In Part 2 of the Hellman-Chang story we saw Dan Hellman and Eric Chang scoop up their first design award. But the bottom line is, there are dozens if not hundreds of design award ceremonies each year, meaning dozens if not hundreds of designers win them. Some of you reading this have won some. So the question is, what do you do next, and how do you stay at the front of the pack? If you're in charge of a start-up furniture line that's not making any real money yet, what's your next move?

Here the then-fledgling designers describe how they reaped one benefit of the award, then took a bold risk shaped like a huge pile of money. We also see some of the careful business thinking that helped Hellman-Chang hit that next level.

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So it's the end of 2006, Hellman-Chang's office is basically Dan's apartment and your shop is a 5x10 in a Brooklyn co-op. And you've just won the Interior Design Best of Year Award. Eric: After that event we were like "Wow, we've got something here. We've actually built something."

Dan: We'd received a form of recognition from the design industry.

And at this point, you've both still got your day jobs? Eric: Yes, I was still with the marketing company.

Dan: But at this point I was not working for the custom furniture guy anymore. So I was building during the day, working on the prototypes of our pieces in the co-op.

Okay. And what happens after the award? Dan: About a week after it was published, we were in my basement apartment on the Upper West Side, working on the website, the marketing collateral and sketching new prototypes, when we got a phone call.

Eric: It was from the design firm working for the Four Seasons. They were making a new hotel in Seattle. They saw the Z-pedestal in the magazine, and they wanted us to redesign it as a dining table for the restaurant-bar area. They had also seen another coffee table on our website, and they wanted that for the Presidential Suite.

Dan: We got that call and it was like "Oh my God" and high-fives.

Eric: They wanted 15 tables and we were like "Yeah, no problem." After we hung up we realized it took us one month to make a small little side table. Now we were like "Wow, how are we going to do this?" Thankfully we had a long lead time, they hadn't even broken ground on the new hotel at that point. But it was another sign that we might have something here. Like, not only are we recognized, now we have people wanting to specify this for their projects.

I just want to zero in on that moment for a second, after you hung up the phone. Had you guys ever had to crank out 15 of anything? Eric: No.

Dan: Nope.

And when they asked for 15, was there any doubt you could get it done? Eric: [Laughter] Well, we wouldn't let anybody know that, but sure.

Dan: Even to this day, sometimes we'll take projects on or try prototypes and there's a second where we're like "We might be in over our heads, but whatever, let's go for it." Eric: We've always had that attitude and I think that's important. I think if you're going to be an entrepreneur, if you're going to try to have your own business, whether it's creative or more business-focused, you've got to be willing to take risks. You've got to be willing to step over the ledge and see where it takes you. Fortunately, we both had that drive. Where you say "yes" and then figure it out and learn from that.Okay. So now the phone's back on the hook. What's your first step? Well, we started redesigning the piece as a round dining table, as they requested. And that's how the Z-Round came about, which is now, by the way, one of our most popular pieces. [Ed: During the interview we sat at an updated Z-round table, a dining version with an extension.] And that alone was an example of line extension where we took one design and were able to create a whole line based on it. Just taking it to the next level.

And I'm assuming you guys filled the order. Dan: We did.

Eric: And I think it's important to understand that what the Four Seasons and maybe the magazine was buying into was a full package. It wasn't just the design of one piece of furniture, it's the brand itself. The design firm for the Four Seasons could go to the website, see the product and be introduced to what our brand is all about. And I think that's the biggest thing—there's a lot of really, really talented young designers out there, probably far better than Dan and I are. We never really had a background, education-wise, in design. But what I think everyone [getting into the design game] needs to consider, in order to set themselves apart, is what the whole package is about.

From the very beginning we knew that and set out with that in mind, which gave us an advantage. If we had represented ourselves as two guys who work nights and weekends, I don't think the designer for the Four Seasons would say, "These are the guys we want to make our table for this new hotel."

It's interesting you say that—I've seen countless websites by talented, up-and-coming designers that were not well-thought-out and gave a general impression of "I don't quite have my shit together yet." How did you avoid that trap? What types of things would we have seen on the Hellman-Chang website of five years ago? Eric: First and foremost the logo, the look, the layout, all of that was thought out from the beginning.

Dan: From a marketing perspective.

Eric: And in terms of pieces it was just the eight or ten that we had in our line at that point and the photos were important to us. We didn't want photos that looked like you took it in someone's apartment. So we would set up photo shoots. I snuck a piece into my office one weekend and set it up with this very New York loft look. So, already we were positioning our products within certain contexts and giving it a brand cache. Things like that were very important.

As you're saying it, these sound like these were the obviously right moves, yet I feel a lot of the young bucks don't consider this stuff. What made it occur to you? Eric: I think it's probably from my marketing background and thinking about products and brands from a certain perspective. And I did a lot of research in the market, seeing what the competition was, what their websites looked like, what they were doing well, what they weren't doing well, and where there was opportunity for a brand like ours to fit in. And that all went into creating the website and giving it certain brand associations that designers can come to and look at and say, "You know, we should spec this for the Four Seasons" et cetera.

