Twelve top designers tell us how they made it
Making it as a designer is tough. For our Performance Review series, Dezeen asked 12 successful designers to explain candidly how they got their break, including Philippe Starck, Inga Sempé and Formafantasma.
For many aspiring young designers, earning a living from their creative pursuits can feel like little more than a pipe dream.
That's why we decided to ask a dozen well-established names to recall how they made it work, urging them to be as honest as possible about what it took to climb the ladder.
"Things have changed radically"
We deliberately selected designers who broke through in different periods, from Starck and Tom Dixon, who rose to prominence in the 1980s, to more recently established figures such as Yinka Ilori and Charlotte Taylor.
There were stories of being in the right place at the right time. Others emphasised the importance of contact-building.
But the timeless importance of hard work and stamina when trying to make a living from creativity was also a running theme.
"You have to be very patient in design," acknowledged furniture designer Inga Sempé. "It was very painful, very difficult and very often hopeless."
"I had to find ways of trying to fund my shows. And that was me working in Marks & Spencer and Jigsaw," said Ilori.
Some designers also took the opportunity to share their thoughts on the current state of the design industry.
What they had to say makes for concerning reading.
"Today, I wouldn't advise becoming a designer," Starck told Dezeen.
"Things have changed radically since we graduated in 2009," said Andrea Trimarchi of Formafantasma, who was among the creatives citing less funding and higher exhibition fees as challenges central to the lives of today's emerging designers.
As well as rising costs, some pointed to the failure of contemporary design education to prepare students for the working world.
"The quality of design education is lower than it was," said Pearson Lloyd's Tom Lloyd.
"It's so bad, I don't know if it should be fixed," added Andu Masebo.
"Taking things into your own hands is definitely the trend"
Despite the undeniable issues plaguing the design industry, some creatives suggested that the power of social media has positively transformed the landscape for emerging designers hoping to put their work on the map.
"Almost all of my collaborators I've met through Instagram," noted designer Charlotte Taylor.
The designers also suggested that there is a growing resistance against the "crazy fees" and inflexibility of trade shows to platform work.
"Taking things into your own hands is definitely the trend now," said Dixon.
Read on for the stories of how 12 established designers got a foot in the door:
"You have to be very patient" says Inga Sempé
"It was very painful, very difficult and very often hopeless. You have to be very patient in design, which is absolutely not my best quality in daily life.
"At first, I worked for some other people, but I was very bad because I don't care about others' projects. Then I was teaching a couple of days a week and working in design the rest of the time. You have to find some ways to still do design, but not rely on the royalties. It takes a long time to make a living out of it.
"It took more or less 10 years. I did a sofa for Ligne Roset, which was very successful. It has helped me to survive as a designer, to have some assistance. But it's very, very rare. It's a job that looks like it would bring you some money, but it's not true at all. If you are a real designer, an industrial designer, the contracts are always very bad and unfair to designers because you get very low royalties. You're not paid while the project is in development. It's terribly unfair.
"It is hard, but if you want to make it, if you really want to be part of it, you should do it. I think the important thing is to be sure that you want to be part of it – not to be from a special world, but to be involved in such processes, which lead to an object being produced, because it's very long and complicated."
"Having the practical know-how has been useful" says Andu Masebo
"For a long time, I worked as a fabricator, so I learned to make things professionally before I learned to design them.
"Because I had this background in fabrication when I transitioned into wearing the hat of a designer, it was one of those things that happened slowly, incrementally. I would get a fabrication job, and I would bring a bit of my designerly lens to it, and then with the money from that fabrication job, I would develop a personal project.
"And then more and more people started coming to me for that personal thing, rather than a kind of facilitation of something they already wanted. So there wasn't a moment when I quit my job and went all in. It was very pragmatic; I was already very ad hoc in the way I worked.
"I did a lot of freelance work that involved being around tools. The process of making and installing something is as relevant when you're fitting, say, a kitchen countertop, as it is when you're making and installing a bespoke range of furniture for a specific setting.
