Welcome back to the NYDesigns newsletter. Our grants season is in full swing, we took on too much, and our newsletter suffered for it. But we missed you.

Crain's NY had a great article the other week on how some creative business owners have turned to street vending to build brand recognition and boost sales.

This strategy is a near relative to the "pop-up/guerilla" temporary store concept that's been around since I was a teenager (exaggeration) and of which I'm the first to admit a sense of jaded exhaustion. Less sales opportunity and more marketing opportunity, "pop-ups" take advantage of the consumer values nurtured by an entertainment- and experience-centric economy. By promoting consumers to participate in temporary installations, insiders armed with the keys to unlock the exclusive, the secretive and the cool, pop-ups are a great way to cultivate a brand following. In addition, transient retail can become a cost-effective platform for testing and refining new products and ideas in the jungle of real audiences; and if things go amiss, well, it's not like you just signed a 5-year lease on a Madison Avenue storefront! Even better, you could site your guerilla store on previously unattainable Madison Avenue, next to your retail idols!

Everything costs, of course, and what Commes des Garçons can do, you probably can't. Street vending seems like a good solution for a more limited budget, but the NYDesigns investigative team found that it's harder than it looks.

If there's foot traffic, there's usually a street vendor. In recent years, we've become more familiar with the food vending industry thanks to the admirable efforts of the Vendy Awards, the Urban Justice Center's Street Vendor project, and the success of eclectic weekend markets like the Brooklyn Flea, which features food, crafts, art, and everything in between.

Street vending can be great alternative to a brick-and-mortar store, but it's by no means a temporary enterprise, given the investment required to launch it. For products that are not food-related, licenses are expensive, in both the open and black markets. They're also limited in quantity and application preference is given to veterans. Life on the streets can get rough; vendors have traditionally had an ambivalent relationship with city enforcement agents, as they do with the weather: "Worse than the bitter cold and long hours… is the stream of tickets handed out by police for setting his table too near a doorway, selling too far from the curb or vending on the wrong corner."

You don't need a license for the sale of certain goods or if you become a merchant under the umbrella of an authorized street fair organization, such as the Brooklyn Flea. But if it's a storefront you want, with semi-permanent branding elements and a suitable, contextual home for your goods, how about mobile merchandising - your inventory and retail venue rolled into a bus or a van? This Brazilian company thrived under this distribution model and this fashion bus has been doing well in London for nearly a decade. Unfortunately, it's illegal in New York. A phone call to the Department of Consumer Affairs confirmed that non-food retail from a stationary or moving vehicle is strictly verboten. According to the DCA representative, some ex-cops have been trying to change the law for years, to no avail. If having a mobile storefront is your dream deferred it's time to petition the city government. Start by emailing DCA for an interpretation of this law at legalinterp@dca.nyc.gov.

Design + Sustainability + Profitability

 We've all known for a while now that it pays to be green. But beyond the deployment of green values in publicity and marketing, what are the hard and real costs, choices and trade-offs design companies face when they integrate sustainability thinking into their core business strategy? Our guest speakers, all active and influential within their respective creative disciplines, have innovated their products and processes so that today's profits don't compromise the needs - and profits - of tomorrow.

Can't make it? Follow us on twitter or submit your questions #designersaccord

 Read more »

It was just a regular postprandial afternoon at NYDesigns. And then we saw it, in Popular Woodworking Magazine.

"Win a Free Router." 

Our LXWXH fabrication lab, headed by "Tool Guy" Ben Wilkinson-Raemer, is a well-equipped outfit but the acquisition of a router would really put it over the top. 

A CNC router moves sideways to drill out material, leaving intact the forms and shapes that are specified. It  digs using a drill bit called a mill. A CNC can cut out a particular shape over and over again until either the material runs out or the electricity turns off. It's hooked up to a computer and is guided by software in much the same way as our beloved Lasercutter, a NYDesigns newsletter favorite (Lasercutter = picture of kittens in a teacup). 

The particular CNC we covet, the Weeke Vantech 480 CNC router, has a retail value of $69,900. It's the cutting edge of shop technology - its drive system is both powerful and impressively reliable. Stiles Machinery will be awarding a free one-year lease of the machine and footing the cost of shipping, installation and training. That's a lot of expensive equipment and extras we can't pass up. 

Winning this CNC machine will change the way we do business in the fabrication lab. Whereas now our members get all their routing done outside of the lab, we can feasibly bring that work in-house and integrate it fully into our practice if we have our own machine. We want to train people to use the CNC comfortably despite its 6ft x 8ft industrial behemoth presence. Needless to say, access to the machine will increase demand for our services, boosting our mission of becoming the most imaginative, most affordable and most reliable shop around. 

