea and like knowing the history of everything and actually getting your hands dirty, making things in class and doing things by hand and so forth, learning things. I'm learning things by how to make that mind a hand connection. I have to figure this out here. How old are you then and what year is this specifically? I want to put a time, place, map. Are you 20 years old when you start this company or start inventing products? 27. So I was in the 80s, yeah, that we started. 79, I think, was the year, yeah. So yeah, so that was after five years of working in Ottawa with a startup that was one of the first digital typography companies in the world. It was really cool. Like I learned work with some ex IBM guys that started this company and I learned a lot about just business. So I had the hardware store side, then I worked five years with corporate. So then when I started the business, I really had some great, great experience about figuring things out. But I have to say, even with the first years of working in that great company, almost every weekend with the guys around me working, we'd have beers where I was thinking about how we were going to start businesses and trying to invent stuff. So the entrepreneurial spirit, especially in startup companies, everyone just wants to be a startup to be an entrepreneur and figure it out. The thing is to get it away. How do you launch something after just talking about it over hundreds of beers every weekend and actually making it happen? Okay, that's the thing. That leap, that leap of faith, because that that requires a lot of courage. Well, that's why it's not for everybody that on for no journey, because they need security and safety more than they need to scratch that itch. But me looking from the outside in, I think there's this strange and beautiful harmony or dichotomy of two things, which which is very analog hardware store, kind of just a blue collar stuff. And then you go into the digital typesetting or typography world in that's very early on. We're talking about here and having the kind of white collar professional environment and the mashup of these two gives you a different set of skills. Yeah, like in high school, I actually did do computer programming. I did Fortran program. Oh, my gosh. What kind of machine? What are we talking about here? I don't know, because we used to just punch the cards and send them out to get done and everything. So it's like, yeah, I was always fascinated by it. So I think there was that early digital experience did sort of help me advance the business. I mean, the internet didn't exist when we first started. That was a big leap forward, I think. Not to date either one of us, okay? But when I was, I think you must be a little bit older than me because what you're talking about is like, wait, I'm still a child here. I remember my uncle, my uncles worked at IBM or something like that. They'd come home with reams of alternating reams of paper. And then they would also have these cards that had little notches in them, which is how they stored them. files, I think back then. We never knew what they were. So we use them like pretend money and we were just like distributing. I mean, are you at that age where you're using the punch cards to store data? Yes. Oh, my God. Okay. So very few people in our audience even knows what we're talking about here, where you and I are getting nostalgic about that time and place. I mean, like the people that I worked with, there was a few guys that quit that typography business and had this new idea of actually, why don't we start selling computers in the home? What a strange idea. And I thought, wow. that's bloody crazy what are you gonna do just play games or whatever like who needs a computer at home but meanwhile of course it was an amazing uh startup and an amazing idea we were at the beginning of all that it was just just a really fun time but then we got back to the the window shades and all the product development was really back to analog right okay were you working full time and then you're like designing your home and then you're like i want to do this thing yeah Do you put in your notice and like, I gotta go all in on this thing? - At one point, yeah, you have to take that big leap, right? That was tough, I gotta say. 'Cause I worked there for five years and I was working on different products, all different kinds of company. Like I had a little publishing company. I had a company that was, you know, we used to do like print wheels. Okay, I don't think you remember those. The typewriters, the select typewriters were kept advancing so you could do more typography style typing on a regular typewriter. And so there was a very limited number of fonts available for those spinning wheels. So I actually developed with a couple of buddies of ours, we actually started manufacturing print wheels at the time. I always had that entrepreneurial spirit to do almost try anything to get just to have independence, you know. I have to say this, and I think it's going to lead us probably to our next part of the story here, which is I find it really difficult when I meet people. When they grow up in a certain era, they get stuck to certain ideas. You've been through many eras, many evolutions. What has kept your brain so malleable and you so vital and just like, you know what? I could do this and I'm going to hear it. How do you continue to evolve like that? There's a couple of things. One is there was always a thread about grow or die in our business. So it was like, you know, I always thought, oh yeah, like if I get to a million in sales and maybe I could just relax and just like make a lot of money and not have to worry about everything. But it was never like that. It was always about what's the next thing. There was like everyone, the pressures on developing a business, especially if you have a team like sales and so forth and you have people in in-house depending on you for their livelihood. You have to keep going forward, developing, expanding your reach, becoming global. So that was a big challenge. I think that kept me going. The other thing that really kept me going was our team. I alluded to the fact that I was doing this outreach with universities, but the reason when I first started, I was designing all the product myself and I thought, I can't do this. There's too much demand. I went to our local university design school called OCAD U and I found a couple of designers by the name of Kurt Keller. And I asked them to start designing on a royalty basis for us. And that was the beginning of it. And then when I started doing that outreach with the schools, I realized that there was a continuous flow of young people coming through the studio. I think the young people kept me young. They were the ones that were coming up with amazing. I mean, I'm sure you love it too. You love having young people in your team. They bring energy, they bring their own intuition, their relevancy of how they want to live. And so like I found that the young people were driving great product development with the assistance of the mature designers who knew how to make shape it and make it happen, go into production. Right. But the young people were the ones that really I mean, I've been surrounding myself with young people ever since then. And now I'm teaching. I teach in Medellín, Colombia when I'm down there for the winters. I'm associated with a lot of different design schools that are reaching out to me all the time for different types of collaborations. The collaborations I could talk about too a little bit, just to know, I mean, first of