Six Lessons in Entrepreneurship for 2022

THE GROOVE

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Welcome 2022! I know many of you are excited for great ideas and to keep the momentum going during this promising year and beyond. Whatever your occupation, position, or career, it is always helpful to see things from an entrepreneurial vantage point. If you are an employee in a big, medium, or small company, these concepts apply the same. Just think of yourself as an “intrapreneur”.

I was pondering about the immensely successful career of architect and designer Florence Knoll, which allowed her to take Knoll (a business she owned with her husband) to gross $3 million in annual sales in 1950 (about $35 million today), and how much she embodied the true spirit of an entrepreneur.

What did Florence Knoll do to build a company that she not only sold for a multimillion-dollar sum in 1959, but also gave her successors such a formidable brand that Knoll went public in 2004 (currently listed in NYSE) and Herman Miller acquired in April 2021 for $1.8 billion?

There are a few things in her playbook that can resonate with you:

When Florence Knoll married Hans Knoll in 1946, she became a partner in the business and turned what was a small furniture company into an international powerhouse. She said that her husband’s goals and projects were usually too broad and didn’t necessarily yield results.

But Florence was sharp and set intentions. She wanted to design furniture that became classics, not just trends. She accomplished just that. Her pieces still look fresh and sell like hot cakes all over the world.

She is also responsible for elevating the role of the interior designer from a mere decorator to a professional who runs the show (like she did).

She was seriously invested in the principles of Bauhaus, which merged simplicity, coherence and the concept of humanizing spaces and objects. She not only brought that intention to everything she did but as the business grew and expanded, she realized that her company was shaping the very idea of what modern living should look like.

Think about what you want to accomplish in 2022. Break it down into tasks, projects and goals, and set an intention for each.

You can generate a million ideas, but the success of an entrepreneur comes from acting on them.

As Florence got more involved in the business and attuned to human needs, she quickly realized that the company’s furniture clients were also businesspeople. As The New York Times wrote in 1960: “Once upon a time virtually every big business executive thought—or whoever did his thinking for him on such matters thought—that his office had to have pale green walls and that his heavy, drawers‐to‐the‐floor desk had to be placed cater‐cornered.”

This propelled her to create the “Knoll Planning Unit” - a full-service interior design division, which by adding contemporary furniture and a sense of open planning into the work environment became the originator of the now common “open plan” offices. (And you thought WeWork was innovative!)

From the Rockefeller family offices to the headquarters of CBS and General Motors, Florence Knoll’s projects quickly dictated a style that was adopted across the country.

She was a pioneer of the idea of putting art in offices, including works from Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, and other artists of her time. This was also done in Knoll’s showrooms, making it a rare furniture company in the United States that generated visual dialogues between unique works of art and mass-produced designs.

Moreover, she understood that in order to convince her clients of what she wanted to accomplish, she needed more than just a blueprint. That’s why she came up with the idea of the paste-ups--those renderings on thin cardboard pages--where she pasted swatches of the fabrics she wanted to use in the design of that space. Nobody had done this before; she was basically humanizing an idea so she could sell it.

Remember: actions are where the crystallization of your wildest ideas materialize. Nothing happens if you don’t act. Don’t leave your ideas dancing alone in your head.

In 1947, a year after she joined the company, Florence Knoll saw the opportunity to open a new division, “Knoll Textiles,” so they could partner with local manufacturing companies to create their own upholstery fabrics with a level of durability and elegance that was not available in the marketplace. She didn’t want to depend on others to find what she needed for her projects.

Not without its challenges (including failed attempts to produce specific textiles and clients whose orders were delayed far more than what they had patience for), she pushed forward and got the division up and running.

This move not only allowed for cost reduction, but it also got Knoll into in the business of “textile conversion” - purchasing unfinished fabrics and bleaching them, printing them, or dying them at the client’s specifications for a fraction of the cost but with a markup that reflected the brand of Knoll. Additionally, this created a whole other “to the trade” business that increased revenues and which remains a strong part of the Knoll empire today.

Big and medium projects require effort and commitment. Every small step counts; consistency compounds over time. Start driving your new project today.

Nobody can do anything alone. Florence Knoll knew that very well.

When she was a student at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was her professor of architecture and became her mentor. When she joined Knoll, she persuaded him to grant the company the rights to reproduce his Barcelona chair. This alone was such a brilliant strategy. If you have seen a Barcelona chair in the lobby of a building, in an interior design magazine, or maybe you have one yourself, it was Florence Knoll who popularized it.

Later she asked Eero Saarinen to design a chair “like a great big basket of pillows that I can curl up in.” He created the celebrated body-embracing “Womb Chair” still sold and produced by Knoll.

Throughout her time at Knoll, Florence created a tradition of collaborations with architects and textile designers by acquiring rights to their creations, paying them commissions and royalties, and giving them credit for their designs.

Who could you partner with this year to expand what you do?

Great entrepreneurs, artists and visionaries know that they must consistently and continuously keep the wheel turning if they want to create a long-lasting impact with what they do.

With her human-centered approach to corporate interiors, Florence Knoll single-handedly reinvented the postwar American workplace.

Add to that the newly found obsession for art-covered walls in offices that people have developed since they entered the world of contemporary art through Instagram. Florence Knoll was doing that 60 years ago.

More importantly, she was not fixated on labels: she knew she was a trained architect and designer but that never stopped her from seeing herself as an entrepreneur and an innovator who could make the future.

You can do the same.

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Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.

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