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When big retail chains are pushing contemporary design, what's an avant-garde
manufacturer to do? Milan's Kartell aims to make its move onto the U.S.
stage.
By Alec Appelbaum
October 2002
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The flexible PVC Bookworm shelf (1993; below right) by Ron Arad is one
of Kartell's best-known products. More recently Philippe Starck created
Bubble Club (2000; above) and Louis Ghost (2002; below left),
mass-produced chairs that borrow the outlines of more traditional
furniture.
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The Los Angeles store is located among a stretch of high-end design
stores on Beverly Boulevard. The facade--with its gray-skin sign and
product-filled plate-glass window--helps distinguish it from its
neighbors.
Top, courtesy Philippe Starck; middle right, courtesy Ron Arad; middle
left, courtesy Kartell; bottom, Benny Chan/Fotoworks
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Over Memorial Day weekend, discount retail chain Target unveiled a line
of household products--curling irons, baby monitors, folding chairs, and
other practicalities--by famed industrial designer Philippe Starck. But
the alliance drew less fanfare than it would have five years ago. Contemporary
furniture mutated in the 1990s from the exclusive privilege of a wealthy
few to the cool totem of anyone with good credit. Pottery Barn and Crate
& Barrel stores spread modern-looking tables and sofas from Soho to
Southern California, British furnisher Conran's returned to the United States
after a long absence, and superstars such as Michael Graves designed popular
lines of accessories for Target. But like the larger economic fad of the
1990s--the stock market--mass-produced contemporary furniture can't grow
at the same rate forever. As Williams-Sonoma and Crate & Barrel show
signs of wariness, a savvy furniture vendor can do nicely by zeroing in
on sophisticated consumers in select cities across the country.
At least that's how Ivan Luini sees it. He runs American operations for
Kartell, a Milanese maker and vendor of plastic contemporary furnishings.
Its best-known products--including Starck's La Marie chair and Ron Arad's
snaking Bookworm shelves--retail for less than $400 each and show off the
company's commitment to high design and ingenious use of plastic molds.
(It used to make auto accessories before expanding into home furnishings
in 1963.) Luini is spending 2002 jetting to Miami, Atlanta, and Los Angeles
to tend to three new stand-alone stores. (Kartell's "store marathon"
in March celebrated openings in these cities; its only prior retail outlet
had been in Manhattan.) He predicts that each new store should become profitable
within a year, and plans new outposts in San Francisco and Boston this fall.
That's a bold course in a shaky economy--and two years after Crate &
Barrel, with vaster domestic resources, opened a disappointing contemporary
store in Chicago called CB2. But Luini acts thoroughly calm. "Our strength
is in continuing to innovate," he says. And he's not just referring
to plastic.
Since Target commissioned Graves to design teakettles in 1997, American
earners have officially learned to pick contemporary designs off the
shelf. With this retail evolution came a change in the way designers reached
consumers. Until fairly recently modern designs overwhelmingly went to those
who sent professional designers and decorators out to snare them. Even today
it's fairly common to wait 12 weeks for a piece to be upholstered or otherwise
custom-fitted. "In this country, contemporary design had been
[sold like] jewelry--hidden," Luini says. But today's consumers are
too mobile, too impatient, and too inundated with other options for interior
designers to serve as useful go-betweens. "The consumer is the one
sitting on the product," Luini says. "You don't need to hire a
designer to buy two chairs."
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The Atlanta store, which opened March 12, is located in a 1940s Social
Security building. Like all Kartell's U.S. stores, the renovation design
was handled by architect Ferruccio Laviani and features floor-to-ceiling
shelving and lighted display platforms.
Left, courtesy Kartell; right, Lauren Rubenstein
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"If a firm has something genuinely distinctive on offer, I'd
be hesitant to bet against it," says Bob Frank, a Cornell University
economist who studies how Americans spend. "Luxury demand has been
holding up surprisingly well despite the recession and September 11, and
there is every reason to expect that future income growth will continue
to be concentrated atop the economic pyramid." As very wealthy people--corporate
lawyers, cardiologists, power-hitting shortstops--continue to earn more
income, they figure to keep spending on creature comforts. And the
stock-market-whacked professionals racing to keep up with them figure
to seek goods they can both boast about and pay for all at once.
More specifically, according to furniture expert Jerry Epperson,
baby-boomers--known for their hefty numbers and distinctive habits--clamor
for furniture that simultaneously conveys high style and good value. Epperson--a
founding partner at Richmond, Virginia, boutique investment bank Mann, Armistead
& Epperson--says the two biggest generations in the country are stoked
for contemporary design. "There's huge demand coming on as we baby-boomers
are buying second homes," he says. "When we have a place at the
beach or the mountains, it gives the opportunity to play a little bit."
