ADU: Why do you enter design competitions?
Tomek Archer: I suppose I sometimes use them as a deadline but then once you have used the first one as a deadline and you enter a product in more than one, everything you need is all ready. The thing is, because I am a self-producer, the way that I work is that I make product and then I go out and market it and I don’t have a marketing budget so I find competitions are the best way to get the product published and to generate interest in that way. So I guess I use it as a marketing aggregator.

What was the first piece you entered in a competition?
The Campfire Table won the art prize at Sydney University. And I was the youngest in my class by four years or something, I was this little punk in second year. It was not what I was expecting. I then entered it in Australian International Furniture Fair and it won the commercial award there, and in the Australian Design Award and it won an Australian Design Mark, that was the end of the line for that piece. One award seems to lead to some interest and that appears to help with the second one and so on.. It snowballs.

How do you choose which products to enter? For example, your product PegLeg has been entered and done well in a series of awards this year.
I think in the last year my product PegLeg was the easiest to sell, there was more to say about it. One product might have environmental considerations, another might be more formal, another might be more functional, whereas PegLeg has all those features combined in a way that makes it an obvious one, and people just respond to it.

Do you ever worry about intellectual property, because once it is published or exhibited that can contravene your copyright? Do you ever think about that?
I think for me, by putting it out there and getting published through competitions, that’s part of my intellectual property strategy, to have it out there and seen.

I think entering awards you should have a piece that is resolved. Because I consider it as a marketing thing and so I would prefer to have something that is production ready. Where as an exhibition would be fine to put a prototype in. So part of it is wanting to have the production set up. I think PegLeg is pretty much ready to go.

On average how long would you spend putting a competition application together?
Two hours.

How much would be the most you would have spent entering a competition including entry fees, prototyping, freight, time spent in lieu of doing something at…
I would put a money value of about $3000 for entering the IF Awards in Germany.

How did you weigh that up and consider the potential rewards, do you think you will get your money back?
In retrospect I would say it was a mistake because it was premature, the product wasn’t ready so when it was accepted into the final round, I was like ‘Oh shit, it wasn’t ready’. The night before it was due  I was frantically packing it together. And it didn’t fit together right! And I was trying to fix it, and it ended up a little bit shoddy and I had no choice because I already had everything booked and about to be picked up.

So I paid $1000 to enter the thing, $800 in shipping and $1200 for the piece itself, and I can’t afford to ship it back because it would cost another $800 to ship back so now its stuck in Europe.

I would do it again but it is like gambling. I think if I had been able to say I got an IF Award and had put that stamp on it, it would have potentially opened up an overseas market. It would be great to approach people cold and say ‘This product has just won an IF award and would you consider stocking it?’

So you do think strategically like that?
Yeah. I entered the INDEX awards but for whatever reason they lost my entry so I didn’t have to pay the entry fee. But I cared about that award because it was in Melbourne and I haven’t had any presence in Melbourne.

Do you think people assign value to your work based on your performance in a competition?
I think the press does.

Do you think you have received a return in terms of the time and money spent entering competitions and the corresponding amount of press and sales?
I don’t know that it translates to sales but I think I have had lots of benefits in terms of the press ratio. When I am confident in something that I have done people seem to respond to it, but I don’t think it will necessarily sell straight off the bat, it will sell, but it’s not like you get published and you sell something the next day.

So for you it is about broader profile building?
Exactly.

www.tomahawkstudios.com

Interview by Madeleine Hinchy.

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