"So I guess that was my immediate transition into industry and into making money from design. Once I found my rhythm, having the practical know-how has been quite useful in lots of moments.
"Design education is fucked. It's so bad, I don't know if it should be fixed. I think we should tear it down and refashion it into a completely new model. But regardless of how I felt about the process, what it's given me is the confidence to know that I'm not the most inferior person in the room."
"Today I wouldn't advise becoming a designer" says Philippe Starck
"When I started, design was only Italian with great master designers and iconic editors. Being a French designer in France was very difficult. Editors would laugh at my models, and one even told me: 'Mr Starck, you are a nice guy, but your designs will never work: chairs don't have armrests.'
"Broke and desperate, I had resigned myself to selling all my drawings when I happened to meet, on a street in Paris, the man who would change my life. His name was Arturo Del Punta Cristiani and he had a furniture store at Beaubourg.
"When he saw the drawings I was about to sell, he convinced me to give them to him, promising that within three months, I would become the most famous designer in the world. I had nothing to lose so I decided to trust him. That was a key moment when I believe I made the right decision. And, interestingly enough, now all chairs have armrests.
"Everything you create must truly come from you. In other words, you must first learn to be alone, apprehending the blank page. Every morning, you face this obstacle. The goal is not to fall, to overcome it, and to face an even greater one the next day. Only then can you create the most honest and timeless designs, cleaned to the minimum for the maximum service and longevity.
"However, the real advice would be not to pursue a fashionable profession. Soon, there will be more designers than clients. Therefore, today, I wouldn't advise becoming a designer. Instead, be a citizen – a human, political, poetic citizen – with rigorous honesty. If you manage that, it is not too bad already."
"I had quite an unconventional pathway into design" says Charlotte Taylor
"I had quite an unconventional pathway into design. I came from a fine arts background, and I was studying sculpture. The sculptures I was making were very spatial and architectural, but not very technical.
"It was when I was building the SketchUp model for the sculptures that I was going to take to the workshop that I started exploring the 3D realm. And that kicked off, and I got really into designing corners of rooms, to rooms, to full-scale houses.
"My practice has been shaped by collaborations, because I do lack that technical side. It's been working with incredibly talented architects, 3D designers, engineers, to translate those ideas and my way of thinking and design process into actual tangible design.
"Social media has been hugely important in my career. I mean, it's obviously a huge time drain with negative sides, but I would say almost all of my collaborators I've met through Instagram, and they've contacted me because it acts as my portfolio as well. I don't have a website, so all of my work is visible there.
"Today, I think there's a collective response against the trade shows in general, for the way they alienate and the crazy fees that come with them. It just makes them completely inaccessible for designers starting up, because you have to prototype and put all the costs into the pieces themselves and renting the space. It makes it all very unrealistic for most people.
"I think there is more of this kind of guerrilla approach coming back into design. More of an off-site movement. Obviously, this still involves costs, but I think people are more interested in engaging with those things. People can find spaces and create things that relate more to their practice, rather than being constrained to, say, 20 square metres and one electrical outlet."
"I wouldn't put all your effort into social media" says Laurids Gallée
"I started my design studio in 2016. But I didn't do anything with it in the first couple of years because my primary income at the time was from working in production for other people. On the side, I would spare one day a week for my own work. Then it was two, then it was three, then it was four, and then I went fully independent five years ago.
"There's one particular moment where I was like: okay, now things are different. And that's when Sight Unseen published a story specifically about me and my work. When you do stuff as an independent designer in your little workshop, you feel a bit like you're crazy. So it was such a good feeling to get industry validation.
"You expect the inquiries and sales to start rolling in, but that was really not the case. It was really, really slow. Many of my friends attempted similar careers because we met in design school. And they're as passionate as me, but I think the difference often is that this process is so annoyingly long that it gets too long for some people and they run out of stamina.