all, I always say stay close to your school because I thought at first when I first left George Brown College, oh, I've done it all now. I know everything. I don't need to go back to school anymore. Why should I? But then I realized later that I went back to the schools like in OCAD or George Brown. that yeah, stay close to your school because this is where you're going to get your recruitment. This is where you're going to get your new ideas. Young people are coming forward. And then eventually I started these collaborations. One of the best ones I did was with Pratt University in Brooklyn. I'm sure you know it. I went down there and for our, I think it was our 20th anniversary, I said, like, we're going to do, I'm going to be like your creative director and we're going to use a team of like 40 students to design a product for Umbra. And what happened was, it was the most exciting time you could ever imagine. Chris, they came up with one of these ideas called the Conceal Bookshelf. It's one that floats on the wall. Like you don't see the, you just see the books floating on the wall vertically. And I I saw that and I thought, oh my God, I found my part. And I said, we're going to make a fortune from this. This is the most amazing thing I've ever seen. And we went into production. It's still in production like 25 years later. And here's what happened. We paid a royalty to the designer student who, who helped launch his career and to the school to develop further programs. And Prada ended up taking that money and going to the shipyards and building out a special entrepreneurial design school there. So it was an amazing thing. Win, win, win. Designer, launcher, career. We made money. The schools are able to be sustainable. I mean, what a great idea. I wish every manufacturer out there would reach out to their local design schools and universities and create similar programs. It's an amazing idea. I need to talk about this. I want to applaud you. for this thing where if you see something, you want to try to make it a win-win situation for everybody. A more ruthless business owner would just buy the concept from the student, screw the school, take the idea and make a gazillion dollars, and then later on that student's like the person who designed the Nike logo or something. It kind of sucks. And what part of you, your upbringing, your moral compass that says, can we all win? We don't have to take it all. Where does that come from? I think the whole business about the culture in our business was founded on this sort of principle that, yeah, we're going to support creativity as much as we possibly can within our budgets and so forth. So, like, I don't know. I think it evolved because it was part of our culture. It's not always easy, by the way, because even schools are quite bureaucratic about this kind of thing. So it's not that easy to actually make those relationships happen. But when it does happen, it's amazing if you have the right partners. So that question is a tough one to answer, like why we were driven that way. I think because we were in that space too, because there was such an incredible camaraderie. Like we used to go to this New York gift show and the international contemporary furniture fair and exhibit with all these people that were like-minded, young, trying to show like advanced design, like it really just a great culture of people, like from sales to designers, to the exhibitors, like like such great camaraderie and also with great support for different charities and so forth. So we came from that. It was just like part of that whole, our persona was good guys, you know, bad coffee. Cold weather, bad coffee, but good guys. Yeah. Cold weather is the worst. Yeah. Okay. Okay. You can't recall a story as a child that something happened that shaped this idea? Like going back to my parenting? Yeah, or something, you know? Very, very sweet dad. Very sweet, good family. Very lucky that way. And you know, I'm sort of glad you brought that up because when we talk about productivity with people and mentoring and so forth, you know, it's not just about the work they do, but you sometimes have to go pretty deep. It's like, why were you so good at what you did? Like, what was in your background that made you so... incredible or like, why did you have an off day with this design compared to other days? So like, I think getting deeper, I think for the people that are doing mentor or management up there, I think it's good to go deep into some people's lives and figure out their behaviors and so forth in terms of their productivity. I always felt like I was almost a therapist in my office. Like the designers would walk in. I used to have this chair called a Q-Chess chair by Karam Rashid. It's a very curvy thing that flips down from a regular chair to like a lounger. And they'd be lying there like it was almost like I just couch and talk to me about their lives. And it would be like an amazing relationship. And I think I'm so proud when these people I worked with like 20, 30 years ago reach out to me and ask me how I'm doing. And like what a great mentor I was to them I mean what a great feeling when someone reaches out to you after so many years like that I think for you it seems so natural that You may or may not take it for granted that everybody must be this way and I've talked to lots of people It's not this way. Well, it is not but okay I want to just park it there and just look at something else here now I may be getting ahead of myself here because I I just see you as this person who has this kind of optimism, this joy, this kind of exuberance and transparency about you that I imagine you to be like an incredibly infectious salesperson, whether it's about an idea or your first window covering shade. I don't know. I've only met a handful of people in my life where it's like, you can tell me that. Where do I sign the check? You know, because there's this thing about you. Now take me back to like when you're in those early days in the late seventies, early eighties, when you're out there selling your wares, how did it go? Were you a natural born salesperson? No, I am so shy. I'm the shyest person you could ever know. Like people used to say, well, he's the guy that never talks. Like when I was growing up, not the guy I'm talking to today. Yeah, I know. And I always encourage like, well, my, if you're an industrial designer, you reason you go into that career is because you are shy. Like they want to sit in front of their computers and they're doing their CAD work and not engage with anyone. They just want to do their design work and see it happen and turn it into a business. And they're like, well, I'm not going to do that. and turn it into somebody else. They're very, very shy. I always encourage my guys, they had to go every week in the studio and present their own ideas to shoot. And same with in the school too. Like when they're ready for their dues, they have to come up there and start presenting. So I think people need to be encouraged or even forced to get out of their shells like that. And that's what happened with me. And it started with, okay, you're not going to believe this, but I have a band, a blues band. I play harmonica and I sing. And this was like, when i was a teenager i was terrified to sing and be the front man but all my friends said to me well you're the only guy i can actually sing you have to go up there and do it it was like i was pushed by all my my friends and family to go up there and and do something so like that was the beginning of it it's like you push push push yourself it seems like i'm