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Contributor:
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Babble On. | Login
Babble On. | Login
Channels: European Design
Susan Grant Lewin (President, Susan Grant Lewin Associates - New York) speaks about how her career in journalism and PR for design and architecture has evolved at the European Design Symposium hosted by the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
All the presentations in these last few days have been very exciting but very often.... not necessarily with these people
there is someone behind the scenes that sort of connecting up people, making things happen, introducing journalists to the people,
helping the designers create the stories what Cilla [Robach] was talking about this morning, the narrative, the telling of the story,
and very often it’s very very difficult to get a designer to tell their story and how did the product come about.
I personally have been involved in the design community maybe just a little less than George Beylerian and George and I
our careers have spanned a similar period. I started out as a journalist and I want to tell you that I discovered George Beylerian.
I was the design editor of a trade newspaper put out by Fairchild called Home Furnishings Daily,
which is now called HFN the Home Furnishings News. A daily, that’s hard work,
so my friend Lou Gropp who became the Editor-In-Chief of House and Garden and I was just running around New York
all the time looking for stories because journalists really have to stay on top of what’s happening and be the first ones to get it.
So, Lou and I went to a little store on 60th street called Scarabeus and we met George and the rest is history.
But the reality is that George never needed the PR person [laughter] and I never did PR for George. He is just magnificent all by himself.
But communicating design, is what’s happening behind the scenes. So much of what you have seen in these last two days is the actual product, how the designers work and think, what the manufactures do,
but there is so much that’s happening with museums, journalists, it’s a story on to itself
and every successful PR campaign has high drama. So, I started out in journalism, I went to corporate communications with Formica Corporation and now I own SGLA my own PR firm.
Journalism is one of the most important parts of my life
and I really believe that as a journalist it set the way that I think and I believe that my firm is successful
and the projects that I have done because I approach everything as a journalist. I would never
encourage my clients to dress up like clowns or do anything ridiculous.
I really feel that people have very serious stories to tell and the narrative is very key.
Stories are passed down from generation to generation and the narrative is primary to a good public relations campaign.
Like a journalist a PR person must stay really on top of what’s happening in design
and also journalists have tremendous access and this is something that's really been a very very helpful.
And the access that’s the behind the scenes that I was mentioning before, for example
I was working with a developer who had inherited a parcel of land in Northern Florida
and while we were talking he was telling me that he, you know, he didn’t know what to do with it
and I said well I know two really good architects that I think might be super helpful to you, and this is as a journalist,
and theirs names were Louis Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany and his name was Robert Davis.
And Seaside I think has become, at least to Americans, Seaside has become iconic and one of the most important developments of it’s time
and that’s the kind of behind the scenes activities that take place.
I don’t have a lot of slides because it’s.... I didn’t think was necessary to show you pictures of some of these projects is what the main thing that
I wanted to talk about was how it happens and connections that can be made.
For example, I went to Philadelphia to photograph Robert Venturi's house and when I was walking though the house, I saw this enormous room
with.... it must have had... I don’t know.... over a 100 chairs stacked on top of each other
and he said to me "I love chairs." He said "The thing that I wanted to do most in life is design a chair," and as a journalist,
I had access. I called up the owners of Knoll and I made it happen
and one of the chairs is upstairs that you can see it now. It’s not in the current European show. I went upstairs a little while ago
to another one of the Craig’s fabulous little exhibitions called Design Since 1945 and the Robert Venturi chair is there
and I am also sorry I never bought one.
The kind of access that the press has to designers, I was very friendly with Frank Gehry and begin a friend,
he did this house that some you might be familiar within Santa Monica and because we were friends and I was a journalist
I was at House Beautiful, he said you can publish it first and really everybody wanted to publish it. And I told my boss,
the Editor-In-Chief of House Beautiful, that I had the honor being given this great house to photograph and publish and she thought I was kidding.
She couldn’t believe the house, she didn’t understand it and it was at that point I decided to move on. [laughs]
I went to Formica Corporation and my first project there as Nasir mentioned in the introduction was an exhibition
of famous architects and designers demonstrating a product that Formica was making at that time called ColorCorp
and we had Shiro Kuramata, Tod and Billie, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.... many many architects and designers
experimenting and creating conceptual objects and this show actually traveled for 2 years and when it was finished,
I wrote a letter to every important museum that had a design collection and they asked them if they wanted a piece and they were all taken.
