Ep. 221: Blu Dot’s John Christakos on Combining Artistic Vision and Business Acumen

John Christakos, co-founder and CEO of Blu Dot, grew up taking road trips with his father to textile mills, skipping school in favor of real-world experiences. He went on to double major in economics and studio art, a combination of creativity and business which proved itself invaluable later in life. After a life-changing year traveling the world with his closest friends, John eventually co-founded Blu Dot alongside them in 1997. In the decades since, under John’s leadership, Blu Dot has grown into an overwhelming success with a dynamic retail presence (online and IRL), prestigious design awards, a devoted following, and a reputation for responding to their customers and world events, with empathy, curiosity, and humanity. 

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Amy Devers: Hi everyone, this is Clever and I’m Amy Devers. Today I’m talking to John Christakos, CEO and Co-Founder of Blu Dot. Blu Dot is a beloved and award-winning modern furniture design & manufacturing company, built on a mission to create beautiful, useful, and affordable furniture that enriches people’s lives. Based in Minneapolis, and Founded in 1997 by John, along with Charlie Lazor, and Maurice Blanks, Blu Dot is known for blending innovation with quality to create contemporary, accessible, and well-crafted pieces. Their products range from sleek sofas and chairs to distinctive lighting and storage solutions, often characterized by minimalist forms, thoughtful details, and a playful, irreverent sensibility. Blu Dot has received widespread praise for their commitment to high-quality design at reasonable price points and have earned impressive accolades including a 2018 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for product design. Under John’s leadership, Blu Dot has grown into a globally recognized brand that has reshaped how modern furniture is created and sold. With a keen sense for scaling operations and creating exceptional customer experiences, John has overseen Blu Dot's expansion into a dynamic retail presence, with stand-alone stores in major cities, as well as a thriving e-commerce platform and a large network of independent retailers. The company’s ability to combine artistic vision with commercial success reflects John’s distinctive blend of creativity and business expertise. Prior to Blu Dot, John graduated from Williams College with a double major in Studio Art and Economics, honed his business acumen as a consultant with Bain & Company, and later earned an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. Throughout his career John has also demonstrated an active commitment to the arts and design community, serving for over 13 years on the Board of Trustees at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among other contributions. Blu Dot is known for making modern design warm and approachable without compromising on style, quality, or integrity… and as you’ll hear… the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree… Here’s John…

John Christakos: My name is John Christakos, I’m talking to you today from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I am the co-founder and CEO of Blu Dot and we are designers and makers of modern furnishings. I think I’ve always been a builder of sorts, or a maker of sorts, from the time I was little. My mom was an artist, a potter mostly,  and my dad was an entrepreneur, I spent a lot of time in the basement in her studio and I spent my afternoons working in my dad’s factory and watching him build a business. So Blu Dot is a little bit of a combination of those two things in some ways. 

Amy: That makes a lot of sense. Where did you grow up? 

John: I grew up in Upstate New York in a little town called Cazenovia, the Finger Lakes area. 

Amy: You were supported, I guess, in the arts, because your family was entrepreneurial but also artistic, so there was appreciation and support for that growing up? 

John: Totally, yeah, they were always encouraging. I think about even Christmases when I was probably eight or nine, some of my favorite presents were sketch books and markers and colored pencils and art supplies basically, I had a grandfather who had an amazing workshop, a wood shop and I would go hang out with him and we would go down to the wood shop and make little sailboats, make projects together. 

Amy: Yeah, that’s so cool. 

John: I kind of grew up around that too. 

Amy: It sounds like wood and clay were very present and sketch books and markers. Were you also painting and what were you doing in the rope factory? I really want to hear these details.

John: I was earning two bucks an hour spooling rope.

Amy: Oh, but you were getting paid, that’s… (laughs)

John: Oh yeah, yeah, I was getting paid. 

Amy: That’s great!

John: I don’t think they should have had probably 13 year olds working in there, but I would leave school and walk to my dad’s factory, a small business, and worked there until he left and then we would drive home together, and I get to watch that company go from 10 employees to hundreds of employees over the time… from when I was maybe 12 until when I was in college. 

Amy: Oh wow!

John: And the pride he had in building that.

Amy: I do want to unpack the pride a little bit. He didn’t invent rope, but was there a pride of craftsmanship in this or was it more about the relationships and about thinking of the business as a living thing that if it’s nurtured and cultivated can actually grow into something that sustains? 

John: Yeah, I think that’s really more where it came from. The content… he wasn’t passionate about rope, it just happened to be, I think, an industry that he was in previously, that was why he started that company or how he ended up in that industry. My brother was also… took that over in some ways and I’d say my brother is also an entrepreneur, but for them, both of them maybe, it’s more about the, not the game, but the competition or the challenge of winning in business, and the satisfaction, I think, that comes from creating jobs and creating livelihoods and watching something grow basically. 

Amy: Absolutely. 

John: For me it’s about the content. I couldn’t do that. Blu Dot is really about just creating a place where I can come to work every day and do something that I love to do. And if we make a successful business in the process, great. But the content is really important, of how I spend my days. 

Amy: It does sound to me like very much an overlap… [0.05.00] I’m assuming your mother was passionate about her art, and to be an artist and to create things from scratch, there’s genuinely a lot of personal connection, there’s a lot of emotional resonance that’s built into the DNA. It sounds like you got that from your mother and then the creative challenge of growing a business from your father and you put both of them together, add a little education and you’ve got the ingredients for becoming John Christakos. 