"I've really earned a lot of money through direct sales and social media; this is one of the most important tools for me. A few things also happened through fairs and so on. But I think social media was more valuable in this regard.
"I've acquired a big following, but I don't attribute this to me being so much better than other designers. The format of short-form video really fits with some of my work. I think this is why it's successful. It's pure luck, to some degree and to some degree, of course, relatively okay work. You need to have a product that works for that format.
"So I wouldn't give anybody the advice to put all your effort into social media. I think for some people, that works. For many others, it won't. Unfortunately, in this kind of attention society that we have, if it doesn't completely stand out, it's really hard to compete."
"I've always played attack" says Fabio Novembre
"I got my architecture degree in 1992, and at that time it was impossible to work in a studio if you were not able to sketch. So I moved to New York, and I started studying movie direction. There, I met my first client, completely accidentally – the fashion designer Anna Molinari.
"We were at dinner with very good friends. And she said: 'Fabio, you're an architect, I have to do a boutique in Hong Kong.' That was the turning point. So I always give this suggestion to students when I lecture at universities: don't hang out only with architectural students. Nothing new can come out of it. It's a very basic secret but it's a real one.
"Another turning point for me was when the Israeli-American visual artist Izhar Patkin gave a guest lecture at my university. At the end of the session, he asked for volunteers to help him mount his installation at the Venice Biennale of Art. We were in an exam session, so I was the only one raising my hand.
"I went to Venice with him and I realised that this guy was so fucking well-connected. We were hosted in the house of Romeo Gigli, who at that time was the most important designer in the fashion world, and Ettore Sottsass and Barbara Radice were staying in the same house. It's like a whole new world opened up to me, just coincidentally from raising my hand at the end of a lecture.
"I've always been open to anything. I've always said: yes, I'll do it. And that's something that is also very important for young people. Lots of the time, we play defence. I've always played attack. I think that with this attitude, everything will come.
"Mine is such a unique starting point – not having ever worked in a studio, getting the right money from the first commitment. I know I'm not a rule. I'm perfectly aware of that. But that's how it happened. And sometimes it also happens for other people. You never know which is the right place. And, of course, you never know which is the right time; it's accidental. But if you go to many places, you could get that magic mix of timing and casting."
"Design Academy Eindhoven was the most important thing we did" says Formafantasma's Andrea Trimarchi
"Things have changed radically since we graduated in 2009. In the early years, we established our studio in Eindhoven, and at the time, it was an incredible place because it wasn't gentrified as it is now.
"There were a lot of studios that were possible to run for really little money. And also, there was loads of funding at the time, both from the government and from private foundations. That has changed a lot.
"We didn't get a lot of funding, but that kind of funding, especially in our first year, really helped us open the studio. It helped us to pay rent and be free in our thinking, which is especially important in the first year of a career.
"[Studying at] Design Academy Eindhoven was the most important thing we did. Our mentors at the time weren't asking, 'how do you solve this design issue?' They were asking us, 'how do you see your profession in the future? What do you want to change?' They were really instrumental in making us critical.
"The freedom that Holland gave us was incredible. In Holland, design falls below the creative and cultural sector, while in Italy, it's the economic sector. So that really changes the way you see design as a discipline.
"After two years, we went to Amsterdam, a city with higher rents, but we wanted to test whether the things we were doing could become consistent. Both Simone and I didn't come from wealthy families, so we couldn't really take the risk to stay [in Eindhoven]. So I think it was very important to be in a city and a country where they really value creativity."
"Today, what is interesting is that everybody can publish their own content without relying on the media. It's easier, in a way, to reach out compared to the past.
"But the problem of money and where you live and how much money you need to make a business survive, I think it's worse than before."
"I don't think we ever really wanted to work for anyone else" says Pearson Lloyd's Tom Lloyd
"I went to Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent University), which is a very traditional 'making' furniture design course.