quite natural with you but like i have to say when you reached out and said like yeah get on the show it's like terrifying I think if you talk to a lot of people that are even like incredible actors and everything, they're really nervous about what they're and they're actually shy people. So this is something that's actually a good characteristic, but you have to overcome it somehow. Push yourself like somehow. And for me, it was always about the motivation, about growing the business. And then when we started to have like several hundred people working for us, it was like and we'd have like a summer barbecue or Christmas party. I think, oh, my God, look at my responsibility. for hundreds of people with families and everything. I've got to keep inventing product. I have to keep this thing going to keep this thing sustainable, right? So people did motivate me. And you've got a lot of people working for you too now. - Well, we have a very small team, but I know what you're talking about. I'm an introvert. I remember one time there was a holiday party And I wanted to, it was such a, like it was a banner year for us. Like it's the most we have ever made. And I was feeling in a very generous spirit. So we, I had to give a speech and everybody's gathered around. I don't think there were more than 20 people in this room. And I had written things on a, on a card and my executive producer was a really extroverted guy. He's like, what are you doing? Cause I just want to make sure I know what they're saying. It was Chris. Come on. You can say whatever you want. It's all right. It's like, no, you don't. Leave me alone. I have my own process. And so I tried my best to deliver something I had to write down to a room of my closest team. It's like even then. So I can only imagine if you take that number 20, you multiply it by some factor. That's what you're doing. You're walking around and feeling that. But. I got to get you to answer one question because I'll ask the question, but I think you give me a different answer. The question is, if you're going way, way back and you have this idea for your very first product and you've gotten there and you hit the streets and you're trying to make a sale, take me back to the very first sale. Did you get it? Did you not get it? What happened? Well, there would have been the window shape product. just i just printed it i'd rolled it up on the rollers i put all the samples in the back of my car i started driving around like what kind of store actually would sell this kind of thing i didn't really go to the hardware stores because i thought they were too mass that they wouldn't talk to me that it was too corporate i started looking for independent retailers and i walked in and started showing this product but their eyes just popped because people when they see innovation like that they just start thinking about the potential. Like, how do you create value in everything that you do so that People will be so inspired. And then the biggest thrill for me also was of course, like it's easy to place product relatively in stores, but when a consumer walks in and actually picks up and takes money out of their wallet and pays for it, for me, that's the biggest thrill. That is the validation of everything because you can sell in a lot of stuff to a lot of retailers, right? They need to fill shelf space and they have all those demands. But like when a consumer actually starts putting their hard-earned money out, I mean, this is an amazing thing, amazing accomplishment. That's a huge motivator. And of course, we were disappointed a lot of times, like these big retailers would make you wait in their waiting room for four hours or they wouldn't even see you or they'd be so arrogant. A lot of them are of business. The ones that were really, really open-minded, like I remember when, I know Bed Bath & Beyond is out of business right now and it's very sad. I mean, I think, because of the conditions today, I think maybe overgrown and all that kind of stuff. But when we first saw us, they had six stores in New Jersey and the owners that knew nothing about contemporary design. They just walked in and said, we don't understand any of the stuff you're doing, but just write an order and we'll test it. And then so there were six stores, then there were 60 stores, and there were 600 stores and 1200. So we can track a lot of our growth to the retail side, which is the big box store. Now, today, of course, it's a whole bunch of different conditions, as we know. So but you still have to track growth according to who's going to be able to distribute this product for you. I'm going to ask you to put on your storyteller hat, to paint some details, to share some dialogues and some sensory information. I see as a shy graphic designer, traditionally trained, I have ideas for products, but I never even like went to make it and then think I'm going to just drive around and find people to sell it to because that's beyond my imagination of what I'm capable of. So when you walk into this one that says your first yes, reenact this for me because I don't even know what is the pitch? How do you know who to talk to? What are you saying? Because there are people in our audience listening to this who are in a different place who are raising hands like that's me. I have an idea. I made the mock up, but I can't get to step two. So if you can, this is like, it's going to be an opportunity to be very instructive for them. Like, here's how Paul did it a gazillion years ago, but the principle should still work. Like, I am assuming you don't have an appointment. You're just driving around looking for stuff. Is that right? That's right. Okay, good. So take me through that. Like when you walk in the store with your hand around merch or samples, what are you asking the person who greets you? What are you saying? Yeah, I'm saying that I got a new idea. It's never been done before. It's something your customers are going to really like. Everyone's responded well to it, like personally with me. I think he's like, please try it. Test it. Like I think testing is something and just, and also having a relationship with that. If somehow you can have a relationship with that first client somehow, I think testing is a big thing today. And I love this idea with digital marketing today, how you can test. Like the more ideas you can get out there and test and test and test, because you never know which ones are going to really take off. So I think the designers out there, they seem to be stuck on just one idea. Like I had a dozen ideas. So keep the ideas flowing. You never know. Like that first idea pivoted to a lot of different ones too. And it wasn't even that successful, the first idea. So it was like, get into the space somehow. But I've had people come up to me and say, I've got a new idea. I want to show it to you. We're patent pending. And then by the end of the meeting, I said, well, let's show me the product. And they say, no, we can't show it to you. It's still patent pending. I said, well, like, how are you going to ever sell anything if you don't get the thing out there? So just get it out there. Overcome that fear of rejection. Because you're going to get rejected too, many times. But then I think there's, I think it's about the strength of your product. and the concept, okay, that will overcome all the issues of rejection and so forth. And then aligning with like-minded people. The store that I went to, I knew they were like-minded. They had already created a collection in their store that looked like, oh yeah, this is contemporary, this is different