John: (Laughter) It took a while. It took a while to figure those things out, right? I think when I was in college… I don’t think I even knew design was a profession. I think being in college, I was a studio art major in college and made mostly sculpture while I was there, but being in the art building and seeing a Metropolis magazine, this is in the late 80s, and just being like oh… it was around the time of Memphis and Ettore Sottsass and I’m flipping through the pages going like, whoa, this is so cool, what is this, what is this world called ‘design?’ And that’s where my eyes were opened to it, I think initially, pre-internet obviously. You learn these things through magazines. (Laughs)

Amy: Absolutely and word of mouth and also by stumbling into them. That means you’re a Gen X’r, correct?

John: Yes. 

Amy: So many of Gen X’s… I think even elder millennials, but older generations didn’t understand that design was an option, that it was something you could study in school. They stumbled into it somehow or they walked past the industrial design department at a college and was like, oh…

John: What’s going on in there? 

Amy: Yeah, what’s going on in there, that might be for me. So back to your childhood. I am curious about your mother’s artwork and how you would describe it, now that you have an attuned sense of art. How would you describe her work? 

John: She wouldn’t call herself… she didn’t go to art school or she wasn’t like a fine artist, but more of a hobbyist in some ways, but really dedicated and really talented in that regard. So pottery and ceramics were a big part of it for, it feels like six/seven years. She had a friend that introduced her to that and they kind of worked together. They would go to art fairs and whatnot and sell their wares. But she was always kind of experimenting with cool new ways of making things, and really beautiful pots and beautiful things that she still… there’s still some kicking around. She’s still living, thankfully, is 93 years old, she’ll kill me for saying that, I hope she doesn’t listen to this. But, she’s so youthful and so sharp. But her work is really amazing. I’d love to get some pieces back here… more recently it’s more painting, so oil painting and she’s a greater water colorist, a really talented water colorist, more landscape kind of paintings. But she’s always been active. She’s just always been doing something. 

Amy: Nice to have that, and that thread of craft running through your life. You mentioned a brother, older brother, younger brother? How many siblings? 

John: Two older brothers, one sadly passed away and one sister, all older. I’m the youngest by kind of a lot, I think I might have been an oops child. There’s a six year gap between me and my next eldest sibling. 

Amy: What was your relationship like with your siblings? 

John: Good. I was a lot younger. All of us went to boarding school, I was thinking about this recently. My sister didn’t, but she was off at college and my brothers were off… the closest brother was off at boarding school, so I was kind of an only child from probably the time I was about eight on. They were all gone out of the house, until I went away. So that was cool for me in the sense, I think my relationship with my dad was maybe different than theirs. We had a lot more time together, just one-on-one, that factory time or he’d come into my room in the morning on a school day and be like, “Hey, I’m going to Rhode Island on a business trip, do you want to come?” Or, “I’m going to New England on a business trip, do you want to come?” I’m like, “You mean miss school?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” I’m like, ‘Yeah, I want to come.” [0.10.00] So I’d hop in his Ford station wagon with wood paneling and him smoking a pack of cigarettes and we’d drive to Rhode Island and visit textile mills and people in that world, which Rhode Island, there’s a lot of that down there. As you probably know?

Amy: Yeah. (Laughs)

John: Those are just awesome experiences that I think would have been harder for my siblings to have because there’s just more chaos and I think he was less settled in his career at that stage. 

Amy: Road trips with your dad, which does sound a really cool bonding experience and also being, I don’t know, kind of given the keys to the world a little bit or being let in on the whole back story of how a business gets built, which is pretty cool. 

John: Totally, like he’d bring me into these sales meetings and stuff. I’m bringing my son along and I’d just get to sit there and watch and listen. We’d stay in some Red Roof Inn, some crappy motel and he liked to drink this drink called a Stinger, which I think is half brandy and half crème-de-menthe, it’s awful, it tastes like Listerine. But he would go to the liquor store and get a bottle of each and then he’d make me run down the hall with a plastic ice bucket. (Laughter) Those are really great memories. 

Amy: That’s nice! What about your teenage years? Nobody gets through teenage years completely unscathed, what were your challenges or aspirations? 

John: They were great years. I went away to boarding school in New England, I grew up in a small town and I think my parents felt I’d get a better education there, so I went to a school called Westminster School in Simsbury, Connecticut. A little bit hairy being dropped off as a 15 year old or 14 year old, I went in 10th grade, 10th through 12th. But I’d probably say one of the most formative years of my life. That might be for everybody at that age, I don’t know. The place was just a really cool school, a really wonderful group of people. Their motto is ‘Grit and Grace’ and I like that combination. 

Amy: That’s really cool, yeah. 

John: And I think that’s words to live by in some ways. And I think that school really lived those values, so it was a great experience. Again, a small town, most of the folks there, my friends, were from fancier parts of Connecticut like Darien or Greenwich and had places on Nantucket in the summer and went on sailboats. That was not our life. So opened my eyes a little bit to just different worlds. Very much a privileged world, but it was a great experience. 

