Designer as Entrepreneur
An Interview with Stephan Ango of Lumi
Stephan shares his journey from design student to co-founder of Lumi and reveals his secrets to dealing with fear and staying optimistic under pressure.
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Stacey Sundar: Hi Stephan, welcome to Type Thursday!
Stephan Ango: Hey there!
SS: Pleasure to have you here. So tell us about yourself and your work with Lumi.
Stephan’s Road to Design and Entrepreneurship
SA: I’m the co-founder of Lumi, which is a company making packaging for online brands. I run the design and technology side, and have done so for the past 8 years. I was born in Paris, but had a multi-cultural upbringing as my mother is American and my dad is French. When I was growing up I couldn’t quite decide what I wanted to do. As a child I looked up to inventors like Leonardo Da Vinci … then I thought maybe I would be a filmmaker. For a long time I thought I would be a biologist … then I went to design school. I think I’m still figuring it all out, but I have many interests and luckily my job allows me to explore them all.
SS: This is very exciting to hear. Did you go to design school here in the states and how does your background in design influence your work at Lumi?
SA: I studied industrial design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The traditional path from there is to go work at a technology company or design agency, but I was lucky to meet the person who would become my best friend, co-founder and business partner Jesse Genet. We started Lumi while we were still in school. It was an outlet for us try things that we couldn’t quite do in school. It’s been an unpredictable path from there to where we are now, but creating well-designed things has been the constant.
I enjoy designing systems and tools, and bringing creativity to things that most people take for granted.
If you want to boil it down, what we do at Lumi today is sell cardboard. I don’t think I would have expected to do that. In a way it’s the most boring thing in the world, but its ubiquity is what fascinates me. I enjoy designing systems and tools, and bringing creativity to things that most people take for granted.
SS: I see, it sounds like as co-founder you wear many, many hats. Is it correct to say you are the creative director as well as a user experience and industrial designer?
SA: Yes, these days I primarily run the development of our online tools and how we present Lumi to the outside world.
SS: In terms of how you present Lumi to the outside world, can you talk to me a bit about how typography plays a key role in your marketing?
Typography at Lumi
SA: Currently our marketing is relatively limited, a lot of it is actually more photographic (Instagram) and audio (podcast) than typography oriented. However, typography is essential to many aspects of Lumi. The aspect that I interact with the most with is how we design our online tools. To give you some context, Lumi.com has public tools that allow anyone to design packaging in our interface, as well as more advanced tools available to customers which allow them to manage inventory, reorder and quote supply chain items. In addition, we also have invested deeply into our internal tools that allow us to manage the complexity of manufacturing thousands of unique items in parallel.
Recently we made a fairly drastic switch away from brand fonts to system fonts. What I mean by that, is that almost every aspect of Lumi.com uses fonts that are native to your operating system, so people using Mac, Android, Windows and even different versions of each OS might be seeing different fonts which is quite a design challenge. The benefits in terms of speed and usability, however, are really important to us and our users.
Packaging can get quite complex when it comes to the many different specifications needed for each product, the pricing, timelines, etc. We think a lot about how to help our customers digest and manipulate this information. Recently we made a fairly drastic switch away from brand fonts to system fonts. What I mean by that, is that almost every aspect of Lumi.com uses fonts that are native to your operating system, so people using Mac, Android, Windows and even different versions of each OS might be seeing different fonts which is quite a design challenge. The benefits in terms of speed and usability, however, are really important to us and our users.
When our customers use Lumi they are dealing with items that may already have strong branding, so we try as much as possible to let our own branding and styling disappear so that theirs can stand out. That’s why we use relatively restrained color palettes and typefaces.
Stephan’s Business Challenges
SS: Interesting… it sounds Lumi, in terms of design and type, offers an interface that allows the customer to focus on his/her product and creates a easy and seamless experience through the potentially complicated process of managing product and inventory. On your website, you mention that you’ve grown and made some mistakes along the way. Would you mind sharing any of the insights you’ve learned with us?