All right. So what happened after you filled the Four Seasons order? Eric: After that order we had the sensation of feeling good about what we were doing, that it was being recognized, that we had something. Next we thought that if we're going to sell to interior designers and architects, how do we reach more of them? After a little bit of research, it quickly became obvious that the answer was one of the biggest furniture trade shows--which happened to be right here in New York.

We got the Four Seasons order in January of '07, and the International Contemporary Furniture Fair was scheduled for May of '07. So we quickly set out to round out our line, decide what we wanted to show, rent space for the show.

Dan: That was a big moment. I remember we decided in February, right?

Eric: Yep. The show was like, three months away and people plan for this all year. And Dan and I sat down and said, "Okay. Are we going to do this," or....

Dan: We almost didn't. I remember we were thinking, "No, we've got to do this right and not rush it. Let's wait a year to really do it well."

Eric: I mean, it's a huge financial commitment. And I've gotta give Dan credit here, he was like "We've got to do this now, we should strike while the iron is hot." I was a little more like "Well, I think we need more capital—"

Dan: Which we definitely could've used. [Laughter]

Eric: —And if this is going to be our formal introduction to the trade, we've got to go out there guns blazing, we've got to come in and just blow people out of the water. We've got to have the press and the designers come in like "Where did these guys come from?" And I felt that in order to do that, we needed a lot more capital to make a much bigger, more impressive booth than what we could have afforded at the time.

So what did you decide? Eric: We compromised somewhere in the middle. We got a bigger-than-normal size booth, a 10x20, which already a big expense; that's like, $14,000 right there.

Key decisions like this are make-or-break for new designers; to do the ICFF that year or not would prove to be a crucial step in Hellman-Chang's history. I think it will be instructive for our readers to hear about the thinking that went into the decision. Dan, do you remember what it was that made you push for this? Dan: Well, at that point I had quit working for the furniture maker and my day-to-day was working on Hellman-Chang prototypes and any custom sales we might have gotten. Very early on we had to take some jobs that were not Hellman-Chang simply to pay the $450 rent on the co-op, and so I could pay my rent and put food on the table.

We did a lot of research on the show. It draws 20,000-plus interior designers and architects to it and we realized that if we did this now, we could get a tremendous amount of sales from it. So it was like, even if it wasn't going to be perfect, the way we wanted to present ourselves, let's do the best damn job that we can in the time that we have.

Eric: Which was three months. And I'm glad we did it. Because the next year the economy started tanking.

Dan: Yeah. Had we waited, we probably would not have done the next year's ICFF [due to the state of the economy that year].

The right move at the right time, not an easy thing to predict. Eric, on the flip side, what was it that initially held you back? Eric: With my background and experience with starting a company, I knew the pitfalls of undercapitalization. I knew the pitfalls of not stepping out with your best foot forward. So I was a little like "Well, I think we should reconsider this," and make sure that we've either raised enough capital to run a full-fledged business and really wow people with the brand.

How much did you feel like you guys would need to nut up at this point? Eric: We ended up doing it with the bare minimum, but from my perspective at the time I was thinking that we probably needed between a quarter of a million to half a million dollars if we were to do the show and then get orders and suddenly need to be operating a working business that could fulfill those orders.

I'm guessing you guys didn't have that kind of cash lying around. Dan: Nothing, nothing near that.

Eric: So we compromised a little bit. I'd wanted to do the ICFF only if we could get a really big booth and really nice, expensive marketing collateral. So, we ended up with a medium-size booth, and fortunately my dad is a printer, and he was able to get me really good trade pricing on marketing collateral.

So, we spent three months designing more pieces for the line just to round it out a little more, photographing them and cramming our schedules to design a 32-page look-book that was heavily branded and looked very professional.

A lot of ICFF first-timers will print up postcards to keep costs down, but you guys pushed for an entire look-book. Why? Dan: We wanted something that the designers could take away other than just a business card.

Eric: I had bought myself a digital SLR camera when I graduated college. So I taught myself how to use it, bought a new lens for it to take some better photos. So the design of the marketing collateral and even the photography was something that we were all doing ourselves.

Eric: Getting all of that stuff ready in three months was...pretty intense.

Dan: Sleepless nights and weekends.

Eric: I didn't sleep much during this period. At this point, today, we've gotten really good at it and used to it. For our most recent book we just did 120 pages in three weeks. But that was our first foray into the ICFF.

And how did you guys nut up for this? Dan: From our own savings, and I got a little help from my parents.

Eric: And at that point the marketing company that I was at was doing very well, too. So a lot of the money that I was making was going right back into Hellman-Chang. Which was helpful because it was a very expensive show to do. I think all-in-all it was, let's see, $14,000 for the booth—

Dan: And the catalogs were probably $10,000—

Eric: And to be honest, that's tough for any new designer to swallow. I mean, a lot of new designers you see are young artists who don't have that kind of capital. So we were lucky in that we had good business sense and had figured out how to make money first in order to actually build something.

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Next: The results of the ICFF efforts. You'll also see why if you went to a certain steak restaurant in 2007, you may have indirectly helped send Eric to Los Angeles. Read Part 4 here.