Amy: I know that when I went away to college it was a sense of freedom, but that’s because I was on my own and I was 17 or 18 and I’ve also talked to some people who went to boarding school and they have mixed feelings about it, like they maybe have some abandonment issues that they’re working through. [0.15.00] It sounds to me like you had a really strong foundation with your family because you got all that alone time, even if you were an accident, you still felt loved. (Laughter) And wanted. So abandonment may have not been your issue. But did boarding school feel like freedom or did it feel like just another reality, where you just didn’t live under your parents’ roof? 

John: It was more like a new experience, a new challenge, making new friends and kind of the best of both worlds. You have this great new group of friends, I’m still super close to… there’s a group of about 10 of us guys, mostly, that still get together at least once a year this many years later. But then I’d get to go home and all the kids I grew up with, I’d be sort of like, oh, we forgot about you. You’d be the fresh new face and I’d get to go to prom at my hometown high school. So it was the best of both worlds to have two really good groups of friends. 

Amy: Yeah, that sounds amazing. You sound pretty well-adjusted, we’re going to find the cracks, I promise! (Laughter) So you decided to go to Williams College and study studio art and economics, was that a double major? 

John: It was, yeah. 

Amy: I totally get the need to pursue something creative and also the urge to satisfy maybe a parental fear and do something a little more practical, which economics would have been considered practical. But I also think, as I look at it, tell me if I’m wrong, the process of fully formalizing and developing your creative process at the same time that you’re learning about business and the forces that make the economies that make the world work, there’s this saying that synapses that fire together, wire together. And so I really like the combination of putting those two together in a young brain that’s absorbing all of this and forming a world view with both of those operating simultaneously. Talk to me about how learning both of those worlds, and fusing them together in your brain actually worked for you? 

John: Well, I mean I don’t think I had that developed of a strategy when I did it…

Amy: No, none of us do, this is all hindsight, yeah. (laughs)

John: All hindsight, but honestly, you hit on it, if I had just been a studio art major my dad would have killed me, I think. And so economics was the practical piece and justified the tuition, I’m sure. I also had an interest in it too. I’ve always been strong in math… I went to Williams thinking I was going to be pre-med, which is really like super laughable now, because I was so young that, right, you’re 18, I’m like, oh, I don’t know, I’ll be a doctor, doctors are successful. I had no interest in medicine. I started freshman year and I took chemistry and I did fine and I took calculus, I started taking all those classes. It was more out of just a knee-jerk reaction. That’s what I did in high school, that’s what I’m going to do in college and it took me a semester or two to realize, oh, I don’t have to do this, this is not my interest. And that’s the beauty of a liberal arts college, right, is to learn how to learn and so yeah, that’s why I did economics and art. For sure, I think there’s for me, this left brain/right brain, interests on both sides of my brain and one is not more dominant than the other necessarily. Those things are sometimes hard to marry up. I left Williams and went to work for Bain & Company as a management consultant, that’s all left brain. There wasn’t a ton of creativity there. So I was making sculpture in my apartment while I was (laughs) working there. So I’ve had to satisfy these two hemispheres for my whole life, until Blu Dot really, which is when they finally kind of merged. 

Amy: So many things happened at Williams, including meeting Charlie and Maurice. And then from there I know you went on to work at Bain and then get an MBA but there was this pivotal backpack trip. [0.20.00] I’ve heard you talk about it and I’m really interested when you look back on it, is that something you would 100% recommend to your own children?

John: One hundred percent, yeah. 

Amy: Okay, tell me why, what was it? 

John: Well, one, you don’t get many opportunities in life to do that, right? And that space between college and the rest of your life, working life, that’s an opportunity to do it. I got a small scholarship and (laughs) I got a job offer at Bain and I was stupid enough to ask if I could defer my job. I thought you could defer jobs like you defer college admission, right? And my father was like, you did what? (Laughs)

Amy: It does sound crazy!

John: They said sure…

Amy: What? 

John: Yeah, and so I left on that backpacking trip having that job in hand to come back to, which was just like the best of all worlds. I guess my naivety in asking worked out in that case. It’s super formative, it was just a really amazing 12 months. About half of it Charlie and I lived in Japan teaching English in Japan, I lived in Kyoto, he lived in Osaka and then Maurice came over and joined us and for the next six months we travelled, we backpacked through Asia on a $15 a day budget. No internet, you show up in some city…

Amy: Boy, does that sharpen your skills though, you get so scrappy doing that. (Laughter)

John: Right, you do a ‘let’s go book’ and you figure out what you’re going to do. But it was amazing, incredible time. 

Amy: Had you travelled much before that? 

John: Not really, no. Family vacations and things. But that really gave a travel bug and we did so many interesting things. We spent some time in Burma which was difficult to get in and out of and really a wild experience. We trekked both in Nepal, three/four week trek up over the Annapurna range, super not technical climbing, and we did the same in Northern India near the Tibetan border. We met crazy people along the way, it was just an experience of a lifetime. 

Amy: Yes, I can hear it and it sounds like an adventure. First of all, being steeped in the culture, on the ground, sorting things out, it sharpens your survival skills and your sense of adventure and your trust in yourself and your trust in yourself and your teammates to figure things out. But it also cures any ethnocentrism that might be residual or otherwise, and to come away with a feeling of a more… I’m maybe projecting onto you, but did you feel more of a universal connection to humanity after being a guest in so many different cultures? 

