By Avigayil Kadesh
You cannot help but smile when you see Charging Charlie and other fun and useful Israeli designs sold in more than 20 countries through the
Monkey Business brand in Tel Aviv.
“As an industrial design student, I never thought I could really change the world, but to make people smile gives me a lot of satisfaction,” says Monkey Business founder Oded Friedland, a surfing enthusiast who began his career designing Gazoz surf wear.
“I don’t think people smile enough, and it could be that we’re creating millions of smiles when you consider all the people who see our items and buy our items and all the people who receive them as gifts.”
Monkey Business has been adding the extra to the ordinary since 1994, providing fresh perspectives on practical, useful, durable products for everyday needs at home, in the office and outdoors. The initial concept was to provide affordable products in upscale stores, and that holds true till today.
Friedland, then a graduate and today a teacher at the renowned Bezalel Academy of Art & Design in Jerusalem, says that originally all Monkey Business products were his own designs. In 2005, he began selecting other Israeli designers to add to the mix, and the brand now encompasses the works of about 40 artists.
“Our distributors abroad said, ‘You’re doing really nice stuff; we want more,’ and there was a limit to our ability to produce a lot of items per year,” explains Friedland.
“Also, we started to see more and more nice stuff by young designers selling in one or two stores in Tel Aviv but not managing to mass produce or mass market. So we built a bridge between demand from distributors and design capabilities in Israel.”
Like a publishing house for Israeli designers
The demand is only growing. In 2007, Oprah Winfrey in her magazine O gushed over Friedland’s Doorganizer, which hangs on the doorknob and stores keys, eyeglasses, cell phones, envelopes and everything else you don’t want to forget when you leave the house.
About 150 Israeli shops carry Monkey Business items, while abroad they’re in museum, design and department stores including major US chains such as The Container Store, The Paper Source, and Crate & Barrel.
Friedland emphasizes that Monkey Business works only with Israeli designers despite hopeful inquiries from designers all over the world. “We’re kind of like a publishing house for Israeli designers,” he says.
“We try to select really talented designers who can go with us through the whole process from initial idea through engineering and packaging. This takes a year to a year and a half.”
Some of the chosen few are young graduates from the academies - primarily Bezalel and the Holon Institute of Technology - and don’t have any experience in production or how to design for the market. Others are more seasoned, including some of Friedland’s former teachers at Bezalel.
The course he has been teaching there for years is titled “Including VAT” (value-added tax).
“It’s a course about design and entrepreneurship. It’s basically about what Monkey Business does. We have some design exercises and some small projects. At the end of the course, they actually develop one of the designs and produce a limited-edition series of the product,” says Friedland.
Fun and business put together
Monkey Business - the name was chosen to convey the idea of fun and business put together - does not deal with furniture or lighting, but otherwise the sky is the limit.
Between 100 and 200 products are sold on the Monkey Business website and in stores, with 10 new items introduced every summer and winter. Those 10 items are typically funneled down from 100 proposed pieces.
“The key is to work with good designers who are sensitive to several things: what people want and need; and how to translate that into an object. A lot of it is experience and a lot is intuition,” says Friedland, who lectured at the 2014 Design Week in Barcelona along with a curator from the Design Museum in Holon.
The six-person company in Tel Aviv also includes Friedland’s brother Omri, in charge of export and finance; and his wife, Liat, who takes care of the domestic part of the business.