Designed for Greatness

All SMARTY's attend this panel Free

Non-Members: $25 thru 1/29, $35 thereafter, $40 at the door.

Big SMARTY Members come early for a Speaker Reception, 6 - 7pm

A Master Event Panel featuring:

Natasha Case, Coolhaus

Dario Antonioni, Orange22

Sara Happ, Sara Happ Lip Scrub

Jose Caballer, The Groop

Moderated by: SMARTY Founder, Amy Swift Crosby

What do an ice cream sandwich maker, a product designer, a lip gloss junkie and a creative director have in common? Quite a bit.

Come hear how some of the brightest, most creative minds have approached their respective design-savvy businesses, and how they've married their creative instincts with back-end strategy and operational results. This unique panel is in collaboration with design icon, Herman Miller, and brings both product and service entrepreneurs to a central stage to talk about their victories, challenges, business hiccups and marketing secret weapons. In addition to peeking behind their start-up curtain, we'll also find out:

• How does a "creative" run a strong, profitable business?
• How does elevated design play a role in your brand?
• Why does design matter to you?
• How has design changed in the past 10 years and why should small business owners care?
• What if math, operations and strategy aren't your strength? How do you compensate?
• How do you scale operations up or down, depending on workflow and cash flow?
• How do you approach sales?
• What are your best marketing tips?

And there's so much more.

About Natasha Case, Founder  of Coolhaus

COOLHAUS is a triple entendre – a play on three of our favorites:

[1] Bauhaus, an influential modernist design movement of the 1920′s and 30′s.

[2] Rem Koolhaas, the famous Dutch Architect and Theorist who challenged the mantra "Form follows function"

[3] "Cool house," isn't that what you're eating – an ice cream sandwich deconstructed into a cookie roof and floor slab with ice cream walls?

Natasha and Freya started baking cookies and making ice cream in Freya's mom's kitchen in the Fall of 2008. They named the flavor combinations after architects and architectural movements they were inspired by and started experimenting with recipes and testing them on friends. It seemed like a fun art project with "farchitecture" in mind ie food + architecture.

One day it occurred to Freya and Natasha that an ice cream truck would be a perfect way to disseminate their ice cream sandwiches (and architecture dialogue) around the city of LA. The truck would be a nod to the past tradition of the Good Humor man selling ice cream novelties around neighborhoods, but with a modern twist – not to mention the long-withstanding popularity of taco trucks around LA and the rapidly growing infatuation with "gourmet" food trucks. The timing seemed perfect, now all Freya and Natasha needed was a truck!

They found a postal truck on Craigslist and were able to afford it with money they had saved from their other jobs. They prepared the truck and their product for their launch at Coachella Valley Music Festival in April of 2009 where the product was very well received – and when they came back to LA, they had generated a strong buzz and following.

Today, they have a fleet of 4 trucks in LA, 2 trucks and 1 cart in NY, 2 trucks in Austin, 2 trucks in Miami, a newly launched storefront in Culver City, CA and even have their ice cream sandwiches at Southern California Whole Foods Markets. They hope to continue to expand to other cities nationally, and maybe even globally (doesn't hurt to dream, right?)!

About Dario Antonioni, Founder of Orange22

By the age of 10, Dario was a bona-fide flight junkie, churning out model airplanes like a man obsessed. While other kids were memorizing baseball statistics, Antonioni was devouring every book about the Wright Brothers he could get his hands on. Even then, Antonioni was amazed not so much by that first flight itself—but by the fact that that two nobody bicycle mechanics had the effrontery to revolutionize a field so far beyond their area of expertise that they almost had no business being there.

“They were the kind of innovators who didn’t follow a standard path,” says Antonioni. “They cleared a totally new path—even if it meant they didn’t know where they’d end up, and they were unwilling to allow any barrier stop them. To me, that’s what innovation is about.”

