Hellman-Chang is a New-York-based furniture line that makes their pieces the old-fashioned way: By hand. Tour their 8,000-square-foot facility in Brooklyn and you'll see mortise-and-tenons, glue-ups and lots of hand-planing. In an era when manufacturing is done overseas, the thought that you can have a not only workable, but highly successful furniture firm based in the city and using local craftsmen seems unlikely.
Even more unlikely is that founders and designers Dan Hellman and Eric Chang never went to design school. The duo seemed to come out of nowhere. When Eric stepped on stage at the Guggenheim to receive Hellman-Chang's first design award back in 2006, Interior Design Editor in Chief Cindy Allen shook his hand for the cameras, then whispered in his ear "Who the hell are you?"
Following that first Best of Year Award, Hellman-Chang carefully built a line that would eventually populate private residences, rooms at the Ritz Carlton, the offices of Sotheby's, the Presidential Suite of the Four Seasons. Building a successful business from the ground up takes talent, hard work, luck, and above all, tons of shrewd decision-making. In this business, as with many others, make the right call and you advance to the next level. Make the wrong call and you're finished. Dan and Eric's uncanny ability to consistently make those right calls is something many a start-up designer could learn from, and Dan and Eric have agreed to tell their full story in this exclusive, multi-part Core77 "origin story" interview.
To answer Cindy Allen's question, Who the hell are these guys? We'll start off by telling you who they were. Daniel Hellman and Eric Chang were two childhood friends from Maryland who wanted to pimp out a fish tank before they went off to separate colleges, where they'd pursue non-design-related fields. Here's Part 1 of their story.
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Core77: First, the cocktail-party question: What is Hellman-Chang?
Eric: We're a furniture line out of Brooklyn, based on a passion for designing and building furniture by hand. Stylistically we're into bold, modern, unique designs, but rooted in solid woods and traditional craftsmanship; we're known for unique surface treatments and a sort of sleekness. And there's that strong Brooklyn vibe. We fabricate in Brooklyn and find that's a major pull factor in our brand. It's a big reason why a lot of our clients are drawn to our projects.