John: Oh, totally, yeah. I was super into Eastern religions and reading all about Buddhism and that was new to me. I’m also not a big reader but you’ve got a lot of time on trains and on buses and guest houses and hostels and things. I think it heightened all of our senses of just observation, just being tuned in to what’s around you and being… really appreciating things that are overlooked. Not the typical design things or art things, but the more humble things that people make and create and just stuff you see. And I think that sensitivity or interest in observing the world around you was really sparked during that trip. And stayed with us, I’d say, through our lives. I think is probably the biggest value we got out of it. 

Amy: Nice. I’ve heard you talk about that, simple things like a manhole cover or, I don’t know… I’m just thinking about my travels and sometimes it’ll be a teacup or the eave on a building and I’m like, oh, we don’t do it like that.

John: Yeah, those things. 

Amy: Suburban United States, like that’s really beautiful. 

John: Totally. Totally. 

Amy: Okay, so then you did this consulting deal for three years and then [0.25.00] got an MBA in marketing and strategy at Northwestern. I want to move into the founding of Blu Dot, but what do you take from those years that’s really foundational to the success of Blu Dot, and your life? 

John: Yeah, Bain was intense, but in a good way. They put us in situations that we’re in front of people presenting analysis or strategy on their businesses and you’re like 23 years old and you’re presenting to like a 45 year old CEO. I can’t believe we were not laughed out of the room, or I was not laughed out of the room I should say. Honestly, I knew nothing and I could bullshit my way through it, to be honest. (Laughs) I think you develop a level of confidence or swagger as a result of being put in those situations, so like being forced into that kind of situation was good for me, in terms of growing and just feeling comfortable in those environments. It was rigorous, it was lots of all-nighters and working on the weekends and super sharp people that you’re working for. So I learned a ton in three years and my job anyways there, it was very much being an analyst, sorting through data and trying to find insights and nuggets of valuable information that could guide a business one way or the other. I wasn’t experienced enough or knowledgeable enough to know what the stuff meant necessarily, but I could crunch the numbers. And I think that serves you really well in business in your later years. Obviously not every decision we make is driven by data, but there’s also lots of things to be learned by digging in and being curious and poking at things. And I think that spirit of curiosity helped along for me at Bain. That’s probably what I’d take away from it, as being most valuable now. 

Amy: Like the data forensics of recognizing patterns and figuring out…

John: Exactly, what’s buried in those numbers, that needs to be unearthed, that can actually lend some insight as to how we should move forward, you know? That kind of thing. What if we looked at it by this, this way versus that way and does that tell us anything differently? 

Amy: That helps me understand. The MBA… what were you feeling, you wanted more equipment or?

John: No, I was yearning for something more creative. I didn’t know what that looked like or what that was going to be. I somehow got this idea that being in the film business would be like a good combination of right brain/left brain for me. With a friend I left Bain and I moved out to LA and started kind of poking around out there, lived on Venice Beach and started interviewing and meeting folks. And just after maybe four/five months realized this is not my scene, just personally. And I’m not sure I’ll get out o  f it what I was hoping I might get out of it. So I really didn’t know what to do next. I’d saved up enough money so I was fine without a job, but I needed to do something. And I think my folks were like, so how long are you going to live in LA on the beach? I think really business school was like, well shit, I’ll do that. And that will be a useful two years of my life and good to have in my resume, I guess, and I’ll take those two years to figure out what’s next. 

Amy: I’m guessing that was a pretty smart decision. You had an interest in business, but it helps to have an MBA if you’re going to become an entrepreneur. (Laughs)

John: A little bit. I think it definitely helps when you’re going to get a balnk loan or you’re looking for outside investors and they’re wondering what your background is, I think there’s an element of…just building another network of great friends that go on to do really interesting things in their lives that you stay connected to, so that was super fun. [0.30.00] But I think in the end, in terms of running a business, I use the analogy, you can’t learn to ride a bike by reading about it, you’ve got to jump on the bike, at some point, and that’s the case. That’s why I think we never really wrote a business plan. I think I knew enough to know that I’d re-write it a month in, because I didn’t even know anything… (Laughter)

Amy: You’ve got to iterate. 

John: Yeah. 

Amy: Then you were yearning for something more creative, you took these two years to get an MBA, developed a new network of friends, what’s fomenting in your heart? What direction is pulling at you? 

John: Well, I was lucky enough that my folks paid for my undergraduate education and I made the wrong assumption that they would pay for my postgraduate education and I remember calling my father to say, “How are we going to handle this tuition?” He’s like, “Dude, you’re on your own, you’re covering that.” My first couple of years out of business school was really about paying off my student loans. I couldn’t really get onto the next chapter until I tackled that, so I was just like hell bent on doing everything I could to get that paid off in a short amount of time I think our idea of devoting ourselves to something creative or having a life or a career that was centered around creativity, that started, I think, on our backpacking trip in Asia where the three of us kind of spent a lot of time together and started having these conversations like what would that look like, and could we work together and what would we do, what would that be about? And it was very vague in those stages. The three of us went off and did our own thing. Me to business school, Charlie and Maurice went to architecture school, graduate school for architecture. And I think after I got the loans paid off and I was getting a little antsy in my… still a consulting job here, I reached out to them and said, “Look, I really want to pursue this nugget of an idea, what do you guys things?” And they were like, yeah, it’s cool, let’s talk about it. 

