“It’s always a little bit of a nutty month,” says interior designer Brad Ford, calling in virtually from Fair, his design showroom and firm HQ at the New York Design Center. A few days prior, the showroom had been packed like sardines for What’s New, What’s Next, the New York design community’s unofficial back-to-school soirée. No time to reset, Ford had already turned his attention to Field + Supply, his semi-annual festival of contemporary craft that returns to Kingston, New York, this weekend. This three-pronged business portfolio, which includes the eponymous design practice he founded in 1998, presents a masterclass in one of the industry’s perennial challenges: scalability. Here, the Arkansas native discusses the importance of diversifying your business (psst: books deals and licensed lines don’t cut it) and shares prudent insights to get you there.
Mel Studach: Scalability is one of the biggest challenges within the A&D community—I hear it from designers all the time: How do I scale ‘me’? You’ve led by example when it comes to building assets beyond yourself. Was that always the plan?
Brad Ford: At the end of the day, for as many people as you can hire and the number of projects you take on, the client still wants [the person] whose name is outside the office. Because of that, you really are the only asset. So I was always interested in figuring out ways to create other revenue streams—something that didn’t necessarily have to have my name attached to it. That scalability was one of the reasons that I started Field + Supply. I could hire a trusted team of people to run the event itself, and then through [the market], I realized that a lot of the makers we initially presented did not have permanent representation. That’s when I started to think, Is there an opportunity to have a showroom where we also represent these artists, 365 days a year as opposed to just that one particular weekend? That was another business where, with the right team in place, I didn’t have to be there on a day-to-day basis. I’m just there to help guide and make certain strategic creative decisions.
When it comes to alternate revenue streams, though, most stick to the usual suspects: licensed product lines, book deals, retail shops. You’ve taken roads less traveled. Why?
Mel, I’m funny about licensing. When I first looked into it, I realized that the margins are very slim and you have to sell a lot of product to make that even somewhat beneficial, so that was something that was never interesting to me just from a business standpoint. You certainly can’t quit your day job with a lot of these licensing deals. The same with books. You can end up spending a lot of money to do a book, and I just don’t know that you get a good rate of return on your investment—other than it being a really big marketing expense.
