About Paul Budnitz
Paul Budnitz is an American artist, author, and entrepeneur.
Budnitz is well known as the founder of Wuu, a bold & intimate private messaging platform; Kidrobot, the world’s premiere creator of art toys; Budnitz Bicycles, a luxury city bicycle brand; and as a co-founder of Ello, the creators’ network. He has created over a dozen companies.
Thirteen of Budnitz’ designs are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Books include I Am Plastic, a two-volume history of the art toy movement, and The Hole in the Middle, a children’s book published by Disney/Hyperion.
Budnitz lectures worldwide on art, entrepreneurship, and creativity, and splits his time between New York City and Burlington, Vermont. He wears size 13 sneakers.
Check out links to current projects.
Biography
The son of a nuclear physicist and a social worker, Paul Budnitz was professionally coding safety analysis software for nuclear power plants by the time he reached high school. He also created video games for the now-legendary Commodore 64 home computer.
Budnitz studied photography, sculpture, and film at Yale University, earning honors in Art. His first two feature films, 93 Million Miles and Ultraviolet won awards at the Berlinale and many other film festivals, and were distributed worldwide.
As Budnitz’s energies became increasingly devoted to moving images he became aware of gaps in existing technology. “Since there weren’t any affordable ways to edit a film on a computer in 1996, I hacked my own hardware system to edit my films,” he says. Budnitz made the first feature film edited on a home computer, an achievement chronicled in Wired Magazine in 1997.
That combination of entrepreneurial spirit, a keen aesthetic sense and encyclopedic love for global popular culture, and a well-developed talent for hacking would characterize all of Budnitz’s future ventures.
“My grandfather was a small-town doctor and he used to say that I was missing a gene that told me that some giant risk I am about to take with my life is both stupid and dangerous. Everything beautiful that we create in life requires a leap of faith.”
For Budnitz, one venture lead organically to the next. He started his first business, M.O.B., while still in college, selling clothing he created to museum stores worldwide. This soon evolved into collecting, selling, and modifying vintage Levis and other wearable cultural artifacts, such as classic Air Jordans (which Budnitz sold in Japan for as much as $16,000 a pair).
In 1997 Budnitz began recording sound for his 16mm films on MiniDiscs, a new audio format that he’d run into while on a trip to Tokyo. Soon Budnitz was hacking and customizing MiniDisc players for film and sound recording and selling them on the then just emerging Internet. By 2001 Minidisco had become a $10 million business run out of a garage on software Budnitz had written himself.
Budnitz’s career took another unexpected turn in 2002 when he came across images of cutting-edge vinyl toys that were coming out of China and Japan. These toys included “vinyl toys based on cereal box characters, and remixed GI-Joes turned into stylized B-boys.”
Budnitz recognized the quirky, intricate toys as works of popular-art that mixed many aesthetic movements he loved — including fashion, cartoons, graffiti, comics, music, and fine art. Budnitz sold Minidisco and sunk the proceeds into founding Kidrobot in a California garage in 2002, leveraging the technology he’d developed for his older businesses. He moved the new company to New York City in 2003.
“When I first started Kidrobot is was impossible to explain to people what I was doing. People would ask, ‘are they art or are they toys?’, and I’d say, ‘Both. Now the toys are in museums AND they’re for sale in stores.”
Budnitz called upon the talents of friend Tristan Eaton, the illustrator he’d worked with on his previous animated films. Together they created Dunny and Munny, two of Kidrobot’s best know and bestselling characters. With a philosophy of collaboration, Budnitz brought in dozens of other fine artists, graffiti artists, and illustrators to work on toy projects with the brand.
In 2010, thirteen toys created by Budnitz & Eaton were accepted into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Kidrobot’s innovative toys were also the centerpiece of the 2008 Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Museum Design Triennial.
Budnitz has worked with many of the world’s top artists, designers, and fashion brands. A short list includes artists & illustrators Frank Kozik, Dalek (James Marshall), Doze Green, Tara McPherson, Gary Baseman, Huck Gee, Shepard Fairy, Eboy, Tilt, Paul Pope; Designers including Heatherette, Jil Sander, Dries Van Noten, Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton, and Prada; Musicians including Swizz Beatz and Gorillaz; and brands including Nike, Barney’s NYC, LaCoste, Burton Snowboards, Standard Hotels, Siemens, Swatch, Volkswagon; and many, many, many others.
Budnitz has conceived of and co-designed all of Kidrobot’s retail stores and the Kidrobot Room (within Peter Gatien’s Circa mega-nightclub in Toronto). In 2010 he authored the book I Am Plastic: The Designer Toy Explosion, published by Harry Abrams Press. This was followed in 2012 by I Am Plastic, Too, and his children’s book The Hole in the Middle, published by Disney/Hyperion.
In 2011 Budnitz launched Budnitz Bicycles, following his lifelong passion for cycling. Often called the Aston Martin of bicycles, Budnitz uses titanium and bespoke components to create the fastest, lightest, and the most beautiful city bicycles in the world. Products are featured in Vogue, V Magazine, Forbes, Coolhunting, and many other online and offline publications. In 2012 Phaidon called Budnitz, “The man who made bicycles beautiful again”. In 2014 Budnitz Model №3 was named “Best City Bicycle” by Bicycling Magazine. In 2016 the company launched the Budnitz Model E, the world’s lightest electric bicycle.
In 2012 Budnitz co-founded Ello, the social network for creators. Fed up with clutter and advertising on big-name social networks, Ello was initially conceived as a private meeting place for aritsts to share their work. After launching a public version in 2013, Ello is now used by millions of top creators worldwide as a place to find and share inspiration, connect, and further their careers.
Recent projects include Wuu, a bold & beuatiful mesaging platform for iOS and Android launching in 2017. Backed by Founders Fund and available by invitation-only, Wuu has been call “Snapchat for everyone.” Ryan Miller of Guster, an early adopter, has called Ello “a big fat cherry-bomb of fun”.
Paul Budnitz lectures on creativity worldwide. He splits his time between New York City and Vermont and wears size 13 sneakers.
Links to current projects
Wuu
Bold & intimate private messaging. Everything fades away in 24 hours or vanishes in seconds.
Ello
The creators network.
Kidrobot
World’s premier creator of art toys & accessories.
Budnitzbicycles
Designer & manufacturer of the fastest, lightest, and most beautiful city bicycles in the world.
Budnitz.com
Home Page of artist, author, and entrepeneur Paul Budnitz
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