Please make our dreams come true!

1.  Go to this video on youtube

2.  Sign into youtube (very important!)

3.  Press "like." 

But wait, there's more: Here's what's in it for you: 

Ben Wilkinson-Raemer: "If by the grace of God we win this CNC machine, I promise that, to the best of my ability, I will seek out Christopher Walken and have him taser me...and I will film it."

 As of now, 109 of you like us and our video has been viewed 1485 times. 

Like us on youtube today!

This summer, the Center for an Urban Future released a collaborative report with architects, urbanists and artists reimagining the look and feel of the New York street fair. I was almost robbed at knifepoint at a street fair on the Upper West Side back in 1999 so I personally stay away. But no past trauma is needed to accept CUF's findings; you know what the report's about if you've ever accidentally (or intentionally, to your everlasting regret) stumbled upon the sad collection of greasy food, tube sock vendors and nonchalant condoning of litter that is the New York street fair. Even Mayor Bloomberg agrees. CUF found that almost half of the food permits were held by the 20 largest vendors in the tri-state area and that almost half of them are based outside city limits. A sense of place and a connection to the immediate neighborhood is notably absent, and it isn't as though the cons are balanced out with cool activities like classes on recycling and repurposing old bike parts into necklaces.

But if such things were on offer, then we would have an entirely new model for a street fair. Thank you GreenHomeNYC for bringing us the NEW New York street fair on Saturday, October 2, 2010 - where you, your kith and kin CAN make jewelry out of old bike parts. And a lot more besides.

The NEW New York reinvents the tradition of the street fair to bring home ideas for greening our built environment for the residents of the city. "A core component of the event is to use the streetscape and surroundings as a classroom. In addition to leaving behind a block transformed with examples of a greener city, activities will be tied into the immediate environs - this year at the Carroll Gardens block of 3rd between Bond and Hoyt - such as tours of a nearby green building."

In addition to community engagement and integration, NEW New York is committed to reducing the traditional street fair's dirty footprint by composting food waste, minimizing the use of paper, utilizing biofuel and offsetting its carbon footprint.

See their schedule of events. And do visit on Saturday - it'll be fun, it'll be new and it's the street fair we New Yorkers deserve.

Curious about going green? Take our GreenhomeNYC's - NYDesigns classes this fall.

At the commencement of the first graduating class of entrepreneurs from Goldman Sachs' 10,000 Small Businesses program, held yesterday September 22nd, we had a surprise.

NYDesigns has been hosting the program for the past 6 months so we knew to expect some marquee names: Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein as well as everyone's favorite investor, Warren Buffett.

That was more than enough for us. And then we were floored. Because so unexpected was the attendance of President Obama's senior adviser and public liaison Valerie Jarrett.

In her commencement speech, Jarrett underscored the Obama administration’s commitment to helping small businesses. Her timing was right on. Today, a delayed bill to help struggling small businesses secure access to credit and other growth incentives goes before the House to be signed into legislation.

The issue of dwindling credit for small business owners has gained a lot of momentum in the past year, as can be attested by all sorts of articles and media pronouncements. Just this week, Crain's New York ran a special report on the "broken" small business finance system. Both the total volume and total value of small business lending in New York State contracted by half between 2006 and 2009.

The drought in small business lending, according to a survey undertaken by Pepperdine University, is the No. 1 issue for private companies nationwide. NYDesigns' own survey and report on Latino participation in the NYC design economy also ranked access to capital as a top issue for design business owners and entrepreneurs.

The validity of this issue comes under question in an emerging perspective advocated most heavily by the National Federation of Independent Business. In their report Small Business Credit in a Deep Recession, NFIB analysts caution against misidentifying fundamental small business problems and translating these faults into faulty policies. Only 8% of the NFIB survey respondents cited access to credit as a business concern while a bit more than half attributed slow or declining sales as their main problem. Even among business owners who reported they cannot get credit, twice as many cite poor sales as cite credit access. What businesses need are customers, not credit.

"So why does lending obsess us so feverishly?" the Atlantic Magazine asks. Credit, the author finds, is available although - it is true - harder to get. The article follows the fortunes of a manufacturer who was able to secure loans to invest in capital equipment and is now enjoying, in a battlefield desolate of competitors, profits, new hirings, and the likelihood of coming out of the recession even stronger than before. Borrowed money can help someone like him, who applied it constructively to grow and strengthen his business. The other direction borrowed money can go is towards shoring up a business already on its way out - to stay afloat. And while access to credit may be a benevolent thing to extend, it may not be the prudent strategy to dig the American economy out of our epic recession.

