The Doctor of Design
Christopher Lowell is the man many women seek out to get over home-decor hang-ups
Lowell may appeal to home-decor dummies, but there is nothing dumb about the Alaska native, who oversees every element of his operation, from the weave of his silks to the life-size cardboard Christophers and marketing materials that accompany his products in stores. Christopher Lowell Enterprises, which was born in 1992 in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, when Lowell sank $100,000 of his own money into producing his first TV pilot, is privately held and does not release sales figures. But Daniel Levin, the company's chief operating officer and reigning left brain, says sales of Lowell's branded and other merchandise should bring in about $300 million at retail this year (of which Lowell earns a percentage) and revenues for the Southern California company are growing at roughly 10 percent a year.
A magazine, a radio program, and possibly a new TV series are on deck, and Lowell is also moving into bigger design projects. He has started adding his flair to public spaces--including Shade, a trendy boutique hotel in Manhattan Beach, Calif.--which he says are the new inspiration for home design. "For a long time, public spaces were trying to look like homes," says Lowell. "Now homes are trying to look like public spaces." In a survey of thousands of visitors to his website (www.christopherlowell.com), the majority of young couples said they got their latest decorating ideas not from shelter magazines, design books, or TV but from restaurants, spas, and hotels.
Analysts chalk up Lowell's success both to his can-do message and to the stability and longevity of his licensing deals. "One of the pitfalls of using designers is that prices are higher and fatigue sets in quickly with consumers," says analyst Steve Spiwak, who follows the home-furnishings market for consulting firm Retail Forward. "If things aren't innovative, consumers balk. That's why so many designers come and go."
Lowell still has some distance to cover before he's a danger to, say, Stewart (her name is worth more than $1 billion in annual retail sales). He's also delivering a different, more entry-level, design message. Lowell's followers don't iron their sheets with lavender water, and they are far more likely to sew their own bedspreads than to find one fortuitously left behind by Queen Victoria and buried among the scraps at a tag sale for $35. Their decorating arsenals are as likely to include electrical tape as hot glue guns and upholsterer's tacks. (In one of his best-known design maneuvers, Lowell once slipcovered an ottoman using nothing but fabric and duct tape.) And though he has calmed down considerably since the flamboyant early days of his TV show, Lowell's theatrics would still probably send the highbrow Stewart to a fainting couch. His books are full of goofy pictures of Lowell exhorting the "heartfelt hoarder" and "perfectly good pack rat" to "detach and purge," then "cease and maintain." His speech is peppered with phrases like "Love it!" and "Use your color courage!" And he thinks nothing of poking fun at himself. "If we laugh, we forget about fear," says Lowell. "And where there's fear, there's no creativity."
Creativity is something Lowell knows something about. In fact, he seems to have an extra chromosome for the stuff. As a boy in Alaska, where he lived in a log cabin built by his father, Lowell was a self-taught piano prodigy (too dyslexic to properly read music) who spent the early years of his career sculpting, then designing sets and lighting in the theater. At night, he squeezed in courses about abnormal psychology. From there, it was on to advertising and marketing. He had his own firm, with health and beauty company accounts like Revlon and Paul Mitchell.
By the early 1990s, he was operating a design school in Chagrin Falls and gathering hundreds of hours of videotape. They would become the basis of his TV show, which won him an Emmy and made Lowell a grateful target of the spoofers at Saturday Night Live. Back then, the designer thought nothing of showing up to the set dressed as an asparagus stalk (stuck as a side dish longing to be an entree) or a pot-clattering Julia Child (beard included). He has traded in his fear-quelling outrageousness for a quieter approach, although there are still the occasional costume and the fabulously flashy black-and-white, psychedelically striped Armani evening jacket. "Love that!" as Lowell would say.
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