Guest 1, sorry for the delay. Always disappointing to see so few young designers interested in striking out on their own, must be the effect of years of school programming to obey someone else’s rules and see creative work as necessarily imparted from the outside - if you’re lucky enough that is.
Core is hardly the place to elaborate at length on the topic, but I will briefly answer your questions and repeat some past pointers for those willing to step out of their comfort zone.
I have what one can consider “above average” business success in product design, but only since I started selling the physical form of my ideas. Consulting was, for me at least, an exercise in frustration. Way too many hours for the little money and the many crooks in exchange. And your “competition” (the way your clients see it) comes from any kid with pirated software working out of his parents’ basement for a song and peddling out ink-jet printed “designer” business cards. I met some too. Impossible to educate so many design illiterate business owners about the value of your design education and field experience when all they see is contract cost. I needed to make money, not to turn up like Jesus.
I make a comfortable living today off my products, if variable from month to month. Say, enough for a mortgage on a new house and two “vintage” Japanese cars, if that’s an indication. Sure, there’s always place for improvement but I’m happy with where I am and with what I do.
You cannot advocate entrepreneurship for all, that’s totally unrealistic. Most people - designers included - are happy enough being told what to do, when to do it and how to do it, for a fixed wage. And that is fine, while it works out. What I do suggest many employed designers start doing as an aside is develop business and planned risk skills in order to have something to fall on in leaner times. And the lean times are coming fast for all the reasons we know. The vast majority are completely unprepared - mentally, economically and skill-wise - for the employment tsunami yet to hit, still convinced talent alone is a passport to lifelong employment. It’s not. It takes years to set up anything ressembling a durable business foundation and especially making a name for yourself.
You don’t need a fortune to start, you don’t need to invest hundreds of thousands in molds or dies, and you most definitely don’t need to be on WalMart’s shelves to make a living - unless you believe in standardizing objects for hundreds of thousands of people at a time. Whether you start off alone or in a small group you adjust your business model to your own capabilities and don’t try to stretch yourself to play on fields where you don’t belong. Call this succeeding on your own terms by first determining your own needs and personal definition of “success”. For me, a big part was simply to avoid being jerked around by bad employers only to be retired one day when it suited them. Don’t make frustration your main motivator, but some of it helps.
The younger you start planning ahead the better, as you have time to make your own mistakes, learn and perfect. Keep in mind that while employed for someone else, very few designers have the chance to make a personal name for themselves, which is essentially your personal brand name - it can be worth money all in itself. Legally or not, your employer is the sole owner of all your years of creative work, enhancing their business through far more than the work you ever got paid for. I’ve befriended designers on the verge of nervous breakdowns because their NDAs prevented them from showing work to successive employers or potential private clients. Essentially, the great work they did for a firm remained buried there for good. Also, you can work in a specific field of absolutely no interest to the next company you are applying for - another example of how sequential design jobs can leave you with the feeling you’re always starting from scratch. In fact, from a long-term creative career perspective, you are. You aren’t building ME Inc. with every problem solved but THEM Inc. Congratulations for a job well done, and come again.
After some years and a string of successful designs done for others on a fixed salary, “anonymous” work owned by the company, you’re stuck on this portfolio-selling merry-go-round and it’s too risky to jump off even if you wanted to. Your well padded folio, made up of disparate projects for chanced-upon employers (market rules) is pretty useless to finally sell your own (or company’s) brand name outside the 9-5 design employment picture and the minuscule design club. The more time you invest in this mechanism, the more comfortable you become and the harder the landing when you exit on your own or the system spits you out for whatever reason.
As a successful service or product provider you must be recognized as a value giver by the community at large, way beyond any design or manufacturing firms. This takes time, lots of it, but the payback is there in the form of not remaining a slave to the whims and limitations of a very small component of such a diversified economy.
By seeking only captive employment for others many designers are practically commiting slow professional suicide, not to mention passing by many opportunities for truly frameless creativity. That sort of mind frame gets more difficult to recover with age and the numbing experience typical design employment provides. In the end, it comes down to simply taking more control and responsibility for the shores you really want to explore and not leaving strangers steer your ship.
Life is the only chance you have, it’s said, not a rehearsal.