Four guys making baby furniture? Philip Erdoes, the founder of a New York City company called ducduc and one of the four guys in question, isn't sure people will buy the notion. Their qualifications: Two of the guys, creative director Brady Wilcox and design director David Harris, have backgrounds in design and brand development. One of the guys, chief operating and financial officer Rebby Gregg, is an operations whiz—he can get things to happen between the factory and the showroom floor. And then there's Erdoes, a successful venture capitalist and father. So far, Erdoes is the only father among the four.
What the four know as a group bodes well for ducduc. What they appear not to know will help them, too, because in entering the juvenile-furnishings market, they have discovered a wheel that could use some reinventing. There are, after all, only so many ways in which discriminating new parents are willing to abandon matters of style and let their kids take over their lives. As Erdoes discovered early on in fatherhood, furniture is almost always one of them—mainly because parents don't really have much choice. "Why is it you can't, in your own kid's room, place an aesthetic that you have throughout your house?" Erdoes asks.
To answer that question, you would have to explain the rut that the American juvenile-furniture industry currently occupies. The business is dominated by old ideas of the nursery, and the presumption that consumers want nothing but fluffy, frilly diaper-commercial decor for their babies. According to that logic, says Erdoes, because babies aren't babies forever, the furniture needn't last a lifetime, either.
In the realm of ducduc—whose office is housed in a bright Soho loft next to Erdoes's investment company, Bear Ventures—furniture for kids is built to be as smart as that made for adults. It's furniture first and foremost, not a toy or a game. It's just smaller. It's also not disposable. Ducduc has designed its pieces to grow with a kid and then become something an adult can live with. That doesn't mean the pieces aren't fun. But if most children's-furniture companies these days sell whimsy (enough of it to make your teeth hurt), ducduc sells wit, and usually on the dry side.
Next Page: Behind ducduc's designs lies the radical notion that parenthood is a transaction.