looking, this is maybe more artisanal, I don't know. It was not your usual mass merchant. So I obviously were kind of aligned in terms of the product, the profile, so to speak. And today, how many SKUs are there for Umbra? Oh my God. I can't even say how many. I mean, there might be 20,000 SKUs. I don't know how many. Like, it's huge. Probably too many, as most companies. most companies usually do too many that sort of protection thing in my experience that you know once you get some space in a mass merchant and then you know they say okay we're going to reset the space like we need more like you keep adding more and more skus just so because you want to have that kind of virtual space i think the physical space but then i think even with dealing with someone like amazon you want to have a collection of products that you know require like take up some space on the screen so you can get people's attention right I mean, you probably know a lot more about that than I do right now. I wouldn't say that, but okay. So you're in the store. I think your pitch is great. And then they're like, yes. Did you have manufacturing lined up at this point? Do you have terms and conditions worked out? Or are you just like, I got an idea. Let's see if I can sell it. I think by that point I'd already had physical samples that we were manufacturing in our warehouse in Toronto. So it wasn't just a prototype, but later on, especially when we started putting 3D printers in the studio, we used concept development and 3D printing models a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. Like we would go into customers that we had a great relationship with show advanced samples, 3d printed mock-ups, everything, because they were working further out anyways, like they were working, you know, six months out or something. So we could show them mock-ups and particularly now I think with digital rendering and so forth, you can still like, why not show a lot of concepts to, to develop an idea and get them to at least hook on one of them or or develop a concept. But I have to say with someone like Kara Machine, who first started showing me designs, who did the garble can, he started showing me designs in the 90s and like he would come with a book like a white page book with 500 pages in it and everyone would be filled with sketches of different concepts so this is a guy that just flowed ideas out and very quickly did renderings and he would just flash through them for me what about this what about this what about this so this is another way i think just about sheer volume of creativity to somehow get into the right space because you don't really know exactly what's going to motivate a client. Like you don't know what they're thinking. They've already got plans due for the next year and everything. You don't really know their business completely because it's probably a secret. So like going in there with some a lot of different concepts that's going to really entice them. How do you inspire a customer to really have a relationship with you? And later on to it protected us too, Chris, because when the knockoffs came, The customers knew that they were going to get original fresh designs from us every quarter. And like if they bought the knockoff and we said, no, like if you buy the knockoff, we're not going to show you that freshness, that newness. So relationship building just and protecting it with your own power of creativity, innovation is something that's really important. i've been talking to paul rowan and he's the co-founder of umbra a pretty amazing company a fascinating story i want to do a quick recap of what i've gotten from you so far So here you are in the world and you see you have this worldview of nothing's perfect. Everything needs to be tailored for individual taste, DIY. So you look out this window and you're like, something better has to be done here. And so you scratch your own itch, you put things together and use your own creativity and ingenuity to make something. And this is the birth of an idea, a product, maybe a company and a brand. And you take a leap of faith, you quit your job, you do this thing, you go all in on this. And what you do is I love your pitch and I want to share it with people in case they missed all of this and all the brilliance that you're sharing with us is you didn't just have like a prototype. It was actually manufactured. You're ready to go. So we don't have to worry about that. You walk in, you say, and here's your pitch. I love it. I have a new idea. It's never been done before. And everyone that I've shown it to loves it. And please test it. Give it a try. That's a pretty compelling thing. I mean, we love novel ideas. And then how can somebody say, well, we're not interested in new and we don't care about what people love. It's like, huh? And you go in there with that kind of confidence, knowing that this is something that's really cool, because when you just did it for yourself, enough people saw it and said, hey, that's really cool. I want that. How do I buy that? So you're doing a little test marketing in that environment. And like, well, gosh, people keep saying that maybe I'm onto something here. And I love that. So scratch your own itch and get some quick validation from people and make sure that we'll smoke up your butt because sometimes friends do that to support us. But it's actually the most unkind thing you can do. They genuinely loved it. You did this. And then 20,000 plus SKUs later, we're here. Valorant. So why not start directly? That's a pretty good summary. Thank you. It sums up my life. And then along the way, there's all that relationship building everywhere. It's a relationship with your employees, relationship with the designers, relationship with vendors. I mean, our first vendor We had to build this tool for the trash can. It was $100,000. At the time, it was impossible for us to do that. We got the belief of the vendor, the plastic injection molder guy, to actually say, okay, I'll build the tool for you. Because he believed in us. When we showed him the concept, he said, yeah, it's worth doing. because he was going to manufacture it, but he also had to invest in it. So even conceptually, when you go in with a vendor, like you want vendor support is a big thing. People always talk about getting a big raise and spending all the money to do all this manufacturing or whatever research marketing. But the vendor support is so important because they're like your partner. they're like a stakeholder well that's rare because they don't usually do that they want you to lay out the money and that's why a lot of products can be made because the tooling is so expensive right well find a vendor that's got belief in you or share the costs at least once they're invested like that you don't think they're going to do a great job on the quality manufacturing like because they've invested i think there's ways of doing it now let's just say about there's a recession going on sort of now almost i would say people would say oh this is the worst time to start a business wherever it's the best time because this is the time when you can go to businesses they have capacity their business is down they're looking for something that's going to help their future so i'm saying to the entrepreneurs out there yeah this is the time to get going and this is the time for all companies to innovate you know we had an executive come to us at one of the trade shows in 2008 it was completely empty it was a financial crisis like you wouldn't believe chris it was scary He said, whatever you do, don't cut your design