Modern for the Masses - Interview with Christiane Lemieux of DwellStudio

Any entrepreneur who leaves a comfortable job to strike out on his or her own and fulfill his or her own goals and aspirations is taking a big risk. Now, imagine taking that risk, building a profitable company, then deciding to scale back and take a one third hit to annual revenue in order to refocus your business to fulfill another, truer vision.

That is what Christiane Lemieux, founder and creative director of Dwell Studio, did, and that risk paid off. She originally built her business by designing private-label textiles for national chain stores, such as Crate and Barrel and Bed Bath& Beyond. But Lemieux decided to “fire” a few private-label clients, focus on her name brand, and successfully market Dwell Studio to specialty shops across the country. Within two years of ramping up the Dwell Studio line of home furnishings and developing her uncompromising aesthetic, the buzz surrounding her company’s products helped Dwell Studio land an enormous deal with Target, which doubled the volume of their business in one year. Today, Target stores sell approximately 500 different Dwell Studio products in its1, 500 locations across the country and online.

Today Dwell Studio has grown in size; not only in revenue, but also in the scope of product offerings. The home collection includes everything from aprons to window treatments to stationery. In addition to bedding and blankets, the Dwell Studio Baby line now includes accessories, clothes, furniture, nursery artwork, diaper bags, more stationery, and nearly anything else baby. They also design home furnishings and clothing for kids.

Recently, NY Report executive editor Daria Meoli spoke with Lemieux to discuss how she leveraged private label clients to grow her own signature label, how her role with the company has changed since the early days, and what it is like to hire your husband to be your CEO.

Daria Meoli: What lead to your decision to start Dwell Studio?

Christiane Lemieux: I was design director for a home furnishings company in Soho called Portico. The focus of the company was more traditional home furnishings, and I had a real love for all things modern. While it wasn’t part of their mission, I tried out a few modern pieces in the collection and I found that those pieces had some traction with consumers. So, I decided to leave Portico and start my own company.

I do not have a business background at all. However, this business is right in my comfort zone. Leading up to Dwell Studio, all my professional experience had been doing the same thing that I’m doing now. If I had left Portico to start a restaurant, it probably would have been more difficult, because I wouldn’t have had my suppliers lined up and my ducks in a row. It was fractionally easier to succeed as an entrepreneur starting out in an industry I knew well. One of the things I learned on the job was that textiles are the easiest items to ship, because they don’t break. I watched the damages come in from the furniture companies. I watched the damages come in from hard goods overseas. Then, I looked at the textiles, and it seemed like a great place for me to start. I knew that textiles wouldn’t break, so, my money would go a little bit further. Also, I had the factories lined up for producing textiles. And, from a creative standpoint, textiles were a great vehicle for designing print and pattern; it was a great blank canvas. And there wasn’t a lot of competition in that area, in terms of modern aesthetic.

DM: You had suppliers lined up, but did you have any customers lined up?

CL: I was selling to nobody at that point; but I did have a few lucky breaks in the early days. When I started my line, I simultaneously started a private-label design company. So, I did private-label design for bigger companies, and my first client was Crate and Barrel. That’s a pretty great first client.

DM: How did you finance that first line?

CL: I started from savings, and then I pulled in a lot of favors from the manufacturers that I had worked with and I put a line together. Crate and Barrel would give me a much bigger order than my one-off specialty stores. I grew more private-label clients, and that’s what financed the startup of the company. I could leverage the manufacturing and the volume we were doing for the private labels and grow the business organically that way.

DM: Are private-label clients still a big part of your business?

CL: We still do some private label; we have some long-standing clients, like CB2. But we keep private-label to a minimum now because, with our limited resources, the more time we spend doing that, the less time we spend doing Dwell Studio, and that’s really our first love. Everybody here is here to design for Dwell. We’ve really been able to shift from our original model.

New Marketing for a New Decade

DM: How were you able to grow the Dwell Studio brand to become a bigger part of your business?

CL: When we first started, we went to the trade shows in New York, like International Contemporary Furniture Fair and the New York International Gift Fair. From those trade shows, we got lucky and got a lot of editorial coverage in shelter magazines. That’s sort of how the word got out.

DM: What do you think it was about your product that attracted the attention of the press and your customer base?