So again, pre-email, we started having charrettes and discussions via fax and kind of playing business in a way, dreaming up what would this be? Would we sell only small things like decorative accessories, would we sell big things like furniture? We knew it would be design and home related things, because we all had an interest there, sort of small architecture in some ways. And so that went on for probably a year and they would come up to Minneapolis here and there and we would spend a weekend together and push it a little further and then I got a little bit more serious and then I just quit my job. And I faxed them or called them and said, “All right, I’ve quit my job, I’ve saved up 50,000 bucks, I’m going to devote that and a year of my life to pushing this forward, do you guys want to join in?” And they were smart enough to say, I don’t want to quit my job, but yeah, we want to participate. So that’s how it got going. And then a year later it looked promising enough to keep going. 

Amy: Okay, so that must have been like 1995/1996?

John: 1995/1996, yeah, we made our debut in 1997.

Amy: Yes, at ICFF. 

John: Right. 

Amy: That’s still kind of a fast timeline to come up with products and decide they’re good enough for manufacture and then put them out in the world. So there must have been… even if Charlie and Maurice kept their day jobs, there must have been a fair amount of dedication? 

John: Yeah, for sure. It was hard part figuring out how we were going to get things made and our mission being making design more democratic and a little bit more approachable and affordable, we knew that we needed machinery to achieve that. So researching that in those days was tricky because you had the Yellow Pages, you know? You couldn’t Google…

Amy: We had these big books, these trade books that had all the manufacturers in them.

John: The Thomas Register. 

Amy: Yeah, the Thomas Register. (Laughs)

John: And I had a set of them in my office, big, green books. They would come to town and we would design together. [0.35.00] Each of us would have maybe a nugget of an idea or somewhat fully fleshed idea, had a long roll of butcher paper on a long table in this little office, that studio that I had. And we’d sit across from each other and sketch and draw over one another basically. And that’s the reason that none of the pieces that we designed… any of the pieces in our collection have a person’s name on them, because we always, from the get-go, did it as a group. And even though it might have come out of my sketchbook or Charlie’s or Maurice’s, in the end it was a team effort. But we started to build… we had maybe a collection of 15 or 20 things and we deliberately made them go from a magazine rack all the way up to a pretty large shelving system we still sell called the Chicago 8 Box and everything in between. There was no upholstery, that was tricky for us, didn’t know anything about it. So it was all honestly the things that we could probably prototype in our shop, in my shop. I had a studio here then, so things we could make on a table saw and a drill press and that kind of thing. And then ICFF is rolling around and coming up and we’re like, should we do it, like I don’t feel ready…. Let’s do it. The worst that could happen, we’ll just get great feedback and see how it goes. So yeah, that was a scramble. 

Amy: Yeah, it kind of always is. (Laughs)

John: Yeah, right. (Laughs)

Amy: Okay, so you scrambled, you got a show together and you got a lot of favorable response, correct? 

John: It was really favorably received. William Hamilton was a design critic for the New York Times at that time, always highlights three/four designers. We were one of the three/four that year, so that felt awesome. 

Amy: That’s great. 

John: Yeah, and we took a bunch of orders, which we didn’t expect, and we were like yeah, we’ll deliver in six weeks. (Laughs) Totally had no inventory, it was exhilarating though. We left there on cloud nine, like holy cow, our hunch was right, we’ve struck a nerve here, there is something real here, we can feel it, now we’ve got to go home and figure out how to make it happen. 

Amy: Yeah, well you’ve made it happen because now, you know, what… 28 years or so, 28 plus years, you’ve grown the company into an internationally acclaimed design brand with 17 retail locations across the US and Mexico and Australia. A network of 50 independent retailers worldwide. You’ve also gotten a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, that was like 2018, right, for product design? 

John: Hmm-mm. 

Amy: These are major accomplishments Blu Dot is a model of not only excellent, iconic, well-made, well thought out design, but the business itself is a thriving example of this beautiful intersection of creativity and commerce and a way to think about business as not the enemy, but as the ultimate creative project. And if you design it right, then you can live inside of it very happily. At least that’s what it looks like. 

John: That’s very nice. (Laughter)

Amy: Congratulations to you, but I have to imagine it’s not always smooth sailing. We know you’ve traversed many rough terrains and business itself has been subject to supply chain issues with the pandemic and of course there’s ebbs and flows and cycles that you go through. My question would be for you is, if you’re painting a picture for somebody who is embarking on a career as a designer, who has aspirations of the Blu Dot variety, what would you tell them about navigating through the joys and tribulations, [0.40.00] the stresses and the satisfaction? 

John: Hmm, oh god, I don’t know, we could have another two hours (laughter) to chat. One, I think I’ve likened it before to a kitchen renovation project. Do your best to figure out what it’s going to cost and how long it’s going to take and then triple it. It’s hard. And that’s not to say don’t do it, by any means, but I have great respect for… and it’s also not to pat ourselves on the back, but I have great respect for anybody who starts and runs a business and keeps it running. It’s more challenging than I thought it would be, basically, and making a profit and sustaining this organism over the years is a challenge. And we’ve had lots of near death experiences over years. So if you’re not totally-totally into it, and completely committed, it’s just too easy to bail out, it would be too easy to quit because there’s plenty of opportunities along the way where you’re like, wave the white towel, I’m done. And again, I don’t want that to sound heroic, it’s not, it’s just that that’s the reason… I mean because we love what we do, because we love making things and putting our creations out into the world that affect people in some positive, small positive way, that is really… that’s why I get up in the morning, right? And I don’t want that to stop. I think also as an entrepreneur, once you get a taste of this, like you never want to go work for somebody else again in your life. You’re kind of screwed. (Laughter) You’re like, this has got to work, because what else am I going to do, you know? Part of that maybe compels you to keep going. But also I think the biggest joy for us is the three of us didn’t do this ourselves. 

