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American furniture company From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Blu Dot is an American modern furniture retailer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It has 17 retail locations[1] across the United States, Mexico, and Australia.[2] The company has nearly 200 employees worldwide, with the majority based at its Minneapolis headquarters.[3]
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| Industry | Furniture |
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| Founded | 1997 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S. |
| Founders |
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| Headquarters | Minneapolis, MN , U.S. |
| Website | BluDot.com |
Blu Dot was started by three founders: John Christakos, Maurice Blanks, and Charlie Lazor. The company was founded in 1997 with $50,000 of the founders' own capital.[2] The three met as undergraduate students at Williams College in Massachusetts and conceived the idea for the company during a post-graduation backpacking trip across Asia.[2] The founders cited their struggle to furnish their first post-collegiate apartments as the catalyst for the company.[4] The three found that the options for furniture were either exorbitantly unaffordable or designs that they themselves did not enjoy.[5]
In 2018, Blu Dot won an award for Product Design at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards[6] and in the same year published a memoir written by the founders detailing the company's history, titled "Less Is More (Difficult): 20 Years of Design at Blu Dot.[2]"
Contrary to other similar brands, Blu Dot has a unique product development process insofar as they control the product from its design through its retail life.[4] Additionally, the company puts an emphasis during the design process of collective ideation rather than any designer's individual ownership of a product's design. Designs ideas are put up in their early stages for critique by the larger design group to refine the idea, in lieu of the initial designer working through the products' creative and practical challenges alone.[7] In this vein, Blu Dot does not put its designers' names on the products they sell as some similar modern design furniture manufacturers do.[8] Blu Dot brings this democratic design to a fairly standard but diverse product assortment. Their product offerings include things such as indoor/outdoor dining chairs, glass nesting tables, plastic lounge chairs,[9] storage ottomans, pillows, as well as your everyday, living room staple sofas.[10]
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