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When Sameer Dohadwala and his two friends, Samer Saab and Max Greenblatt, had the idea to design and build a piece of furniture after lugging a friend’s bulky piece up three flights of stairs, reality didn’t quite meet their expectations.
Although they tried to build something “more portable and high quality,” said Dohadwala, “It was a huge, huge failure. We didn’t know what we were doing.”
After they couldn’t find anything in stores that fit their needs, they proposed a venture that utilized their business and technology backgrounds and solved their furniture dilemma: Unbranded Designs.
Started in 2012, the crowdsourcing site capitalizes on the cultural shift from mass-produced to artisan-crafted products. Independent furniture designers submit their prototype sketches online, where community members vote on their favorites. The selected designs then get advice from industry experts in the refinement stage, and are subsequently produced domestically and sold on the Unbranded Designs website, with the designer receiving a portion of the royalties.
Designs are as unique as the individuals who create them, with styles ranging from “antique to contemporary to super modern.” Making an account is free, an intentional decision by the founders, Dohadwala said, once they realized that many talented furniture designers “didn’t have the money or the sales and marketing” to fund their own ideas.
But even with countless new technologies appearing every day, Dohadwala and his friends saw promise in starting a company focusing on furniture, an industry that’s existed for centuries. “It’s constantly innovating and changing,” Dohadwala said. “If you think about a home, your entertainment center that you had 15 years ago is completely different than what you have now. It changes based on how TVs and different accessories evolve.”
A prime example of the evolving nature of furniture can be seen in the company’s first design challenge, a collaboration with Motorola Mobility to create a reception desk for the company’s newest facility in Fort Worth, Texas.
"We threw a challenge out to our community to create something for them that functionally solved their problems for a reception desk but also aesthetically,” Dohadwala said. The winning product of the contest is now being used in Motorola’s facility.
They recently launched another design challenge called Office Storage Reimagined, the goal being to create a piece of office storage that is relevant to the needs of today’s workplaces. Dohadwala expanded upon the need for innovative office storage, explaining that “people still use filing cabinets but most people don’t use paper as much.” The submitted designs will be judged on innovation and future thinking, quality of design and ease of manufacturing. Anyone can submit a design, and there are monetary prizes and manufacturing opportunities for the winners.
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Even though the realm of design has always been largely dependent on personal artistic agency and control, Dohadwala said he believes there is great value in community opinions when deciding which furniture designs to manufacture.
“There’s a certain meritocracy element,” he said. “Our platform is a way to level the playing field. Our community helps decide what ideas are worth producing and making. It helps us fill the gaps of what’s not already there.”
Looking to the future, Dohadwala said Unbranded Designs has three main goals: “Aggressively building out our collection of products that we can get in front of customers, continuing to evolve and promote our design challenges and looking for other ways to build and promote the independent design community."