department. Wow, what an amazing thing to say to me. And I thought, oh my God, you're right. We're going to keep innovating during this whole crisis. And when we come out of it, we're going to be like a leader. And you know what? It's the same today. There's a big retraction going on with every manufacturer. And because of the supply chain and the threat of tariffs, people have really stepped back. Like there's going to be a big hole in product for Christmas even this year because people have really put the brakes on. The flow of product is not something that you can just start up and start again so quickly. So like, this is a great time to go to people with manufacturers, vendors, retailers with great ideas, because they're going to want in the next two years to really come out of this really strong. You've casually mentioned his name twice, Karam Rashid. And he's an icon within the industrial design world. I think he has some nicknames, but for some reason I think of like the king of plastic. This guy has touched more products in your home than you even know. I think he's Egyptian ethnic ethnically, but he's is he Canadian? Yeah. Yes. And if you don't know, he's like a white and pink guy with funky glasses, super tall and lanky. He's been doing some social media posts, so I highly recommend you look him up. He must have been a really young man when you guys met. Yeah. Yeah. We were all young. Are you the first person to discover him? No, he was actually starting his career off fairly well with doing tabletop items that were really sort of curvy. There were aluminum cast items that were for tabletop and giftware. He was starting to get some traction with that. And he kept pitching me over several years, like, let's work together. But then everything sort of came together when we realized that we were making some inroads in housewares, that there wasn't a contemporary trash can on the market. They were all just rectilinear. It was like a dirty... place for design. Like why would designers focus on something like a trash can that holds all the things that you really hate? But then, you know, like we realized that, yeah, there is room for this to contemporize this whole idea. And then Karam came up with this beautiful curvy thing. I think it was the first injection molded product that had like this type of character to it. And we were able to even patent it with all the characteristics of it. Shapely, whole oval handles, curved top. translucent plastic. And it became like a brand trademark for us, which we actually very rarely are you allowed to get trademarks for physical product, but we were able to do it with him. And yeah, that was the launching point for a lot of different product with him. And then we did the chair called the O chair. which was the first beautiful injection molded plastic chair. I mean, these were just, you know, we haven't, you can tell by my tone of voice, the passion behind this whole thing, like, oh my God, Chris, the passion behind getting something like that done, like a very difficult, large plastic molded tool with huge investment and to convince everyone we have to go forward with this. I mean, this requires a lot of passion. There's something to unpack here because in the world of trash cans, we think of it as like, it's ugly. I don't want to deal with it. So most trash cans are very geometric. They're cylindrical or they're boxy or some rounded corner version of that. And if you're not familiar with this trash can that you guys have made, it's got like a torso. It's got like hips or something. It's sexy looking. It's different. it moves there's some kind of undulation like when you look at the back of a porsche it says it's got good hips this has got like a good bust i think right it's skinny at the bottom and it's white at the top it kind of comes out that's why we called it garbo the garbo after the famous actress is that why you called it that yeah because it was so shapely and like really yeah and then garbino too like we had variations of it too you know what i guess let me just say something about that chris because there was this incredible thing that happened we got the the this garbo can in the permanent collection of the museum of modern art in 1996 and it was like paulo antonelli was the curator then it was like i still have the letter and i look at it frequently it's like this 9.99 product is sitting right beside a Ferrari in the permanent collection. I was like, holy shit, we've done it. We've proved that there is such a thing as democratization of design. Design doesn't have to be expensive. It was a huge turning point for us and such a validation of everything we were doing. I have to say, to get that kind of support from these organizations and award design shows and everything is really kind of important for everything the whole team right it just validates everything you're trying to do well i'm sure you're involved in a lot of different design competitions too for your work back in the day yes for sure so You said something earlier about it's one thing to get a retailer to try it, but it's another thing. It's like the moment of truth, if you will, is when someone spends their hard-earned money and says, I want this in my home. What was the reception like on the retail level when this thing actually was in stores? How did it do out of the gate? You know what, this is a good story because the first version we did was quite a large one. It was like, I think it was about two feet tall. We thought it was going to be like a big office can. Like everyone would just throw their recycling in it or whatever. And it would be a big receptacle or people be, it was multifunctional because you could put ice in it and you could put like your beers in it and everything. And it did pretty well. We sold several hundred thousand. It wasn't a bad product, but then we realized that if we scaled it down so that it would fit into your bathroom, for example, where there was a lot of need for this kind of thing to beautify this type of product, if we scaled it down, like what would happen? So we did invest in a smaller size and we went from like 300,000 pieces to 10 million pieces. So this is an interesting thing. You don't, even though you're confident about what you're doing and you're moving forward in a great way, you don't know what you don't know about like going to happen in the marketplace, but to have the courage to pivot and to reinvest, to figure it out, because you know, you have something. But it's just not there yet. I mean, that was a huge turning point. You can imagine how financially sustainable we came after that when we did that one. It was like we had three. I think at one point we had three or four molds running simultaneously in different countries for that product. And one thing about mold, I should say molding in that whole style of that manufacturing model is that I got this awareness about putting the value, the design, the thoughtfulness into the tool. is something that's so important because what you're going to do is like that value is just going to explode into like thousands of pieces. So like you see people carelessly making these tools and coming up with this crap and injection molding because it's injection molding that doesn't make the value low. Putting that work into it will turn into like exponential financial sustainability. It's unbelievable. And you're going to be proud of every piece. Yeah, you mentioned that before, like the democratization of good design. It's not that design has to be expensive. It's actually ugly design costs way more than good design. You