NYDesigns, in collaboration with Hostos Community College and with generous funding from the Small Business Administration (SBA), surveyed and interviewed 70 Latino designers to gauge the state of design entrepreneurship within New York City’s rapidly expanding Latino community. The study assessed key challenges and proposed strategies that would benefit Latino designers most in propelling their business forward.

New York City’s Latino designers identify themselves as graphic designers, web designers, fashion designers, industrial/product designers, interior designers, and architects. Their extensive professional experience, acculturation to the language and customs of American life, and commitment to their professional futures mark them as valuable contributors to the New York City’s economic and cultural health.

NYDesigns has just launched a brand-new website devoted to the study, the resulting report, and the creation of a Latino designers network committed to advocacy, support, and mentorship. Explore the site, read the report, register for our Latino designers database, and keep your eyes peeled for future developments!

To explore Créate: Diseñadores de Nueva York, visit nydesigns.org/create.

The independence anniversary for five Latin American countries - Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua - marks the beginning of Hispanic Heritage Month every September 15th. It's easy for those of us who are not Latino to let this one pass by as easily as all the others (National Caramel Month, German-American Heritage Month, Workplace Politics Awareness Month but let's resist the expected and think about what this month means - could mean - to you. How does your business cater to Latino Americans and why should you care?

Today happens to be the launch party for NYDesigns' survey on Latino participation in the New York City design economy. In the process of surveying, researching, and writing, we've amassed and catalogued a lot of statistics. Demographics tell a compelling story, and one wouldn't know it from the way they're usually presented. In this case, two statistics particularly stand out:

The New York metropolitan area’s Latino population numbered 2.16 million in the 2000 Census and is projected to rise close to approximately 4 million by 2020. [ Laura Limonic, The Latino Population of NYC 2007, Center for Latin America, Caribbean and Latino Studies, Graduate Center, City University of New York, December 2008 ]

In 2007, the Latino consumer market in the United States was about the same size as Mexico's entire economy in terms of gross domestic product. [ Press release, Terry College of Business, July 31, 2007 ]

The increase in Latino consumption will influence the demand, supply, and marketing of goods and services.  There are enormous opportunities for entrepreneurs and designers to take advantage of the culturally driven spending power of the escalating Latino minority as well as the countries of Latin America. Latinos in the United States long for food, music, and consumer goods that remind them of home but also desire new goods that reference and play off cultural references shared by the Latino perspective.

Explore NYDesigns' Créate: Diseñadores de Nueva York

Welcome back to the NYDesigns blog. Our summer hiatus is past and unfortunately, yours is too.

The NYDesigns staff know that summer's truly over when, after two introspective weeks in a silent fructarian monastery in Appalachia, we spy the godzilla-sized, tomato-red IDCNY sign halfway through the 7-minute walk from the trains at Courthouse Square. We share the building with LaGuardia College CUNY and E. Gluck Corporation, a watch manufacturing company.

In 1908, however, the "Thousand Window Bakery," a best practice factory showcase for the Loose-Wiles Biscuit company originally of Kansas City was the building's sole tenant. All 10 stories of the building housed production, sales and management as well as 2500 employees in a Fabian, sun-infused proletarian paradise, complete with a lending library and a clubhouse. Trading under the name Sunshine Biscuits, the cookies were baked in the shape of Popeye, Olive, Swee'pea, Wimpy, etc. and distributed in tin boxes which are now modestly priced collectibles. Animal crackers originated here. Now a subsidiary of Keebler, Sunshine is now best known for producing the Cheez-It brand of snack crackers.

The "Thousand Window Bakery" was one piece within the larger industrial park of Degnon Terminal, the brainchild of Michael Degnon, entrepreneur and railyard contractor  for the Sunnyside Yards, which abut the building's northwestern facade. Degnon Terminal  was attractive to companies including the Packard Auto Company, Ever Ready, and Chicle (of Chiclets gum) because of the ease in shipping just-manufactured goods via rail straight to distributors.The Sunnyside rail lines haven't seen any traffic since 1989 and the industrial occupants have long moved on to more affordable real estate climes. Sunshine left in the mid '60s.

...but the oversized sign doesn't say "Sunshine Biscuits." IDCNY (International Design Center New York) was a mid-80s experiment by Lazard Development Corporation to create a hub for the contract furniture and trade showrooms just as furniture showrooms couldn't afford to pay for space in Manhattan and just before the real estate world crashed (the last time around). The experiment was not succesful. It would cost tens of thousands of dollars to take the sign down, so there it remains - may it always remind you of us.

