Beauty matters because it expresses love. The job of the craftsmen, when completely emerged in the process is to find and create beauty.
I took a break from writing this blog to focus on writing a proposal for a much larger company than our own which had requested that we present a luxury line. In the end, I will not present the proposal to the company because the company has refused to sign a simple non-disclosure agreement, a necessary preliminary step, from a designer's perspective. Andersen Design is a design company and cannot ignore the fact that we live in the cyber age wherein large companies eat small ones. The non-disclosure agreement is a basic and minimal protection, comparable to the terms of agreement one must sign in order to use the services of a website. The spokesperson for the company framed the relationship as about "their platform" but, it is also about our designs and ability to produce them. In our view, a partnership is a two way street, one in which each side presents its own terms in order to reach mutual terms of agreement. I said so to the spokesperson, who did not want to relinquish the partnership identifier nor to relent on the refusal to sign a NDA agreement. The platform sells to the individualized buyer, but business relationships are structured using the central management model. Today a refusal to sign a standard NDA agreement might be because the Platform owner maintains that it, alone, makes the rules, but the Platform may one day decide to branch out into producing its own products and into mergers and acquisitions, as Amazon has done This has to be a consideration for a small company, when entering into a partnership with a larger one. So back to the drawing board. How does a small company survive on its own terms in today's world?
I took a break from writing this blog to focus on writing a proposal for a much larger company than our own which had requested that we present a luxury line. In the end, I will not present the proposal to the company because the company has refused to sign a simple non-disclosure agreement, a necessary preliminary step, from a designer's perspective. Andersen Design is a design company and cannot ignore the fact that we live in the cyber age wherein large companies eat small ones. The non-disclosure agreement is a basic and minimal protection, comparable to the terms of agreement one must sign in order to use the services of a website. The spokesperson for the company framed the relationship as about "their platform" but, it is also about our designs and ability to produce them. In our view, a partnership is a two way street, one in which each side presents its own terms in order to reach mutual terms of agreement. I said so to the spokesperson, who did not want to relinquish the partnership identifier nor to relent on the refusal to sign a NDA agreement. The platform sells to the individualized buyer, but business relationships are structured using the central management model. Today a refusal to sign a standard NDA agreement might be because the Platform owner maintains that it, alone, makes the rules, but the Platform may one day decide to branch out into producing its own products and into mergers and acquisitions, as Amazon has done This has to be a consideration for a small company, when entering into a partnership with a larger one. So back to the drawing board. How does a small company survive on its own terms in today's world?
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