That was great. So, they are all..... they all exist and they are all still around.
Also... I forgot to show a slide... sorry.
Ookay.... so that..... that’s the Frank Gehry Fish and there were several of them. I think there was an addition.....
well, the one that was in the exhibition went to the Museum Of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. This is one that was, I believe, at the Walker Art Center
but while I was at Formica, I also had the idea that this is an iconic American company and it’s history should be told
and so I set about building an archive for the company, I sent out millions of letters and collected
lots of old material and commissioned some of the best writers about design to write essays in the book about all the aspects of Formica.
And the book is just sold out it’s second printing which surprises me. I didn’t think that many people were interested. But someone said to me
that designers love their history and this is my favorite line that was the first sentence of the book is t"The history of Formica is not what you think ."
And apparently a lot of people are interested to know what it is. Then Formica got sold
and I decided that I was tired of working for other people and I would like to work for myself. So, I opened a public relations agency because
I really feel I know so many people in design and journalism and it would be great fun and it has turned out to be wonderful.... wonderful
fun to help people tell their stories. I feel that there is a 50/50 rule that 50% of marketing a product is the product itself.
It’s the great design, it’s the great idea, the great designer, but the other 50% is the communications package
and I really do believe that a lot of people see it as wonderful advertising. Well to me an advertising can be exquisite and beautiful
but people turn pages very quickly and this really just a sound bite. A lot of people are in love with beautiful graphics or inventive graphics
but I think that so much of what happens with a product is the public relations and I think that
a lot of people don’t really understand how powerful public relations is in helping a story get a product into a place
that it deserves to be, or a designer, or an architect to become well known. There is a lot of stratagizing
and intellectual searching that goes into a public relation’s campaign.
It’s a much slower, more detailed project than I think a lot of people would imagine.
I’ll just show you a few examples. We were very lucky to be hired by James Dyson when he entered the United States.
I am just going to show you three small examples just.... there are millions and millions of examples from our office but when we started working with James
as the other two examples that I will show you, he was completely unknown in the United States and one of the things we did with James is to take him out on the road.
After all nobody in the United States had a clue what a Dyson was or who James Dyson was and and this is only 5 years ago.
And he never had to wear a bunny suit. [laughter] He is very very serious guy
and he has a lot of integrity about what he does. We really wanted him to tell his story.
We traveled all over the United States to museums, design schools, and every city that we went to we would not only.......would he speak
but we would create small dinners and lunches with the top design people, top journalists in those cities,
and we continue to do those kinds of things for a lot of our clients and that’s another way that people get to be known.
Well for example I was very.... I am very friendly with Simon Doonan
who does Barneys Windows and I called Simon, and this is an example of how things happen behind the scene,
and Simon turned out to be from the same town in England James was from and had admired him [pauses]
and so he was thrilled to have his models vacuum up the floors of Barneys Windows
and then we took some of James’ philosophy to Starbucks and they loved the idea
and put it on Starbucks cup. And I think that you might have seen some of James’ advertising,
which is quite wonderful because he tells the story of how he creates the product. We started working with Design Miami in 2005,
which was the first year that it existed and it’s hard to believe that in 2005 nobody knew what Design Miami was. Well they couldn’t because it wasn’t.
We were from the very very beginning in building the brand of the design fair which was very exciting.
There is James in Fast Company. There is [unclear speech] from Design Miami also in Fast Company.
It looks like our favorite magazine but it is a good magazine and I think these stories have a lot of creditability
And this is more on Design Miami. This is Tom Kundig who is an architect from Seattle
and Tom is really wonderful architect and there are a lot of wonderful architects out there.
But Tom totally credits our agency with helping him build his career.
Since we have been working with him about 5 years, he has won a National Design Award in architecture.
He just won the AIA Firm Award and he is published everywhere and I will just show a little bit...... These are some of Tom’s houses.
This was in the Wall Street Journal recently and that’s Tom. There is in Men's Vogue and I think that’s it.
So, I guess the thing that I wanted to bring to this party, and it is like a party because I am having a wonderful time,
is that so much happens in the world of design behind the scenes and all the wonderful things
that you have seen today sometimes have a lot of helping hands behind them. Thank you!
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