Google paid homage to the Wizard of Oz's 71st birthday today, Thurs 12th, with a custom banner ad. Take a peek before midnight. That's the anniversary of the movie, not the book; Lyman Frank Baum published his story in 1900 and it wasn't until 1938 that the Technicolor explosion featuring Judy Garland was released. 

The well-loved story of the ragtag band of...interspecies, variously-animate, accidental friends questing towards a way back to Kansas, a heart, a brain and courage in the magical kingdom of Oz is so preposterously imaginative and utterly crazy that it must have some basis...in reality.

That reality would be the divisive monetary policy debates of the late 19th century, set against an economic depression not unlike what we're now experiencing.

A ton of academic literature has been devoted to unpacking the political parable that is the Wizard of Oz. Baum's politics swayed sympathetically towards the ascendant Populist movement whose members identified themselves with the geographical "West," an amalgamation of interests and values representative of a heartland bloc of provincial farmers, workingmen and frontiersmen. They contrasted themselves against the orthodox and monied power structures neglecting the country from places like Washington and New York, the seat of the intelligentsia.

Their differences took shape in the monometallic vs. the bimetallic standard debates. The US was then operating on the gold standard - a monetary system which valued the dollar according to the quantity of gold. The Populists wanted the free coinage of silver to join gold as a source of money. This move, they argued, would increase the US money supply, raise price levels - which had fallen by about 22% in 16 years- and reduce farmers' debt burdens. Farmers, not surprisingly, were among those most adversely affected in this extended period of deflation and depression.

What's this got to do with Dorothy? Well, you'll have to read this seminal study for all the juicy analysis, but I'm sold. Baum modeled the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsmen and the Cowardly Lion after the Western Farmer, the Proletariat and Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, respectively. That march to Emerald City? That's a march on Washington, "where many ladies and gentlemen of the court, all dressed in rich costumes...had nothing to do but talk to each other." The Yellow Brick Road and every gold-inflected detail in the story correspond to support for the gold standard way of life; the starkest example might very well lie in the name "Oz" - ounces (of gold). The Wicked Witch of the East is naturally President Grover Cleveland.

You decide if this theory is coincidence or coherence - Baum's grandson is reported to have said that these interpretations were "insane" - but allegories exist to illustrate a coherent doctrine outside the fiction. These are two parallel realities to explore if we are open to perceive - and two can only make us smarter.

The world gold supply increased in the 1890s, reversing the deflation and muting the Populist cry. And all we got was the Wizard of Oz.

2, 4, 6.

If you live in NYC, you probably live in a building running one of these fuel classes for heating.

Nos. 4 and 6 are why are children under fourteen in NYC have double the asthma rate of the national average and why on some days you feel like a smoker even though you quit back in 1999. More pollution comes from burning heating fuel than all cars and trucks combined.

9000 buildings in the city still subscribe to 4 and 6 fuels, described unappetizingly as "unrefined sludge" by the Environmental Defense Fund in its recent and ominously titled report The Bottom of the Barrel: How the Dirtiest Heating Oil Pollutes Our Air and Harms Our Health. This posse of 9000, which counts ritzy communities like the storied Dakota among its membership, creates 87 percent of the soot pollution arising from heating oil. New Yorkers burn more than one billion gallons of the stuff each year, more than any other US city. Last week, the City Council voted to improve the quality of heating oil by reducing the sulfur limits in No. 4 and requiring a minimum of 2% biodiesel in home heating oil. Last month, the State passed a law to reduce the sulfur content  of No. 2 heating oil by 99%, to go into effect in 2012. No. 2 represents around 70% of all the heating oil used in the city and have 15 times less the pollution of No.6 oils. Changing the types of oil we use can improve air quality, save on maintaining our heating systems and boost our energy security by reducing our dependence on foreign oil. Natural gas is a cleaner alternative, as are renewable energy sources.

The City Council's press conference was held at Metro Biofuels in Brooklyn, one of the largest biodiesel manufacturers in the area. Biodiesel, made from a wide variety of vegetable or plant oils including used restaurant grease, is not only renewable, but also a surprisingly easy sell. NYDesigns resident Paul Miller lead his Upper East Side pre-war co-op through a changeover from No.6 to a biofuel/No.6 blend, with the goal of switching over to a No. 4 blend by this winter.

"It cost us nothing," he shared. "We used the same tanks, burners and boilers and the 2% blend acts as a cleaning agent, resulting in an immediate improvement in efficiency and longer intervals between service visits." The available conversion tax rebate stands at $0.01/gallon for each percent of biodiesel, and Paul thinks more incentives are on the horizon. "Everyone at 308 has been happy with the reduction of toxic products in the building, particularly parents. Our conversion to biofuel went off without a hitch without any additional costs."