Paradigm Gallery Design Blog

Knoll Barcelona Chairs

Once when I was in business school, a professor told me, “you’re not really doing anything in business until you get your first lawsuit.” I thought to myself, “come on, why would I want that?”. Well, our little company is facing one of our biggest challenges in our 4 year existence.

This battle goes back to the age old battle of reproduction vs. originally licensed classic debate. I rather not get into the ethics or morality of Paradigm Gallery providing modern classic reproductions, but designs have entered the public domain, and our customers deserve options. You can purchase an original Barcelona Chair from Knoll at nearly $4k, or you can have the OPTION of buying from us for a quarter of that price. It’s about options. That’s why Paradigm Gallery exists and our purpose.

We never mislead customers…EVER! We make it very clear that we DO NOT provide originals through our product descriptions, and even more vehemently through our customer care team. We also do not bad mouth originals, talk about how overpriced they are, nor do we ever talk foul about any competitor in the market. In fact, we sometimes refer potential customers to our competitors if they provide a better price or availability. Again, we care about profits, but we feel that treating a customer properly is paramount and everything else will fall in place.

Our Barcelona Chair reproduction, called the Pavillion Chair, is under attack by Knoll. Knoll wants us to stop selling this reproduction, among a couple of other of Knoll’s original designs. This is a tough challenge for us. In fact, go to our Pavillion Chair page and you’ll see that we actually promote the original from Knoll through their dealer, Design Within Reach. Again, we provide options for you. That’s our goal.

We respect Knoll and in all our marketing of our reproduction vs. their original, we’ve always given them the proper respect.

Where do you stand on this issue? What do you think? Give us your opinions, support, criticism, anything.

20 Pounds of Awesome

Foremost, this is an absolutely huge book + an accompanying book. While not the sheer size of 90lb Super Bowl commemorative book, the “Le Corbusier Le Grand” weighs in at 20lbs, so make sure you’re coffee tables are prepared.

It’s not a biography, rather, a collection of Corbusier’s sketches, writings, personal photos (good and bad), architecture, and more. The accompanying book is a translation of Le Corbusier’s French letters and demonstrate insight into Le Corbusier’s personal life. While that’s a definite plus, the true joy is in the 600+ pages of photographs. You get to see all the Corbusier’s classics like the LC4, LC7, LC2, and other modern furniture classics. Not to mention all the blueprints and designs…

This is a great book to have. It’s the complete package with a perfect blend of design, passion, personality, and life. No longer will you look at eat at your LC6 Dining Table again and just consider it a piece of furniture. To get the background, get into the mind of the designer, and experience it, that’s the true genius of “Le Corbusier Le Grand”.

Over the weekend, we hit our 9,000th customer. This is absolutely amazing. We’ve been working so hard on our new Fall items that we completely lost track of the huge milestones forthcoming.

So we did a little Happy Hour yesterday but now it’s on to bigger and better things. Coming up on the 10,000th order, we have a special surprise for that lucky customer. Details unveiled soon.