We’ve had so many great people work with us over the years, some of them don’t work with us now, that have moved on and many that still work with us today, and it’s a completely team effort. I honestly marvel at it and I’ve said this to the whole group here, it’s crazy that… it’s so complicated… for what we do anyways, furniture, you know, we design it, we engineer it, we create it, we’re silly enough to decide to also sell it and market it, do all of it. I think we were so young and naïve that we took it all on. The benefit of that is that we get to control all that, right? But to have a collection as large as ours is, make it at a high quality, consistency, inventory it and have it available for sale, sell it, it’s so freaking complicated and I don’t know how it doesn’t collapse under its own weight, honestly. It is like a symphony of contributions from so many people, right, that are all playing their instrument just the right way, where it all kind of comes together. And so that’s the gratifying part, is to sit back and be somewhat of a conductor, I guess. But just sort of hear that music and play it and watch everybody do their part…And watch it come together, it’s super-super cool. It’s been the most gratifying part. 

Amy: Yeah, I appreciate that and I can see that and throughout your life you’ve had these really important relationships, long term relationships and so I have to imagine that this culture, this symphonic culture didn’t happen by accident. And so part of the skill of the leadership at Blu Dot, you and your team members, is creating this culture that allows everyone to play their instrument to the best of their ability. How do you do that? I ask like what’s the creative process of creating that culture and supporting those relationships so that this whole thing can play the beautiful music? 

John: Yeah, it’s very important and I remember being in business school, we had to take a class called ‘organizational behavior,’ it’s basically psychology for business, for MBAs. And it seems squishy and soft and all of us were like, why do we have to take this? And the professor was like, you guys are all going to think that, [0.45.00] but this is going to be one of the most important classes you need to pay attention to. (Laughs) And culture is super important. I don’t think we recognized it or realized it until maybe 10 years in. We were also very small, so having core values or culture when you’re 15 people or 20 people just seems silly. But as the company started to grow and we got better at hiring folks and we were also able to pay folks what they should get paid, we were maturing as a company, it became clear that we needed to pin down what we stood for and kind of how we wanted to show up in the world. And how we wanted to show up for each other. And so that was our building core values, like so many companies have. And I think in many places everybody has got it pinned up in their cubicle, whether or not the company lives them or not is another story. But I think we do and I know that our folks do, my colleagues do for sure. As a leader, the place… you can feel it, like you can sense it and I think when somebody is off base, not living those values, it shows up pretty obviously. So it is, I think, our superpower and I don’t know how you’d run a company without a strong, healthy culture. It would be really hard, because you don’t have the fertile soil for stuff to take root in, the foundation to build on. 

Amy: Yeah, that makes sense and it sort of descends into chaos, even if it doesn’t look like complete chaos, people either don’t feel ownership to take initiative or they don’t trust the leadership, so they do take initiative, but it’s not all aligned, everybody is at cross [processes 0:46:55] with each other. 

John: Yeah and we’ve learned it over the years. Even as us being leaders of the place, I always joke, I’ve never run $150 million company until this year. (Laughter) So I’m learning it too, and so we’re figuring this out as we go a little bit. We’ve all grown up, literally grown up, but also matured and learned just over the years. So it takes time, those things take time to kind of marinate and develop.

Amy: Well, one thing that I’ve noticed over the years is that when the world is dealt a blow, like a recession or a pandemic or even a slew of devastating wildfires, Blu Dot responds, in some way clever marketing campaign or some response to that, and it reminds us that there’s caring humans at the helm who are actually participating in the same reality that all of the customers are. And I think that’s so important, especially right now, to not descend into complete mistrust of all corporate entities. But I also think that some of those fun… what I’m talking about is like swat meet and trash day and the fact that you offered to replace any Blu Dot piece that was destroyed in the LA fires. Sorry, I’m from LA, so that touched me, I didn’t suffer through the fires because I live in Rhode Island now, but so many of my friends and family were really traumatized by that experience. Anyway, I just really appreciate that there is a caring touch and often it’s a humorous bit of levity that comes through from the company, but it just reminds us that at its core is the humanity that is running Blu Dot. But it also seems to me like it might be grit and grace I think, coming through.  

John: Yeah, maybe. I think a lot of it stems from, I think a deep appreciation for our customers. Whether you buy a candlestick or a hotel worth of furniture, our customers allow us to continue to do what we love to do every day. And we totally don’t take that lightly, that’s not a given. And we say that a lot here, especially being in this so long, you live through these ups and downs and there are periods where [0.50.00] four/five years in a row things are going great and you feel like a rockstar and I can get a little cocky. And then you get popped in the chin with Covid or with whatever and you’re like oh wait, none of this is for sure. I can’t take this for granted and I really need to appreciate what we have. So the LA thing was… it’s interesting, when you lead a brand and things like that happen, the murder of George Floyd in our city is another example, especially then people were looking at brands to be like, what are you doing? What’s your stance? What are you saying? And we left the city… I was here the night that everything… the riots are happening, the city was kind of burning down and my family was up at our cabin in Wisconsin and I joined them the next day. And there’s a lot of pressure to post on Instagram what are you doing and I was reading all these other brands posts and they were saying all the great things they’re doing for racial equity and blah blah blah. Honestly, it felt like bullshit to me. And we as a company had not done anything. It was not in my agenda to spend a little bit more time making sure that our hiring and our team reflected better the communities where we live and work, but I hadn’t gotten into… we hadn’t really devoted ourselves to it that much. 

