1871 Member Unbranded Designs Outfits Motorola Mobility’s Global HQ in Style

By Lauren Kaufman, 1871 Intern

The guys at Unbranded Designs believe your furniture choices should not be confined to The Home Depot. 1871 members Sameer Dohadwala, Samer Saab, and Max Greenblatt created Unbranded Designs to help amazing designers bring unique, storied, and high-quality furniture directly to discerning consumers.

On April 22, one of those discerning consumers was 1871 sponsor Motorola Mobility. Motorola Real Estate Operations Executive Steve Monaco first approached the Unbranded Designs team after reading an article about their work. After he posed a successful design challenge on Unbranded Designs earlier this year, Monaco asked Unbranded Designs about curating a “showroom” in Motorola’s new global headquarters, located in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. “It’s a really great validation point that a large, well-respected company that is as innovative and forward-thinking as Motorola sees value in what we are doing and wants to work with us,” said Unbranded Designs CEO, Sameer Dohadwala. “It’s a very large company, but Steve has been great in thinking of us, working with us, and mentoring us over the last months.”

Pieces from Unbranded Designs showcased in Motorola’s New Chicago HQ

Typically, Unbranded Designs allows designers to submit concepts to the company’s website, where they are then scored by the site’s visitors. Once a concept reaches a high enough score, it moves on to a refinement stage in which designers work with Unbranded Designs team members and manufacturers to make the design production-ready. Unbranded Designs then works with domestic manufacturers to make the design a reality, so consumers can purchase the final products online.

In curating Motorola’s showroom, the Unbranded Designs team chose products they currently fabricate and sell, which have made it through the online selection process and demonstrate the quality and creativity of their design community. According to Dohadwala, “Steve bought a number of products that he personally loved from our collection and asked us to include posters to talk about the designers, the background stories of each piece, and what made them unique.” Ultimately, Motorola selected 10 final products that Unbranded Designs is showing in various quantities throughout the new Motorola space.

Pieces from local designer showcased at Motorola’s Chicago HQ

Moving forward, the Unbranded Designs team hopes to continue building partnerships through design challenges similar to their initial Motorola challenge. “The design challenge format that we piloted with Motorola was very interesting to us, and we’ve started running more challenges focused around design innovation,” said Dohadwala. “We love the idea of working with our global design community to help solve emerging design problems.” While the world of furniture design constantly evolves, Unbranded Designs is working to be at its center.

Check out Unbranded Designs here.
Read more about Motorola’s return to Chicago here.