start up
“Alone we can do little, together we can do much.”
1st shop
Faced with the possibility of loosing everything once again, John Lindsay meet with his old friend and mentor to propose they go into business with each other, even more than that, John wanted to team up with Alex to change the world. After leaving the Paradiso employ, and enjoying early success as a custom cabinetmaker and millworker in the late nineties, building for some of the best architectural firms and contractors in the North Shore of Chicago, John found his life and career in free fall due to the recession...
model making
After moving into their new shop at 7235 Saint Louis Ave in Skokie IL, new to this kind of design collaboration, John presented his four foot high stack of notebooks to Alex ready to start prototyping. Alex thought it better to take John’s designs and start a rigorous model making period, a process completely new to John, but familiar to him, now a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Some of their first investments were in art supplies like matt board, balsa wood, crazy glue, Exacto knives, and a mini-scroll saw...
prototyping
Nine months of model making proved fruitful artistically, but worrisome financially, and the pressure was on to start finding a way to support the shop overhead. It was time to start making furniture and stop dreaming of possibilities, but the right design was still out of reach. Then John came into the shop with a new idea and quickly built two models, a chair and a table, the seeds of a new kind of system. After months of searching, with both partners scrutinizing each design exstensively, making an art of the critique, Alex had a two word reply “That’s it" ...
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