invest that time and energy and creativity in the manufacturing process is what it is. Who came with observation like, "Hey guys, I think this might not be the right size. What if we scaled it down a little bit so people put it in the bathroom?" Because I had one in my bathroom for a period of time. We have a lot of product meetings and team meetings with various people, product managers, sales managers. I have a lot of respect for the sales team about bringing concept ideas to the table. I mean, we have also product managers that are looking at this whole sort of landscape of what our competitors are doing and what's happening in the market. So like maybe it was identified that, hey, like, you know what, we didn't do the right size. We should have done about like a bath size. It is a sort of a little bit embarrassing that story because we look like we're heroes in design. But like this is what it took. You know, it took us to go through That, and maybe it's a scale of that thing was the one that got the attention of the curator of museum art, right? Like maybe you have to do bigger things. Like when we did the chair, it wasn't just about creating a product that was going to be really successful, but like the scale of a chair gives you that credibility in the marketplace that, wow, those guys are really serious. Like it's different than making like a set of bath accessories or some little objects. little artifacts, things like you're not taking that seriously. The people that will write about it, review it in the press are not going to review bath accessories. They're going to review a chair for sure. So the critics to get something in front of the critics or the reviewers or the press is really important too. Sometimes you have to do bigger scale things. So somebody on the sales team said, Hey, Paul, maybe we got the wrong size. And you're like, Oh, So let's look at that and then you guys go do this and it winds up being a gigantic hit. Ballpark to date, how many gazillion dollars of sales is that in terms of product sales for that one can? - You guys, I don't have my calculator in front of me. But yeah, it was a lot. - What do you think it is? We won't hold you to this. Nobody's gonna quote you. If it was 10 million pieces, I mean, at retail level, if it was like, let's say six bucks. So do the math. So you think in excess of $60 million in retail? Yeah. It's got to be, right? I think it was pretty ubiquitous at a point. Isn't that crazy? Yes. I know. It's like a dream come true, really, that you have. That brings me to another subject is that like when you talk about brand related to the strength of product, I just was looking at this timeline of different products that we've done over the years and it always took one product to push us over the top during that year. We could do all the experimentation we wanted and fool around all we wanted with really unique, interesting things. And something had to fall out or rise to the top out of all those products that would really drive profitability. So like we were willing to spend a lot of money on R&D and do a lot of different experimentation, but it was still real wide on one product to rise up and really excel. And like when you look at our success, there's always been every couple of years something that pushes over the top. And I would say like not enough people in our space think about like how to drive really hot products. somehow figure it out. I'm not sure about the formula, but it's certainly in knowing about, I have to say that I attended every trade show in the world at one point, every single one, I looked at every single product that was available. I can say this every single product that was available in the world to figure out where the niche was, where I had to go, you know, like I don't rely on, on market studies only or research, but like as a foundation, I think that's really important. So like if I was like a young designer out there or a startup company, I would know everything about everything there is in my space and then figure out where we're going to add value to the market. - Well, you've talked about a couple of products that are super iconic. If you're a student of industrial design, you already know these things, the garble can, the O-chair. There's the hub clock and the penguin soap dispenser, the soap pump. - I love the penguin. - It's so cute. It's so freaking cute. It's adorable, right? - So cute and it's really important, isn't it? - Yes, because it kind of makes you happy. Now, we can talk about that, but here's what I want to ask you. What product did you make that you're like, this is going to be a hit and just bomb? I want to see what we can learn from that, right? tell me one the one that kind of like what we missed that one by a mile there's hundreds but like i guess well we did like so many like once we were on a roll with the o chair and the garbino cam we thought okay we're going to be the leaders in injection molded plastic modern housewares and we started to do a lot of different products like containers seating and everything i remember doing one i thought oh let's do a storage device with a cap on it we'll even you know buy we'll do like blow molded like top on it so it's got like a foam top on it you can take the top off like an ottoman sort of with storage and everything and i remember taking it to the show and then this japanese customer came in and she he really liked it and everything he sat on it the whole thing just collapsed oh my god right at the show at the show yeah the show it was in a private room so it wasn't in front of everybody but it's like oh my god like we really blew this one like this thing plastic with this scale and everything and the way that people on it did not work so it was like and we'd already like tooled it everything too so it was a huge huge flop so yeah though and there's hundreds of those okay like it's just you know i would say in if you have pure creativity without really good engineering i think it can be a flop that was always something that was critic we were criticized for is that you don't have engineers like because most injection molded like facilities are engineering heavy. And that's why some of the stuff that gave us the advantage because engineers are going to do things that are stackable, moldable, but basically ugly. Right. So we had that advantage of trying to innovate. But I think working closely with, I would say, an enlightened engineer would be such an advantage because you can just avoid all those problems that might happen. Yeah, okay, you're bringing up another point here. Before I kind of recap that just real quickly, when the person sat on your chair, your ottoman, which was designed to be sat on, but for whatever reason, it wasn't strong enough, it broke. Did you guys just kill it right then and there? Did you try and figure out a way to salvage this thing? Or is it, no, we're done on that one. Oh, no, that was done. That was done. Like you have good evidence. It's not going to work. And nobody really wanted the idea anyways. Like it was not the right material. I mean, like I think materiality. So you drive, you go in a direction where you think it's where you have the expertise and everything, but it's not necessarily right for the market. it, when you think about like a home decor, you don't want to have like plastic storage unit to be sitting around in your, in your decor. Like you want to have like maybe wood or some other material that's a little more homey. And so I think like if you just get over, you know, we were obsessed with injection molding at the time. So