So I was struggling to figure out what are we going to say because we really honestly couldn’t say anything. And so that’s where we sat basically, was look, we could sit here and tell you all the great things that we’re doing, but the truth is we haven’t done jack, and here’s what we’re about to do and what we plan to do. And if you remember that environment, there was so much intensity in the comment section of all those posts and I only made that post, it was sort of like… people were like, thanks for telling us the truth. And it was the truth, that was all we could do at that stage. But LA, there’s also pressure I think, as a brand, what are we going to do? Are we going to make our store a drop-off spot for stuff? Are we going to invite people in to hang out and find a moment of respite or whatever? And that’s all good, don’t get me wrong, but it felt like too little and it also felt like, in a way it felt like marketing on the backs of this tragedy. I mean I know that’s not… folks that did offer that, that’s not their intention, but it just felt a little too trivial to me. I think you do this long enough you realize you have more time than you think and you don’t have to respond tomorrow. And that’s kind of what we did. We thought about it a little bit longer and said, what can we do that would be more meaningful and so we offered to replace anybody that bought Blu Dot in the last year that lost pieces in the fire that we’d replace them for free. 

Of course you need to check to see if you can afford to do that and it’s not a small amount, but we can afford to do it and not everybody will need this all at the same time and so it’s like, that’s actually something we can do that might be more meaningful. But it’s a give and take, our customers allow us to do what we love to do, so if we can give back in a more meaningful way, we will. 

Amy: Well, thank you and the care and the thoughtfulness that goes into it is evident, even just in the way you’re describing it and choosing your words and the transparency is also really appreciated. I think so many people feel vaguely gaslit by the marketing professionals who put out those responses. But it does take a thoughtful and intentional approach to find the thing that works, that is authentic to who you are, so that when you are giving it as a gift, it is genuinely meaningful and people can receive it as such. And I think Blu Dot is really good at that and I think that’s… probably a lot of that is you. 

John: Well, thank you, it’s gratitude really, fundamentally. 

Amy: This has been a success story I would say. 

John: Twenty eight year success story. [0.55.00] Overnight success story. (Laughter)

Amy: Outside of Blu Dot, what are the things that keep the whole train running? How do you stay excited about life? 

John: Oh, I’ve got awesome family, amazing, super interesting, amazing kids that are doing all sorts of great stuff, that’s a blast. My oldest son works with us here in business intelligence, data analytics. He’s on the autism spectrum in a fairly mild way and it’s awesome to see him here and we get to work together, which is super fun. 

Amy: Hey, this is like the modern-day version of the road trip to Rhode Island in the paneled station wagon. 

John: Right, yeah. (Laughter) No cigarettes! (Laughter)

Amy: And are you drinking stingers? 

John: No stingers! (Laughter) It’s been a while since I’ve had a stinger, maybe I’ll make one tonight. I have a son who graduated college and wants to be a stand-up comic and is in Chicago pursuing that. 

Amy: Oh wow!

John: I think he thinks probably like I did when I started Blu Dot, I bet my parents don’t think this is like a legitimate pursuit and it couldn’t be further from the truth. I send him stuff all the time that basically says ‘go for it.’ You’ve got to pay your rent and you’ve got to be an adult, but life’s not a dress rehearsal, if that’s what you want to do, get after it. I’m so proud of him to put himself out there like that, which seems terrifying to me. 

Amy: Oh my god, it’s so courageous and I believe it, just to put yourself… oh my god, yeah, that’s terrifying. So if nothing else, if comedy doesn’t end up being his passion for the rest of his life, the skills that he’s learning in terms of the swagger that he’s building, it’s like your Bain, it’s like he’s putting himself in these situations and picking up these skills that are going to be transferable to whatever he chooses to deploy them. 

John: Yeah. Totally. He calls it, he’s getting his ‘reps in.’ He thinks a bit like exercising and I think yeah… and what’s the worst that can happen, right? You switch gears at some point and do something else, or you stick with it and it becomes your lifes work, that could easily happen for him, yeah. I have a daughter who is a senior in college who is an incredibly talented musician and singer and a super cool girl. And my youngest son is at Williams as a freshman. 

Amy: What? Wow. 

John: So I get to go back and spend time there, I’m super proud of him too. 

Amy: Wow. Family reunions at your house must be pretty fun. 

John: They are fun. The kids are funny and yeah, it’s a good time, for sure. 

Amy: Nice. I guess this is my final question, what is it that people don’t ask you that you want to share? Are there any hidden talents or things that people kind of get wrong about you that you can set straight? 