When not immersed in make-believe, Epperson adds, boomers will assuage their
guilt over working long hours by plying their postcollegiate children with
cash. Thus Epperson expects Generation Y to "hit the furniture industry
earlier" than any prior cohort. It's no coincidence that in April,
Williams-Sonoma unveiled a new housewares catalog targeted at a young urban
audience. The offshoot is called West Elm--a stealth brand that never acknowledges
its corporate parent. John Baugh, who researches specialty retailers for
Wachovia Securities, told clients in a note that the move reflected
Williams-Sonoma's conviction that growth lies in a slightly funkier demographic.
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The L.A. store opened in West Hollywood on March 14 and uses the
company's signature red-and-white walls--which changed slightly from the
original design (right) to the installation (left)--to subdivide the
interior space.
Left, Benny Chan/Fotoworks; right, courtesy Kartell
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Comparatively Kartell, which grosses $100 million per year, may look
like an ant scurrying beneath Williams-Sonoma's $2 billion in annual sales.
But the firm is well positioned for this moment; its pieces have already
acquired the sort of cachet West Elm is seeking. Newsweek put a model
in a Kartell chair for a springtime cover on "the future." Moreover,
the company prides itself on having goods available on site in a variety
of styles and colors, at prices that favor impulse buys. Kartell's ready-to-go
wares, including Arad's Bookworm and Starck's Bubble sofa, attract expansive
home buyers in two ways. First, they're often cheaper than upholstered alternatives:
Starck's Bubble sofa sells for $595, compared with more than $1,200 for
an upholstered sofa at a Manhattan chain. Second, they can leave the store
with the buyer. "When you buy two Starck chairs from us and the whole
thing costs $300 or $400, you want it immediately," Luini says. "It's
like buying electronics rather than like buying a car."
The analogy highlights another strength. Kartell began in 1949 as a maker
of auto accessories and built an in-house R&D corps called the Labware
Division in 1958. Luini promises that the company will keep outsmarting
other manufacturers. Technicians produce its pieces with complex injection
molds rather than hammers and fabric. This makes for costly development
but efficient production. "A molded polypropylene chair has investments
in the hundreds of thousands just for the mold," Luini says. Rather
than building a brand around photos of attractive yuppies or wedding-registry
sales, he stresses Kartell's high-tech cred. He boasts that the company's
plastics are 100 percent recyclable and designed to outlast other synthetic
furniture. And Luini swears that consumers will never find, much less
accept, substitutes. "It took us two years [to create one chair], and
we broke a couple of molds," he says. This is engineer-geek bravado,
not marketing cliché; Luini expects his brand to escape trend cycles
by producing shapes and contours that nobody else can match.
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The largest Kartell store worldwide is the Miami flagship, in the city's
booming design district. The 6,000-square-foot store includes a private
garden.
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Top and above left, courtesy Kartell; above right Steven Brooke
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Of course, the stores have to be unique as well, since they sit in self-consciously
tony "design districts." And while engineers tinker with new shapes,
Kartell needs to sell a lot of $150 chairs to make those stores profitable
within 12 months. Luini clearly intends to out-cool American mass-produced
brands. At a time when even La-Z-Boy has hired a designer to sex up the
footrest, Luini has sought the sort of seductive store design that Armani
and other clothes merchants use. "We can show an entire line, six colors,
before your very eyes," he says. Ferruccio Laviani, who also designs
tables and lamps, outfitted Kartell's new stores with lighted platforms,
skylights, and floor-to-ceiling shelves. Although less audacious than
Rem Koolhaas's Prada flagship, the buildings lure passersby more aggressively
than design showrooms traditionally have. "People might have seen a
product in a magazine and thought it was unaffordable," Luini says.
"Here they can touch it."
Kartell pieces already sell in more than 150 design boutiques nationwide,
but the individual stores give the company more control over its brand;
they enable consumers to associate their desire for aesthetic edge with
the Kartell name. As Epperson explains, specialty vendors often grow by
leaping from one city's subculture to another's rather than by saturating
a given city. By cultivating followers in cosmopolitan cities across the
country, Luini may insulate himself from a drop in the value of the dollar
or a shift in tastes--both of which, Epperson says, have afflicted
European design before. "These looks grew nationwide in the past and
then petered out," he warns.
Luini's not panicking. Instead he's signing long-term leases and saying
he seeks "the beginning of a proper diffusion" rather than a chance
to cash in on a trend. The notion that Kartell's goods can forge a self-defining
path to consumers who want to graduate from the bigger chains isn't so outlandish.
Indeed, in the downtown districts it's chosen, Kartell probably won't need
to match Pottery Barn or Crate & Barrel's prices or volume; its leases
cost less and its competition lies farther away. Luini presents himself
as deliberately surveying American cities, waiting to make his next landing.
"Many companies within their lines have something competitive,"
he told me via cell phone from an airport. "But none has as vast an
offering of good designs made of high-tech materials for relatively affordable
prices." Jetting with other urbanites, Luini may be chasing a fickle
market--but he's picking his spots.
Alec Appelbaum writes about business, cultural, and environmental issues from New York City.
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