"I Love It, But Not For $3,000." Our Thoughts When Selling Furniture.

• A furniture dealer recently said to us, “The more unique an object is, the less willing a consumer is to part with their money for that object. No one really gives much thought to a cup of coffee or a pack of gum, but a customer will contemplate buying a chair or painting for their house for days, weeks, or even years."
  
  
• A poignant definition of capitalism is the Marx description of a circuit in which money (M) is exchanged for commodities (C) to be sold for a larger sum of money (M’), in a never-ending metamorphosis of M-C-M’. In selling unique objects however, one should be concerned with the dashes of the circuit, all of the irrationalities that the consumer brings to the exchange. The dashes are a leap of faith that determines success or failure in selling the object.
  
  
• We envision the process like a fishing trip, you prepare yourself before you enter the sales floor by saying to yourself, “today is the day, today we will find that customer who will buy our objects.”
  
  
• In our limited experience, the consumer doesn’t act as willing to buy as they do in our minds. They walk through our wares sometimes with an awkward contemplation, sometimes an ambivalent meandering around the objects, as if the objects never existed.
  
  
• The problem for us becomes selling our products to people that don’t feel an immediate need or desire to buy them. Customers don’t seem to buy contemplatively. This feels to us unrealistic and completely different from how other business operate.
  
  
• It’s really hard to actually get what an object is worth to produce. How long it takes to make or how many design failures happen before arriving at the finished product are arbitrary factors determining the price. It could be totally fair to price an object at 3,000 dollars, but if it isn’t perceived to be $3,000 by the consumer, then it is actually worth less. The question then becomes for us, “is this object really worth making?”
  
  
• Art and design are exactly like venture capitalism. We had a relative who recently passed away who was a venture capitalist. He attempted to sell revolutionary fleet management technology to the United States military. He worked on his idea for the last 15 years of his life, with the military pondering the technology for that entire time. He attempted to sell them with the only compensation being his dream of the big payoff. He died of a simple complication with diabetes he didn’t know he had. We saw him in the final weeks of his life as a blind man failing to sell his good health to his family. We think of him when we are selling. We think of him when someone loves one of our objects, but not for the amount that we are asking.
  
  
• These thoughts are reminders that help us keep track of the indeterminate time we wait for a customer to make a decision. Design masks our restrained desperation for a sale and it masks our failures from our customers. As we continue to design and sell, these thoughts will always accompany us.

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DESIGN FAIR 2010: MOBILE & OTHER UPLOADS.

wacdesignstudio recently participated at the Design Fair 2010 benefiting Lawndale Art Center. Here are just a few images taken with our mobile devices and cameras that we would like to share with you. Enjoy!

1. Limited edition postcards mailed to invite family & friends to the Design Fair 2010.
2. Lauren Rottet lecturing on the Future of Design at DCH.
3. Loading the truck at the studio with tourists taking pics of the presidents heads.
4. Our exhibitor tags.
5. Sign that defined our booth at the fair.
6. Scott Cartwright and Michael Guidry installing wacdesignstudio's poster.
7. wacdesignstudio's littlest fan.
8. Scott Cartwright talking at Design Fair 2010.
9. Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amare Cartwright sitting on wacdesignstudio's curved chair.
10. View from wacdesignstudio's booth.
11. Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amare Cartwright sitting on wacdesignstudio's bench
12. Artists Wei Hong and Sarah Schellengberg conversing on wacdesignstudio's bench
13. Raj Mankad and Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amare Cartwright.
14. Enjoying the Preview Party.
15. Emily and Jenny Lynn.
16. Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amare Cartwright and Iris Trent Siff, co-owner of Mortar.
17. Scott Cartwright and Sacha Nelson, co-owner of Mortar.
18. Adam Gibson and wacdesignstudio.
19. Vernon Caldera and wacdesignstudio.
20. Matthew Blackburn and Jennifer Allbritton with wacdesignstudio.
21. Jenny Lynn, vintage model, and artist Sarah Shellengberg.
22. Jenny Lynn, vintage model, and artist Sarah Shellengberg.
23. University of Houston Industrial Design student and Scott Cartwright.
24. Brenden Macaluso and Scott Cartwright.
25. wacdesignstudio with Joshua and Audrey Hardesty from HARBENGERduo.
26. Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amare Cartwright and Industrial Designer Myan Duong.
27. Blurry but fun, Eleanor Williams and Vernon Caldera.
28. Adam Gibson, Peter Glassford and Karen Olds.

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Notes and Thoughts on "Furniture Sale on North Freeway."

As announced through postcards, e-mails, twitter and blog posts, Furniture Sale on North Freeway was recently staged at the old Landmark Chevrolet Dealership in Houston, Texas.

We arrived to the site early in the morning with every object that we made for the event and set up shop in one of the corners of the empty car lot. It was a cloudy and windy day without a soul in sight, except for the thousands of cars zipping down the freeway at 80 mph. We had our first customer around 9:30am, and from there we had visitors every 45 minutes with most people coming in groups, driving out from inner loop Houston to the site. People from the neighborhood situated behind the dealership also stopped to chat, with conversations ranging from being angry about the quality of product the dealership provided when it was in business, and being angry about the 700 yd x 175 yd concrete void left behind after the business had dissolved.

Little was spoken of our intentions, or our gesture of attempting to sell six modest objects in a space that once sold and held in inventory more products than a husband and wife partnership could possibly fathom.

