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The Medium is the Message

A profile of Syndesis, the top winner of Inc.'s first annual design awards contest.

This year's top winner is tiny ($1.3 million in sales) and bootstrapped. But what Syndesis lacks in resources it more than makes up for with imagination, diligence, and founder David Hertz's clear vision of what he wants design to tell you about his business

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The business card David Hertz handed out to prospective clients when he started Syndesis Inc., in 1981, was as stiff as concrete. In fact, it was concrete, with its 21-year-old bearer's particulars rubber-stamped on one side. Fresh from architecture school, Hertz was fascinated by concrete as a surface for finished products and sought patrons who'd pay him to cast beautiful things in it, such as chairs and countertops.

But Hertz's concrete was not the old-fashioned gritty kind. He had developed his own mix, one that used silica sand, required no steel reinforcement, and was composed in part of recycled-waste aggregates. It was less than half the weight of common concrete and twice as strong. Flecked with whatever postconsumer detritus Hertz chose to add to it (broken glass, plastic scraps, metal shavings), pocked with tiny air marks from the casting process, and pumiced to a smooth luminescence, it was far better looking, too.

In sum, precisely the attributes Hertz's 3-D business "card" imparted.

At first Hertz regarded business as "an enemy that compromises art." But he was seduced into it when the Los Angeles flower shop whose displays he executed began selling more of his cone-shaped concrete vases than the roses that were in them. Within three years the idea of business had become so appealing that Hertz launched four separate lines of it -- architectural-design services, custom manufacturing, ready-made furniture, and household gewgaws (including the vase). In 1985 he gave his lightweight-concrete concoction the brand name Syndecrete, rented commercial space, hired assistants, and began to fabricate market-driven goods. For convenience, his calling cards became paper like everyone else's, but he continued devising ways to link the distinctive material he had created with distinctive materials to promote it.

Today all collateral matter associated with Syndesis is calculated to hint -- directly or subliminally -- both at Syndecrete's uncommon properties and at the capabilities of the company that makes and sells it. Some examples:

It's an attention-grabber to receive promotional pieces that describe pricey goods but are tucked inside drab, basic-brown corrugated cardboard. Cardboard's unmistakably primitive origins stress Syndecrete's gravel-and-sand heritage, lest the product be presumed a synthetic (which it isn't).

A folding brochure is designed so no envelope is needed to mail it. On the outside, a collage of Syndecrete tiles in subdued tones acts as a teaser. Inside, a sample tile glued to a reader-response card shows customers what the product feels like.

An address label is laser-generated on transparent, sticky paper, not on the usual opaque stock. Because the label blends seamlessly with the background of the mailed item, the recipient's name and address seem to have been custom-printed onto the piece itself. The result: an instant, personalized bond between company and customer.

The covers of the three-ring binders sent to clients to hold reference material are plain cardboard, with no shiny plastic coating. The idea: the bare cardboard binders, which don't pretend to be anything other than what they are, symbolize the integrity of Syndesis and Syndecrete.

The logo ties two logotypes together as one. A wide and airy Syndesis perched atop a condensed and brawny Syndecrete conveys both flexibility and stability -- of the company as well as the product.

Whenever possible, Syndesis's brochures are printed on recycled paper (complete with blemishes) with soy-based inks, underscoring the company's concern for the environment -- a good-business buzz-phrase. More subtly, their use reminds sales-literature recipients that Syndecrete's singularity also stems from imperfection and understatement.

A price list, on a stark white sheet laced with delicate particles that bespeak the Syndecrete look, pops out from the other materials, which are uniformly brown. While design connoisseurs will admire the white paper's elegance, meat fanciers will recognize it for the cheap industrial butcher wrap it actually is. The suggestion in either case: don't get hung up on the prices -- admire the creative spirit behind them.

These and a host of similarly well-considered components were deemed so meticulously integrated and sensibly executed that all nine Inc. Design Award judges plucked Syndesis -- in 1991, a 30-employee enterprise grossing a modest $1.3 million -- from a field of 73 finalists as winner of the overall Design Leadership Award.

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From its entryway tiled with Syndecrete "flagstones" to the decor of its factory walls, Syndesis's 16,000-square-foot sales-and-manufacturing facility, in Santa Monica, Calif., is an outpost of design. Not the design of jazzy shapes and eyeball-twisting typefaces (California is awash in those), but design as a coherent message aimed, in all its manifestations, at assuring viewers that this company is a stayer. Its specific burden is to convince prospective buyers that products made from so magnificent a substance -- which, for all its promotable uniqueness, is still concrete at heart -- are fairly priced.

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