Today, the founder of the Los Angeles design lab Orange22 still takes his cue from those aviators, refusing to abide by the often fiercely guarded distinctions between disciplines in design. He calls himself a “maker of things”—a purposefully open-ended description, as Orange22 designs and fabricates both mass-market and limited-edition objects and furniture, brand-defining retail environments, residential interiors and design concepts licensed for mass production. In every case, Antonioni fuses technology, art and design, with the overarching intent to revolutionize the way we live.

With its aerodynamic lines, his furniture design often anticipates the future, leveraging advances in technology just slightly before they enter the mainstream. Those qualities hint at a designer with expertise in a field few designers can claim even cursory knowledge: And in fact, Antonioni’s first stop in higher education was the University of Michigan, where he studied aerospace engineering for several years. When that mostly theoretical science left him longing to work with his hands, Antonioni moved on to receive his industrial design degree from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he currently teaches the next generation of innovators.

Antonioni’s work has been featured in magazines like GQ, In Style, Interior Design, Metropolis and Wallpaper, while Surface Magazine paid Antonioni tribute as a featured designer in its prestigious T.A.G. Event—a showcase of exceptional design talent—in New York and Milan. He’s exhibited his furniture at the most important international design shows in New York, Paris, Cologne and Milan, and has lectured at universities and industry conferences worldwide.

As if his work as designer, fabricator and teacher weren’t enough, Antonioni is also developing the business plan for a nonprofit children’s summer camp. With it, he aims to introduce kids to the two worlds—nature and science—that inspire so much of his work. The educational program centers on outdoor excursions and trips to high-tech manufacturing plants. “I can’t imagine what life would be like without my relationship to science and nature,” says Antonioni. “But there are so many kids who might never experience either. I want to give the next generation of innovators the tools they need to change the world—and at the same time, I want to help cultivate their respect for it.”

About Sara Happ, Founder of Sara Happ Lip Scrub

A card-carrying beauty junkie and magazine addict, Sara Happ has loved all things beauty, bath and body for as long as she can remember. "I brought my curling iron and blowdryer with me to Girl Scout camp. We slept in tents," she explains.

But in 2005, Sara realized that there was a hole in the market. "I kept reading: exfoliate lips with a wet washcloth or baby toothbrush. I thought there had to be a better way. So I went to my kitchen and made it myself."

A cult product was born the moment the lip scrub by sara happ® hit shelves in Los Angeles in December of that year.

In 2008 her highly anticipated follow up, the lip slip®: one luxe balm quickly became known as the richest, glossiest, most luxurious balm on the market. “My sole purpose was to create the greatest lip product imaginable. The world didn’t need another lip balm. It needed the perfect one.”

She has just released the body scrub by sara happ®: vanilla bean. Three years in the making, the body scrub treatment is designed to look, feel and work unlike any other, using gigantic sugar crystals suspended in a custom blend of kukui and macadamia nut oils, that, get this: rinse away clean. “It’s silky but not greasy, hydrating not oily. You get the same supple skin that you do with the lip scrub, but now it’s literally softness from head to toe.”

About Jose Caballer, Founder of The GROOP

Growing up in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, Jose developed his visual acumen at an early age (he handcrafted a race track and cars out of river clay and cardboard shoe boxes). He quickly developed an appetite for entrepreneurism as well, selling Star-Wars replica space ships made out of chipboard, foam and paper to his 6th and 7th grade classmates (Darth Vader's Imperial Transport was his top seller). He figures that's why he gravitated to a career in digital media because of the blinking lights, sounds and visuals that it combines.

Throughout his career he's had the opportunity to collaborate with clients such as Sega, Microsoft, Wieden + Kennedy, WK Tokyo Lab, Sony Music, Warner Music, Art Center College of Design, Nike and Live Earth. While Jose is much more driven by results than awards, he's taken home his share of hardware too, including Art Directors Club Young Guns 2004, HOW Magazine's, Interactive Best of Show 2003, American Center for Design Web 100, and he has work in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

When he's not producing results for clients or running a contemporary art gallery called Bank that he co-owns, he spends his time dropping knowledge as a professor of digital media and design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Here he provides students with an insider's look into the ever-changing methodologies that are used to create engaging digital experiences.