Anyone who spends a lot of time doing creative work for clients has probably passed a wistful moment or two dreaming about making something completely their own. Such entrepreneurial visions might have once seemed far-fetched, but now that startup costs can be crowdsourced on Kickstarter and products can be sold anywhere in the world through online storefronts like Etsy and Apple’s App Store, bringing a product to market requires little more than an Internet connection and a good idea. So it should come as no surprise that an increasing number of creative agencies are launching independent products alongside their client services.

As designer Rafael Esquer discovered, however, branching into retail when you’re already running an established design studio is not without its challenges. Esquer established branding and design firm Alfalfa Studio in New York City back in 2004. Five years later, he launched a boutique clothing brand called Alfalfa New York. “We realized that by being our own client, we would have complete freedom to create products and designs we love,” Esquer says. “We wanted to create a product that reflects the same level of excellence we invest into our graphic design practice.” For the first few years, though, growth of the new business was very slow. Alfalfa’s design business had to be stable enough to support the fledgling enterprise until it could sustain itself. Now that Alfalfa New York has matured and gained momentum, it is generating a profit, but the extra income wasn’t something Esquer could count on right away.

Esquer’s story is ultimately a tale of success, but there are inevitably a lot of entrepreneurial ventures that fail. David Catalano, co-founder and CEO of Virginia-based digital consultancy and product studio Modea, says he often sees agencies launching products without really understanding what it will take to make the product succeed in the long term. “Agencies must not overvalue the output from a passion project or the result of a hack-a-thon,” he says. The hard question is how a creative agency—by definition, a service business—can create, launch and sustain products well enough to compete with companies that aren’t focusing on anything else.

For some, the solution is simply not worrying about profit. In 2010, London interactive design studio ustwo launched an interactive app called Granimator, which creates “musical wallpapers” for smartphones and tablets using graphic and illustrative elements designed by established creatives such as mcbess, Kate Moross, James Joyce and Pete Fowler. Granimator has been downloaded more than 450,000 times to date, but it’s not making ustwo rich—marketing director Steve Bittan decided early on that Granimator should be free. “The emphasis for us was all about learning and improving our skills,” he says, “and collaborating with some seriously talented people. The project has never been about making money.”

Not all agencies relinquish profits altogether, but many have found it important to weigh factors other than money when assessing the value of creating independent products. “I’ve benefited in countless other less quantifiable ways,” says Julianna Goodman, founder of JG / D + A D design studio. Goodman, formerly a graphic designer for the Museum of Modern Art in New York and web art director for Kate Spade, created an interactive children’s book app called This Monster: Creatures That Love Color. “The work has led to other projects and directed me toward new opportunities that would never have surfaced prior,” she says. “Clients like to know that I saw this project through from beginning to end.”

Josh Kenyon and Colby Nichols of Portland-based design studio Jolby & Friends started selling prints and related products online through Etsy and Big Cartel just for the chance to stretch their imaginations and interact directly with customers. Last year, they broadened their portfolio with a fabric collection that they launched through Spoonflower. It didn’t make much money, but that didn’t really matter to Kenyon and Nichols. “The fabrics opened up a lot of prospective clients’ eyes to our capabilities, and we’ve been hired since then to do commissioned patterns for action sports and apparel companies,” says Nichols.

It’s important to consider, however, how much a product launch might take away from the core business of the design studio. “The process of creating, making and producing a print to sell versus taking on another client job is something we weigh constantly,” Nichols says. “It all comes at a price.” Illustrator Karolin Schnoor, who sells her work on Etsy, says she often ends up sacrificing the creative for the administrative, spending a lot of her time “answering e-mails about when things will arrive and reassuring customers that their products are on their way.” Sandra Dieckmann, an illustrator who earns a living selling her work on web shops like Society6 and Mr. Chiizu, says her illustrations are “frequently ripped off and reproduced without consent,” which is almost impossible to prevent. “Images of your work are readily available to third parties worldwide,” she says. “Countries with lax copyright laws don’t give a damn where the artwork comes from.”

If the primary goal of launching a product is to enrich skills and facilitate creative expression, these drawbacks are probably negligible. But if the goal is to sustainably and profitably move into product development, the entrepreneurial venture has to be more than just a side project. Catalano, whose company Modea incorporated the development of digital products into its consulting services, says the change required “a fundamental realignment across the entire organization.” Modea took cues from tech companies like Google and Facebook, which build product development groups into their overall business model. The studio now creates products as part of its expanded service-oriented relationships with clients, so it can hone new inventions over time and reduce the risk involved in bringing them to market.

