There are few things less interesting to look at than a washing machine–except maybe a dryer. But hit the standard machine with a zap of personality and you just might interest the people who go for the new Beetle and Razr phones.
Designing a whimsical washer was a natural extension of childhood for Daniel, 36, and Christopher, 33, who spent their early years building things together. The only sons of a game warden and a homemaker who had studied art and had wanted to work at New York magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, the boys lived half a mile outside rural Chilton, Wisconsin, between a cornfield and an alfalfa field. “We had to make things happen, we made our own fun,” Daniel says. Like a lot of kids, they made Halloween costumes, forts for plastic cowboys and Indians, and rubber-band guns. But they also dabbled in making their own shoes: “You’d rip your shoes apart and glue another material into them, replace leather with plastic or get some vinyl at the dime store,” Daniel recalls. “Our mother taught us both to sew, so we’d sew them up however we wanted.” In high school Christopher drove an old Volkswagen Beetle he’d modified into a dune buggy for riding around off-road. And even now, though the design process happens mostly on a computer screen, “it’s not uncommon for one of us to toss the mouse aside and start nailing and gluing and sewing stuff together,” Daniel says.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This eclecticism was borne out one recent day in the office of the Strengs’ six-person studio. Four small boxes were lined up on a table, their contents stuff that had caught somebody’s eye within the past week: a tray made of molded paper for carrying cups, a piece of meringue candy, vanilla packaged in a test tube, some foam gaskets, a green holder for potted plants that looked like Styrofoam but was made of rice.
The brothers “network like mothercrackers,” Jeffers says. Christopher “never ceases to amaze me. I’ll ask him how he got in with this company and he says, ‘I called them up.’” In the mid-90s, when the Strengs were both out of college and Daniel had just sold the small advertising firm he started, they took what money they had and went to Italy, hoping to make some kind of contact with the tight clique of high-end designers there. They worked their way into an elite crowd of people they still work for and hang with. Christopher did so well, in fact, that he was invited to Versace’s funeral. “You can see me four rows behind Princess Di in the footage,” he says.
