Fortunately for Friberg, there was no time to sit back and long for all those support systems he'd been trained to count on at Citibank and Harvard Business School. Motif's sales skyrocketed: wallpaper distributors were so desperate for high-quality designer products that Friberg's first 1,000 sample books, intended to blanket the whole U.S. market, were snapped up by the first retail distributor who saw them. If anything, that initial success reinforced the self-confidence, even arrogance, that had been fostered at business school. "You come out of all those case studies thinking you know everything about business," Friberg says. "It takes a long time to realize that you don't."
Motif's original spark came from a licensing agreement the couple won from Marimekko, the Finnish design company then taking the United States by storm with its table linens, sheets, and other home furnishings. In just one year Motif's sales went from $194,000 from the retail store to $1.6 million from manufacturing and retail sales together. It was all so intoxicating that Friberg, always the more cautious of the two, soon surpassed Peterson in his enthusiasm for growth and more growth. "I'd tell him, 'Well, now that we've made it this far, everything's great, and we can stop worrying about things and relax,' " she recalls, "And he'd tell me, 'No, it's time to start adding this, this, and this.' Sometimes it felt as though I was on a high diving board and Karl was behind me, giving me a push whenever I felt too tired or scared." Friberg himself felt inspired. "I could see us doing $100 million in sales by the end of the 1980s," he remembers.
The synergy between the pair was hard to ignore. "I remember meeting them back then over lunch at a sales convention," recalls Jerry Rosen, the owner of Wall-Pride Inc., a wallpaper distributor based in Van Nuys, Calif. "Lyn was on fire with this incredibly infectious enthusiasm about her patterns and her artistic vision. And Karl, although he was quieter, conveyed that he was in control of the financial end, that this was a real business. They were irresistible -- and what they had to sell was a collection that was unlike anything else that was available back then."
Peterson ran the design studio and planned and supervised what grew to be four annual collections; she also handled some interior-decorating jobs that increased Motif's visibility -- decorating rooms, for example, for prestigious design shows. Friberg managed the business end, which included negotiating with subcontracting mills, budgeting, struggling with thorny warehouse and customer-service operations, selling, and managing the company's growing staff. And he found running the business as exhilarating as Peterson found her design work. "At Citibank there were always so many different levels of authority you had to clear your activities through. It felt great to be able to pick up the phone and call anyone I decided it was important to call and say whatever I felt it was important to say." The division of labor was fairly simple to maintain, especially during Motif's earliest years, since Peterson -- who planned her pregnancies four years apart -- preferred to do most of her design work at home, where she could keep an eye on the kids.
"Working with Lyn was fun; it was a kick: the perfect change from a place like Citibank," recalls Friberg. Says Peterson, "Back when Karl worked at Citibank and I was at the store, we'd tell each other about what had happened during the day, even though it was tough sometimes to pretend to be interested. Now, we were involved in the same thing and working toward the same goal, which was incredibly exciting."
For Karl Friberg and Lyn Peterson, the end to the romance -- at least, the fairy-tale romance of entrepreneurial part-nership -- came four years ago, when Motif Designs crashed up against a series of business-threatening disasters. The crisis began after they had convinced Ralph Lauren to license his wallpaper and home fabrics to them. They had spent years wooing him.
By the time Lauren agreed, Motif's sales were around $5 million, and it had about 40 employees. Friberg and Peterson had long since sold off the retail shop to concentrate their attention on manufacturing, adding some of Peterson's own brand-name designs as well as a fast-selling line of home fabrics. Things had been going so well for so long that they figured the Lauren expansion would play out like Marimekko Part II, pushing Motif's already-fast growth into hyperdrive.
"We had to gear up to add this behemoth to our existing lines," begins Peterson. By the mid-'80s, the cost of introducing a typical new collection had risen to $500,000, 10 times the cost of Motif's earliest Marimekko collection. This meant the company needed cash and plenty of it to finance upgraded and expanded manufacturing ventures.
Despite the difficulties, neither had any qualms about the expansion: Friberg was still gung ho for growth, while Peterson saw the line as a designer's dream come true. Fortunately, Friberg found a new banker willing to triple the company's credit lines, using the 15-room house they'd bought a year earlier and Motif's assets as collateral.
Friberg figured the company would need enough warehouse space to store twice the current inventory -- about 200,000 rolls of paper and 125,000 yards of fabric, he projected, which would mean they'd be shipping more than $1 million worth of merchandise each month. His confidence was understandable: aside from a few short-lived missteps, Motif's ever-accelerating machine had never faltered. So he hunted down and leased a 30,000-square-foot facility -- more than tripling Motif's work space and providing Peterson with her first office outide of the house.