One of Modea’s first successful independent products, a web platform called Moveline that lets users shop for movers the same way they would shop for flights on a site like Expedia, was initially a client project for a moving company called Lawrence Transportation. Moveline became a joint venture between Modea and Lawrence, then evolved into a separate company with an initial $400,000 investment from Modea. Catalano says that creating a spin-off company is an important step in developing a truly sustainable product. “Only when the company is truly set off from the mother ship will it be able to forge its own destiny,” he says.

That has been the case for a digital research tool called Ethnio, once an internal agency experiment and now an independent business. Nate Bolt’s design research firm Bolt I Peters initially created Ethnio for the company’s own use. “We needed to intercept real humans, live, in the exact moment they used our client’s interfaces,” Bolt says. “Seems so simple, but all the existing ways to do that—surveys, links, e-mails—kind of sucked.” So the firm built Ethnio, which allows the owner of a product or business to make contact with people while they’re actually using the company’s website and ask them questions in real time. Bolt decided to build Ethnio into a product that others could use simply because, as a consultant, he was always working with other people’s interfaces, and he wanted to make his own. At first he didn’t even charge for it, though, ironically, he found he got a lot more users as soon as he instituted a fee.

In 2012, when Ethnio was still at an early stage of development, Facebook acquired Bolt I Peters and hired Bolt as design research manager. But Ethnio remained independent, and Bolt kept working on it. Now he devotes himself full-time to Ethnio, which is a product-focused company, not service-based as Bolt | Peters was. It has about 2,000 users around the world, including clients as diverse as Ford, Etsy, DirecTV and the Harvard Business Review. Bolt is considering how to grow the company so that he can both hang on to what he finds personally fulfilling—the intangible benefits of a side project—and dedicate the focus necessary to make Ethnio a fully sustainable business of its own.

Bolt, and many others like him, might be pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a creative professional, but they’re also developing a new way to be an entrepreneur, one driven less by the bottom line and more by passion and an understanding of how to make things that people actually use. And whether that manifests as a tiny side project or a full-blown business, they’ll keep trying despite the risks involved because, as Bolt says, they “don’t know any other way to live.” ca
 

PUSH TO START
Five incubators helping to launch tomorrow’s designer-founders

With  support from Google, international digital media school Hyper Island recently launched 30 Weeks to cultivate designers’ startup skills through mentorship, critiques, workshops and, most important, hands-on experience. In the application-only program, designers are given the space and resources to create products and start companies in New York City. In collaboration with Parsons, Pratt, Cooper-Hewitt and SVA, the program’s first class began in September, with 20 students. Tuition fees are set at $10,000 per student—a hefty price, but cheaper than many grad degrees, and two lucky designers received full scholarships.

For those who would rather receive than spend, Designer Fund invests $100,000 to $1 million in designer co-founded startups. In addition, its Bridge design-education program connects designers with the San Francisco company of their choice—including Airbnb, Pinterest and Dropbox—where they are paid to work full-time for at least three months, during which they also participate in weekly workshops, attend dinners and hear talks from tech founders and design luminaries. The program aims to give talented mid- to senior-level designers up-to-date knowledge and startup savvy so they can contribute to the cutting edge—in other words, an MBA for those with MFAs.

The Pratt Design Incubator for Sustainable Innovation was once exclusively for Pratt alumni, but is now open to the public. It provides space and mentorship to more than fifteen startups, and has supported the launch of more than 30 companies such as TurnUpArt, which upcycles art and design supplies through a social network. The incubator also offers a three-week Certificate Program in Design Entrepreneurship.

For Portlanders, Seattleites and online networkers, Makers’ Nation unites designers with creative entrepreneurs of all stripes, including coffee roasters, app developers and crafters. Through workshops and meet-ups, these independent artists share skills to strengthen each other’s businesses.

For the three-dimensionally inclined, TechShop provides the tools, classes and space to create. With eight shops nationwide, it offers a wide range of supplies, including glass cutters, soldering irons and digital cameras, plus hands-on opportunities like 3-D printing, welding and wood-working. In case this sounds overwhelming, the shops also provide support through personal training and prototyping. —Rebecca Huval