John: No, I think you obviously know our world and know the design world. But I think often folks, because we are a business and because we have stores and because we have a brand, people forget that we’re actually designers, or they put us in the same camp as a CB2 or a West Elm or whatnot, and we are in that world, you know? We are substitutes for the good stuff that those folks make, but we’re fundamentally different [1.00.00] because we create everything ground-up, 100% of what we sell, we make. And I don’t think we do a great job of telling that story and our stores, for sure, we don’t tell that story well enough. Somebody coming into our store that didn’t know us, might think we’re a Design Within Reach and wouldn’t know that everything they’re looking at was created in this little studio outside my office here and prototyped in the workshop across the way. So I think we need to do a better job of telling that story. I think people like to know where their stuff came from. 

Amy: Yeah. 

John: And like to know that the objects in their home have a story or a history, it’s not just stuff. So obviously you know us, but I think sometimes people don’t remember that or just don’t even know it. 

Amy: I see that and I agree with that and I wonder… so you deliberately don’t put names on furniture and then for the general consumer or even the design appreciator, sometimes the name is the way that we connect through to the humanity behind the piece. 

John: Right. 

Amy: And yet I really appreciate the collaborative dynamic that the pieces that are generated from Blu Dot are from this, let’s say family of designers that all contribute to it. And it’s like you’re getting lost in that because it’s nameless. 

John: Yeah, it’s not Philippe Stark or it’s not… 

Amy: Right. But, that’s one of your values and I wonder if you can talk a little bit about, about the difference between the truly collaborative process that designs something that is inherent… inherently Blu Dot DNA versus the sort of diluted process of design by committee or design by consensus, because those are two very different things. And so how would you unpack the nuance between true collaboration and design by consensus. 

John: I’m taking ‘design by consensus’ to mean kind of watered down and lowest common denominator and everybody gets a say? In the beginning it was the three of us and that was it, for probably the first five or six years maybe. And then we brought people into design studio and we have fulltime designers that work here and have been with us for a long time, actually some more than 20 years. 

Amy: Wow!

John: So I guess we work maybe more like an architecture practice, like Frank Gehry doesn’t design every Frank Gehry building, but his office does and Frank is in the charrettes and in the critiques and is shaping it and molding it and pushing it in one direction or another. And that’s kind of how we work. I think that’s the role that we play now, is more like creative director in a sense. We’re not designing things… occasionally, but not always designing things ground-up and throwing it into the process. And so we’ll hear, if you’re part of our critiques here, which happen every Thursday, ‘I don’t know if that’s Blu Dot, is that Blu Dot or is that not Blu Dot?’ But at the same time where there’s members of that group that push us, right? (Laughs) A good example is a woman, Ashton Jones she manages our overall product assortment, so she acts kind of like a merchant in a way, so it’s here all the things that we offer, but here are the things we’re missing and those are the things we’re going to work on and she’ll make a design brief and then the designers… we start working on that. She was really pushing us towards adding velvet to our upholstered offerings and Maurice and I both were like not velvet people. (Laughs) I mean there’s nothing wrong with velvet, it just wasn’t our jam. So we were like, I don’t know man, I don’t know if we can do velvet. And she’s like, come on you guys, let’s try it.

Of course velvet is super successful, lots of people love velvet. Actually our pieces look really great with velvet on it. So the influence of others ends up pushing us in directions we wouldn’t have gone on our own and makes us better. We just believe that collective power is better than a singular power. And I think for us, it was deliberate not to put our names on designs because… also because we were trying to somewhat assume the notion of a celebrity designer or a heroic designer, in a cape, you know? Especially the spirit of Blu Dot being more approachable and democratic and real maybe, so that’s why. But I think it does make people think of us more like a company than a designer because those things don’t have designers’ names attached to them. 

Amy: That might be true, but when you look a little closer, and you look at the… like your response to world events and the way that even just your website is super transparent about all of your core values and the choices that you make and the process behind it and celebrating everyone who is participating and contributing to the process, the humanity really does come through. And I like to celebrate Blu Dot as this design driven company, with designers at the center, because for me it feels like one of the reasons why the products become so iconic and last so long, is because you’re thinking of things all the way through, from the whole ecosystem.

John: I hope so, not everything becomes iconic, but some of them do. (Laughter)

Amy: You hit some out of the ballpark, sure. (Laughter) This is really fun, thank you so much for your time and for sharing your story with me, I’ve really enjoyed it. 

John: I appreciate it and I loved your insights, it’s fun to get other people’s perspectives, so it’s been a fun conversation, thank you. 

Amy: Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you like Clever, there are a number of ways you can support us: Complete our listener survey at the link in the description. Share Clever with your friends, leave us a 5 star rating, or a kind review, hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. For a transcript of this episode and more about Federico, including links and images of his work, head to our website. Cleverpodcast. com. While you're there, check out our resources page for books, info, and special offers from our guests, partners, and sponsors, and sign up for our free sub stack newsletter, which includes news announcements and a bonus Q and a from our guests. If you like clever, we could really use your support. You can share Clevver with your friends, leave us a five star rating or a kind review, support our sponsors, and definitely hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. We love to hear from you on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X. You can find us Us at Clever Podcast, and you can find me at Amy Devers. Clever is hosted and produced by me, Amy Devers, with editing by Mark Zurowinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anoushka Stefan, and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is a proud member of the Surround Podcast Network. Visit surroundpodcasts. com to discover more of the architecture and design industry's premier shows.

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Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.

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