The conventional design market has many steps: galleries, companies, showrooms, retailers, who mark up the products, leaving the designer with far less than what their item sells for. What if one could bypass all these stages? In a report called Betray Demonstration26 designers sold their items through a vending machine at a booth in Copenhagen, experimenting with new retail models.
The show was supported by For Switzerland and ran during the city 3daysofdesign festival, and is the second collaboration of four designers: Bruno Pauli Caldas, Frederik Buchmann, Guillaume Gindrat, and Massimo Scheidegger. The 26 items produced for the exhibition were available for purchase on site, along with the usual cigarettes and sweets found at the stand.
Sell Out Show © Bianca Blair
© Sell Out Show
© Sell Out Show
© Sell Out Show
Bottle opener by Frederik Buchmann and Guillaume Gindrat © Camilla Hoffmeister
© Sell Out Show
© Sell Out Show
Sell Out Show © Bianca Blair
Sell Out Show © Bianca Blair
© Sell Out Show
The group’s previous work
GindratBuchmann, Scheidegger and Kaldas met while studying at the Swiss School of Design ECALand their previous work together, Smoking diariesserved as a precursor to Sell Out. He asked a group of mostly early-career designers to replicate the ashtray, creating 17 objects that were then exhibited in a historic bodega in Copenhagen.
A feature of the show was that the participants could drip their cigarettes on the products. “It was not an exhibition in the traditional sense; objects were touched, used and soiled. We aimed to create a moment first, and the objects were at the service of that moment, not the other way around.” said Buchman. Sell Out takes the same interest in everyday objects and social environments, exploring another way of inverting the logic of traditional design exhibitions.
The location and form of performance
The location of the performance was chosen with a similar logic. Maria’s Kiosk is located in the city center and has been run by its owner for over 30 years. The organizers wanted to choose a spot that would be seen by regular passers-by in addition to visitors to the design exhibition, a location that would force the design to be involved in everyday life rather than placed on a pedestal in a gallery, turning the cigarette stop into an unusual encounter.
Bringing design closer to the public is a familiar ambition in industry discourse. Many think of the democratization of access, the removal of barriers between manufacturers and buyers, however, many have not given such a literal form. The organizers took no commission from the designers, leaving them with 100% of the profit, and the vending machine format leaves no room for negotiation.
The designers
The contributors are mainly drawn from a part of the network of European design schools from which the organizers themselves emerged: Ted Synott, Silvio Rembholz, David Searcy, John Tree, Julia Eske, Claire Lavabre, Andrew Robertsand more, along with collaborative pairings like Bianca Blair and Victoria Marquezor Oscar Lilo and Juliette Gueganton. Among the items on offer were a metal bottle opener by Gindrat and Buchmann, an ashtray that snaps onto the end of a bistro table by Gindrat and Caldas, and a three-metre candle by a German designer. Anna Lena Wolfrum.
The range of products suggests that the brief was less about a unifying thought or typology and more about the act of circulation itself: each piece must be small enough and not fragile to survive a vending machine transaction.
What Sell Out ultimately tests is a fairly direct financial proposition dressed up as a curatorial proposition. With the guarantee designers All their revenue and capping prices quite low, the project bypasses the commissions of the gallery system and the burden of designing for a brand, betting instead that good enough items can be sold to strangers buying cigarettes.