"I then went to the Royal College of Art to do my MA and had a brilliant time under Daniel Weil, who ended up as a partner at Pentagram. He offered me a role at Pentagram when I graduated, which I suppose was one of my lucky breaks. Luke [Pearson, studio co-founder] went off to work for Ross Lovegrove. We both did about three to three and a half years in those studios.
"Then, in the most innocent way you could possibly imagine, we just said, 'let's set up a studio'. I don't think we ever really wanted to work for anyone else. And we were young. We were 29 and 30 when we started. I think we had that innocence, you know, it was pre-digital.
"In those days, there was almost no furniture industry in the UK to speak of, because a lot of the factories had shut. But there was no globalisation yet. So the idea of outsourcing stuff or getting stuff made abroad was not yet available in a way in this country. So we had to go looking for our work abroad.
"We really just were ringing around and going to fairs and walking onto the stands hoping to be commissioned. It was very uncomplicated and unsophisticated. I suppose what we did have is that we were recommended some work by our previous employers, which did get us in through the door early.
"We could only show work from college, because we couldn't show work from our previous employers, and people still don't. You can say who you've worked for, and show stuff in the public domain, but you can't really show anything else.
"The quality of design education is lower than it was. So I think there probably are routes to becoming a designer that don't entail college. You can come into design from being a sculptor or being an artist or a maker.
"Personally, I would say I always employ someone based more on their personality than their work. I think it's more of a curiosity and enthusiasm, a sort of sparkle in their eyes, because after three years of a design degree, you have hardly been able to show your true talents in that amount of time.
"My route was pretty traditional – I went to college, I trained in furniture design and I became a furniture designer. There wasn't that much deviation. And in a funny way, I wish there had been some bending and moving looking back on it. Some people have a very broad CV of where they've gone and how they've ended up over there, and they've gone over here, and then finally, they've found their place."
"There was no job too small" says Morrama's Jo Barnard
"After graduating, I decided that I wanted to freelance, because I'd had an internship, and being young and naive and slightly overconfident, I felt like that wasn't for me.
"I told every single person I knew that I wanted to freelance. If they had anything, there was no job was too small – I would do it. So I made a bit of a livelihood that way. I was also a design assistant for a couple of days a week, doing lots of CAD.
"I founded Morrama when I was 24. I was at university with a fellow designer called Rob, and we had batted around the idea of running our own studio. We didn't set anything in stone at first because we wanted to go off and get some experience.
"Setting up a business is quite easy. We knew how to make a website, we knew the importance of getting ourselves onto Google and getting a social media profile. The hardest thing was finding the next project, and then the next project.
"It's always going to be hard in industrial design because it takes such a long time for products to come to market, and you can't really talk about it for a long time. When setting up, you're reliant on conceptual work – things you might have done at university. Any work experience you ever get to do is vital because you just need to have said, 'I worked on that project,' which is even harder now because younger people are finding it difficult to find internships and junior roles. It's the first thing that gets cut when purse strings are tightened.
"I think that there should be a closer relationship between design and business at an educational level, so that people can understand the implications of what it is that they're creating from a business perspective.
"Controversially, I sit in the camp that there are too many designers. There are too many design courses, and there are too many courses that don't have a really strong connection with industry. There are students doing three years of a design course, but at no point do they even get a week of work experience. For me, that feels so wrong. It should be a requirement that you can't graduate without some form of experience in the industry. Without that experience, it's really hard to get a job."
"It felt like I was about to jump off a cliff" says Yinka Ilori
"I graduated in 2009 and worked in retail through college until 2016. But I started my practice really early on – it's been over 10 years.
"I think the difficult thing that I found early on in my career was that to exhibit at the really big design and trade fairs was really expensive. I had to find ways of trying to fund my shows. And that was me working in Marks & Spencer and Jigsaw to fund my first show. And I was living at home at the time. Prior to that, I worked for Lee Broom for a little bit. He gave me my first design internship.
"I left [a retail job] in 2015, because I was offered my first commission in Miami for Airbnb. I remember I asked my manager if I could go to Miami, and she said that I had to choose the job or Miami, and I said to her, 'I'm gonna go to Miami.' And I resigned.