Our initial intentions were out of boredom, we were originally building pieces of furniture to fit our small apartment over weekends in our family run cabinet shop in Spring, TX, with materials left over from construction jobs. We would drive back and forth on I-45 passing the empty shells of former businesses and billboards selling ugly products far cheaper than someone could build and sell locally. Our point of departure for this idea were our conversations on how ridiculous it would be to find a local market for one of a kind, small-scale furniture meant for an aging 600 square foot Montrose apartment.

Next, our conversations turned towards the site, nestled along a stretch of empty commercial space. Like many, we felt frustrated by the lack of vibrant local activity in spaces like Landmark Chevy that are found throughout Houston, space that is overbuilt and left empty that many are forced to drive by everyday. Our hopeful gesture of peddling local goods was one possible, albeit unlikely solution to these empty spaces requiring excessive capital, volume of goods, and a large customer base to fill.

Our personal fantasy was a large community of modest profit, small-scale and local businesses that could occupy these empty spaces, selling whatever goods they chose to make. We imagined that this business structure could enable a dialog with the local consumer, giving them tremendous power and input to what they needed in their community, replacing the currently accepted mass produced illusion of choice of goods that are bought without knowledge of their true costs of production, labor, or environmental impact.

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OffCite. Design. Architecture. Houston

From OffCite.org
"FURNITURE BUYERS UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOOSE BUT YOUR LA-Z BOY."
by Steven Thomson

“I came home with a high fever; my ears still hurt. Just from the noise — a ringing in my ears. It is very toxic. But it’s Houston.” Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amaré Cartwright is describing the after effects of Sunday’s Furniture Sale on North Freeway (announced last week on OffCite), a daylong event at the abandoned Landmark Chevrolet dealership on Interstate 45. Presented by wacdesignstudio, which consists of husband-wife team Scott Cartwright and Jenny Lynn, the guerilla retail event launched the studio’s first furniture line, designed and fabricated with an attention to the modesty of scale, materials, and production.

Located outside the crumbling remains of the Landmark Chevrolet Dealership, “Furniture Sale on North Freeway” reflected on the unanticipated failures of highly leveraged businesses and their effects on the city landscape.

The happening attracted about 50 people who had received mailed flyers, picked up information from Catalina Coffee, or began following the studio on Twitter. Because the space was not rented, Scott and Jenny brought an envelope full of cash to pay off potential security guards (there were none), as well as food for any wandering homeless people. The crowd was a mix of architecture students, writers, and curious locals from the adjacent Hidden Valley ranch-style development located behind the dealership. For Scott and Jenny, bringing the intelligentsia outside of their element to the edge city and putting the locals’ neighborhood eyesore to use was just as relevant as displaying their wares.

Mr. Cartwright grew up in the midst of the Woodlands McMansion boom. His father owned a custom cabinetry company, to which Scott owes much of his sense of craftsmanship, as well as keen sense of economy of material. Scott met Jenny, a native of Caracas, while both were studying at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts. When the couple came back to Houston upon graduation, Scott found that his native Woodlands had been almost completely built out, leaving a dismantled craft construction industry in its wake. The Cartwrights chose to interpret the recession on their own terms, founding a hyper-local design studio focusing on the discourse of contemporary art and its relationship to design and architecture.

They define their “design art” as any artwork that attempts to play with the place, function, and style of art by commingling it with architecture, furniture, and graphic design. The forms are simple and composed of repossessed construction materials. Explains the duo, “It is more about the objects than about comfort and pop, we are currently not designing furniture to please anyone or solve other people’s problems, we are designing and building furniture as a way to find the answers to/and/or compare them to global and local issues concerning the current state of the economy and capitalism.”

Though no pieces were sold, the show on the North Freeway created a dialogue with the community on the failure of high leverage business, massive turnout, and mediocre quality goods versus the idea of a low leverage business, locally built, and individually handcrafted. In the long run, wacdesignstudio believes that this model will be the standard for creating a sustainable, growth-oriented local economy.

Posted by Steven Thomson on March 11th, 2010 at 2:14 p.m on OffCite.org

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THANK YOU!

To everyone that had the chance to go to The Furniture Sale on North Freeway, thank you... we truly appreciate your support. "Thoughts and Notes on the Furniture Sale on North Freeway" will be published this weekend on this blog. And to those that were not able to go to the event and would like to know about this and upcoming projects contact us via e-mail at mail@wacdesignstudio.com

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OffCite. Design. Architecture. Houston

From OffCite.org
"GUERRILLA FURNITURE SALE"
by Raj Mankad

In January, the New York Times reported that employment at US architecture firms had dropped from its July 2009 peak at 224,500 to 184,600 by November. Commercial development has ground to a halt, the big car manufacturers have pulled the plug on many dealerships, and a number of big box stores have closed. As an article by Susan Rogers in the next issue of Cite will discuss, vast amounts of land in the city are withering, wasting, wild, and waiting. It is in this context that two young designers have announced a “guerilla retail event,” the “Furniture Sale on North Freeway.”

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POSTCARDS SENT

Postacards were dropped at the United States Post Office, you might be getting one in the mail... "Furniture Sale on North Freeway" Sunday March 7th, 2010 in the abandoned lot of the former Landmark Chevrolet dealership located at 9111 N. Fwy, Houston, TX 77037.

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wacdesignstudio's brand.

As you may noticed in a previous post, we acquired a copper brand and all of our furniture is being stamped with the name of our design studio.

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