I think that, you know, maybe that kind of obsession obsession was a failure by trying to apply it everywhere. because it was actually, you know, like, of course, you can see the attractiveness. Okay. You invest in the tool and then you can sell thousands of them and eventually the tools pay for it. And after that, it's like gravy. Right. But it doesn't always work. I mean, like people and also there's trend too. Don't forget, like you see We're in an era where people are really excited by our injection molding, but then all of a sudden, wood is a really warm material. Where's your wood products? That requires a lot more research into different vendors that can do craft at a certain price. If you're doing it in Asia, wood will crack and so forth. It's a lot more difficult to go into that craft space where people actually want it. So that required a lot more work and experience like, oh yeah, cracking wood, cracking wood. like they the woods the woods feels pretty good in asia like it's nice it's the right humidity and density there and then you bring it to the midwest to midiapolis to the target headquarters and like every sample will crack okay it's like like this is something that you go through and then you realize okay like we better put a lot of quality control on it to do um we do testing for humidity and so forth and do all that kind of stuff and drying wood and so like this comes with Those experience that experience comes with a lot of failure to write because. Couple of lessons to peel away for our audience, which is I think with your success, you can get into tunnel vision like we're going to be the kings of injection molded housewares. And that kind of led you to this place where like a little oversight. Maybe that's not the best way to do this. The other thing is to say, like, if you want to be really innovative, you can't let the bean counters, the engineers who seem to be focused on problems, lead the design process. Sometimes you got to just go for it. And it's like, yeah, okay, that one didn't work. But if we were engineer heavy or engineer led, we design ourselves into boxy things that are functional, but aren't beautiful. And there's this idea that I read this quote recently, it was from Jordan Peterson. I know he's controversial to quote, but he said something like, real art is a window into the transcendent. And I'm really kind of stuck on this line where the other line, he said something like art is necessary to make the suffering worthwhile. Like we can endure the suffering of this art. And you guys are very much the people who bring art into the world to make our places, our homes, our spaces more bearable. And I think There's something to be said about that why people love Apple products and don't love other companies products the same way there's this emotional attachment and I think even to the non-ethics in the world where they don't know what they're doing but they touch it they feel it the materials then all the little kind of invisible decisions are being made make them feel a certain way and and so putting it out there for all you entrepreneurs business owners like let the artists play for a bit let them lead and Keep them responsible, but let them lead. Otherwise, you're going to just come up with boring, drab, uninspired products. That's my takeaway from your story there. But the designers today, I would encourage more of a hybrid kind of designer too that has more engineering background. Like, why not? Like part of design is a business. Okay. So unless a designer knows how to, we call it material optimization. unless they know how to do that, the product is going to be overpriced or over the wall thicknesses are going to be too thick or the connections are going to be wrong. So it has to be something like a hybrid thinker. And I think with the CAD programs that they had today, like SolidWorks is one that we use quite frequently. Like they can become kind of the engineer designer hybrid sort of thing. But I think the imagination of that designer cannot be overshadowed by engineering. Okay. Like engineering is a killer. And And by the way, when we talk about, I think we might talk about AI a bit, but like when we have AI becoming an expert in engineering, then I think we need to get the designers more focused on the human side of this. I think it's a pretty good bridge, but I want to ask you this question. It's a technical question. Is the software that you use to design products now capable of running simulations based on the material, the density, and gravity and the forces applied to it where you can run sims on the machine to know it's going to work or not? Yeah, I think there are like my experience was I think in Penn State they had a mold flow analysis program that they developed. It was quite used that we used quite a bit to see how they would actually show the simulation of the product flowing through the mold. So if it actually reached the extremities of it. So this was a really valuable thing because actually all these products that you see, they're injection molded. There's certain wall thicknesses that are varying through it. You don't really notice it unless you cut it in half. but like this is an important thing so there's a lot of different programs available now for that kind of analysis i think that really aids the designers still i still encouraging everyone to still pick up a paper and pencil right now and get back to the foundational stuff about art and design and i would encourage like all designers moving forward that the foundation year should be about the history of art just like really immerse yourself in it even if you want to talk about okay prompt engineering and all that for it you still need to have all that history to be able to able to talk to computer to sort of develop your concepts Now we're in the age of AI, when every professional field is going to be threatened, replaced, optimized, and downsizing, all that kind of stuff, right? We can see that you can take a sketch, a really rudimentary sketch, and the machine will draw it and build it and render it just in ways that exceed the human capacity to do in such a short time. What is your take on this? I just want to open it up as a very broad question like, I have mixed feelings about it. Like on the positive side, I have a little design team that I've been working with called Archive. We use AI to do like renderings for conceptual presentations all the time. And we can do hundreds that we would only in the past maybe could do one in the same time period. So you know all about that and everybody does out there too, right? So it's helped a lot to just present a lot of different ideas to clients in a very short period of time as a stepping off point. My fear is that for and there's this laziness and I think we've all felt it like we're using chat GBT or something to create our papers or concepts or whatever. It's just that that reliance on it is really a killer in terms of like your imagination. And we need to The only way to face the future is through imagination. And I think the computer is only going to, I find this, there's a whole sameness about ai output is that you just it smells right when someone sends you a document created by chat dbt don't you just know so like i almost want to do in the prompt like make it like human make make mistakes in it or something because you it sounds too perfect and it always sounds the same so i think there's this kind of lack of originality that's coming out of it too. I've been commenting about it and getting a lot of different feedback about it, but like, where's