…We were actually building a factory — learning how to produce this dye in large vats, sourcing ingredients from around the world, packaging and palatalizing them for retail, working with 3PLs (third-party logistics) companies to fulfill them… It’s a complex process that we had to learn without much guidance.
SA: The reason we got into packaging in the first place is because Jesse and I first started a business around a product called Inkodye that we crowd-funded and ran for about 5 years. We started working on it together around 2009 and launched a Kickstarter campaign at a time when the platform was only a few months old. It was an incredible experience which we actually repeated in 2012 and had amazing success with. The product is an art supply product, an unusual fabric dye that develops its color in sunlight and is sold in kits. At the time we leveraged new online tools to build our business: things like Kickstarter itself to raise money, but also Shopify to run our store, Stripe to accept payments, Mail chimp to send newsletters to our customers, etc. We were able to get the digital side of our business up and running very fast.
On the physical side however, we were actually building a factory — learning how to produce this dye in large vats, sourcing ingredients from around the world, packaging and palatalizing them for retail, working with 3PLs (third-party logistics) companies to fulfill them… It’s a complex process that we had to learn without much guidance. We made every mistake in the book in terms of scaling the physical side. It was painful but we learned a lot and it made us better entrepreneurs — more knowledgeable about what to avoid. We tried as much as possible to share that knowledge with our peers and anyone who asked for our advice. It felt like a natural evolution to turn that into what Lumi is today and help other companies scale the logistics and supply chain of their businesses.
Fear as Motivation
SS: At any point in your career, did you ever feel overwhelmed by your ventures and if so, what did you do to move past that fear of failure?
Fear is good. I don’t mind fear. If Jesse and I are not afraid of something at any given time, then we know we aren’t being ambitious enough.
SA: Fear is good. I don’t mind fear. If Jesse and I are not afraid of something at any given time, then we know we aren’t being ambitious enough. Obviously being constantly overwhelmed is not a good feeling, and you want to try and minimize that, but I would put those emotions into different categories. Are you scared because it’s something you have never done before? Are you scared because you don’t know if you’ll be able to do it? Are you just overwhelmed because you have too much on your plate, or too many responsibilities? These are all different questions with different approaches to solving them. I am very confident in my ability to figure it out, even though at any given time there are lots of problems I have no idea how to resolve. I think as an entrepreneur you develop a bit of a numbness to that, a thicker skin for the feeling of walking on the edge of a precipice while still looking at the peak you are trying to climb. There are simple questions that help me, like “what’s the worst that could happen?” — I ask myself that all the time, and the answer is usually benign. I would also say that solutions are everywhere. I will often put a problem on the back burner for several weeks or months, and try to stay open to solutions that might suddenly appear from a totally unexpected place, such as trying to solve a seemingly different problem, reading a book, traveling, etc.
SS: Stephan, I am loving all of these helpful methods you’ve shared with us on staying grounded and optimistic under pressure. If you had to give one last bit of advice for all of our aspiring entrepreneurs out there, what would it be?
As an inveterate perfectionist, the advice I give myself all the time is don’t be too precious about it. The best thing you can do in this very moment is experiment.
Stephan’s Advice to Entrepreneurs
SA: As an inveterate perfectionist, the advice I give myself all the time is don’t be too precious about it. The best thing you can do in this very moment is experiment. Try it. How can you simplify your idea so that you can test it and understand if you are on the right track? When I look back on anything that I took a long time making and polished to “perfection”, six months later I thought it was stupid and there are ten things I would have done differently. So you can pretty much assume that whatever you think is “perfect”, is going to take some refinement later on. The only thing you need to do right now is get it good enough to learn something valuable, and keep iterating. I really need to hear that sometimes too.
SS: Stephan, it was a pleasure having you here with us at Type Thursday. Thank you for sharing your candor and wisdom with us!
SA: Thanks! It was a pleasure.
Want to check out Lumi? Click here.
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