"The best decision I made for my life was taking that risk. I think at that point, sometimes you need those ultimatums to kind of push you out the door. But it felt like I was about to jump off a cliff. I was like, 'I'm scared, but I'm gonna do this,' and I did it, and it was the best thing ever.
"So sometimes you might get those opportunities, and that one opportunity you take might unlock other doors for you. Doing that project in Miami unlocked big opportunities. I'm still working with people now that I met in 2015.
"I think loads of designers now are so eager to make it and be successful. Sometimes you have to remember the groundwork, and that might mean working in a pub or a cafe to fund it all. Because let's be honest, to be a successful designer, it's very, very hard to make a living out of it. To make a living out of anything creative is tough."
"But things are changing a lot. I think designers are doing things on their own and funding shows on their own. Because the landscape of how we showcase or break through into the industry is something I feel like people are now taking more ownership of. People are a lot less reliant on design fairs."
"We got a flying start and never looked back" say Form Us With Love's Jonas Pettersson and John Löfgren
"Our expectations in terms of money were extremely low. Going from being in university to running Form Us With Love, the first three years were pretty much the same as being a student. We were in a much smaller city, and they were quite pro-design at the time. So you could actually get funding to go to Milan. They covered 50 per cent of the travel expenses and the exhibition fee.
"I don't know how it is today, but overall interest in design in Sweden at the time was much higher from a government-funding perspective. So I think that helped us a lot. But we were pretty eager to make it happen. We were booking a lot of meetings, not only at the fairs, but then weeks and months after, basically travelling and meeting people with those ideas.
"Often it's been a problem-solving activity. Like: okay, these guys need some art direction or help with photography or help with a stand or whatever. It wasn't about us; it was about what we could offer to help out. We saw pretty early on that there are so many things that surround the product that need to be in shape as well.
"And you have different ways of paying for these different layers. In the early stages of our business, that was the core question: how can we make money on what our offer is? The royalty system doesn't work at all when you have a startup. It could take two years to get something out of it. So you need money from another kind of source. Royalties are a super interesting setup when you've been in the business a few years, but you need to manoeuvre through this in other ways in the beginning.
"We got a flying start and never looked back. If we were guessing how it is to start something new today, that's tougher. In Sweden, the government is more interested in startups than in the furniture industry right now."
"We've tried to do something very different" says Tom Dixon
"I started in the disco business, which was great because it left you big swathes of the day where you could do what you wanted. So that was definitely a factor in my being able to not rely on design. What was great about the nightclub sector was that you got to know a huge amount of people very superficially.
"Everybody in those clubs was doing something. There were musicians, there were photographers, there were hairdressers, there were fashion designers. And they all needed something. They needed a mirror for their salon. They needed a window display for their showroom. They needed a set for their pop video. I made a lot of things quickly. And it was that practice that got me there, I think, the fact that I was not precious about it, that I wasn't criticised for it because I didn't go to art school.
"I ended up doing 10 years with my own studio, making things first with my own hands and then with 10 assistants, 15 assistants, and then finally giving it all up and getting a proper job with Habitat. So for 10 years, I was in corporate circumstances and creative direction, doing communication, marketing and branding, all of that. And then, after 10 years, I decided to start designing again.
"Everybody else in the main is working from their studio, selling ideas to brands or doing small production themselves as independent makers. And we've tried to do something very different. We took investment very early on and created an eponymous distribution brand. And at our scale, we're still unique, I'd say.
"Taking things into your own hands is definitely the trend now. Designers are in a position where it's much, much easier to create your own brand, your own marketing, manage your own manufacturing and then sell your product than it ever was before. Your problem now is that everyone else can do that as well. So how do you stick out from the huge crowd of people from all over the world that have access to the same tools and same platforms?"
Performance Review
This article is part of Dezeen's Performance Review series interrogating the problems plaguing architecture and design, from difficult working conditions to ethical dilemmas.
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