the original design? Like, where's the designer in all this? Even if AI develops a pretty brilliant idea, it's still using sources. Like, can it name sources as primary sources? Like, everything had to come from somewhere. Are people in the future not going to know anything about original design? It's bad enough now. When you go into a store, like, what's original? like 99 is probably not original so people just have a lack of understanding of what original design is that original design is what's going to carry us forward to keep advancing all these great things that have happened in the last 100 years since the industrial revolution have always been really imaginative things that have changed the way we live and the way we think about things that going to happen in the future with just relying on ai i worry about that yeah i think that's a reasonable concern because The mass people who are using this, they don't have the eye, the training, the history to know like good imagery or good writing or good music that's being generated. They're like, that's pretty close. And to people like you and me, I'm like, no, it's not close enough. I think AI is a great tool to get you 80% of the way there. And then a human for now needs to put that 20% of their own spin, take, revise it. So I love this industrial tool that we have to like generate anything and I love to get to some point where we can highly art direct it so that you can do most of it. But right now we use those concepts and then we got to really get in there and put the things that we know are going to make it great to go from good to great. It's not that last 20%. It's a very difficult last 20% to get to. But even like, what are the... Things that we don't even, can't even imagine. Like we need humans to imagine this new way of living that we're going to be presented with. And like young people today, are they going to have that kind of encouragement to be imaginative like that, to invent, to make the products and services around them more relevant to them? Is it going to come from AI or is it going to come from humans? I think it has to come from humans. Yeah. Well, are you familiar with, I'm sure you are, the term general AI? Yeah. So we thought we were closer, but then Apple said we're not close at all. It's pretty garbage, the output that we're getting. So there's some divided thoughts on this. But at some point, however long it takes, the machine will actually be smarter than any one of us and can probably exceed our capacity to imagine. Until then, we still have some time to play and figure this thing out. And we'll just kind of bookmark this conversation there and see, like, let's see what happens. You said early on, you're retired now. You want to give back. You want to help the next generation. You're going to pay it forward as an educator, a person who speaks, who runs workshops. Talk to me about this and where are you headed with this? Yeah, well, I want to give back, but it's very reciprocal. I think you get the same enjoyment that I do about knowledge sharing and working with people. First of all, to actually say the things that are on your mind and to enact them this way is such a reinforcement of the way I think. And it's like, I just get excited by hearing myself talk about the things that were so successful or not so successful. And so it's a very two-way benefit. benefit for the student. I mean, I get a lot of respect for, I have to say in Central America or South America, Latin American countries, I really do get a lot of respect from the people down there because they do seem to have a more respect for education. And I feel that the people there, they're very family oriented. When they send their kids to school and they work with their professors there, they have a lot of respect for them because they're actually saying, "I'm giving you my child There's that kind of respect. And I find in North America, they're a little bit critical of teachers and professors or whatever, those that can do, those that can't teach. It's like, yeah, bad attitude. We should respect the professors. We should really hold them to high esteem because they're taking care of our children. So I think that's really important. I find that in Latin America. So they're very receptive to me coming down there, doing collaborations. I bring international speakers to the shows there. I do collaborations with students, like for a semester, like 40 students. I find a sponsor to do, let's say, a furniture manufacturer down there, and then we do a project for them. So it's really, and then the idea is too, that I have the outcomes will be shown at some sort of design show down there. So we actually have, it's not for me just to do a semester and then walk away from it, but I want to be able to show it. And then, you know, when it happens at those shows, Chris, it's so touching. Every family member will come down to it. Like the booth will be packed with family members and supporters, like looking at the student work, the ones that won the competition, for example. It's just a wonderful, wonderful feeling when I see something like that. Yeah. Have you taught or done workshops in parts of Asia, like Singapore? Well, I have done some online work with some various schools, one in Moscow and I think one in Italy. I mean, online, but I would love to. I'd love to go. Yeah, I'd love to go to Singapore to do. I mean, it'd be really a great advanced city. Yeah. Living in the future, I think. Yeah, I think so too. So the thing I learned about Singapore is this is that they're consistently ranked like top three in the world in terms of the education system. People there have a healthy respect for education, love education, and have the means to pay for education. So this is like a fantastic thing for me because I'm an educator. I need to get paid too. So I would strongly encourage you to perhaps do something in person. That's going to be on HUMID. I'd love to teach or lecture there for sure. So Paul, if somebody's listening to this and they want to book you to speak or teach, run a workshop or have you consult or do something like that, where can we send them? Yeah, go to my website, www.paulrowan.ca. And also on YouTube, there's going to be my new show called Undesigned with Paul Rowan. Wonderful. That'll be on YouTube. You can check that out. And do you have an Instagram account? Yeah, Paul Rowan. There you go. That's probably how people can message you, send them a DM. And if you're from Singapore or one of these other countries where you're like, we need a person like Paul and we need to show them a different, a better way of thinking and designing and building. I can't think of a better person to have run something because I know this is what you do and it seems like you're very passionate about it. Hello, Singapore. And English is their first language, so this is very easy. Okay. Paul, it's been a real pleasure talking to you. I'm glad I got to meet the man and hear some of the stories behind the products I've seen, touched and loved in my life. And it's just, it's a weird thing because early on in my design life, I couldn't afford nice things. And it's like, it was a delight to find cool stuff that I could actually afford that was modern, that was contemporary and was into my budget, was budget friendly. So Paul, really appreciate you. Thanks so much for putting me on the show. I just love talking to you. I hope we can do it again sometime.
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    “It's not that design has to be expensive.”

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