Yves Béhar’s Four Tips for Hiring a Designer

❶ Hire a Partner, Not a Vendor

Most clients understand this, but for a collaboration to be successful, the design team they work with shouldn’t be selected only for their portfolio, but also for the potential for a true partnership. Any design process is a close collaboration, with a significant amount of communication necessary to get the best results. If the partnership isn’t there, the results will disappoint. If the partnership is there, a designer will grow with you and continuously optimize your business. Mitch Pergola, our chief operating officer at Fuseproject, says, “The key to effectively working with an external design firm is not only picking the right skills and experience, but collaborating with them like a partner. Neither of these points are optional.”

❷ Share Dreams—and Nightmares

The design process is never the same for any two projects, so it’s important to be as clear as possible upfront. Not only does this mean timelines, finances, etc., but also what you expect from the process and, crucially, context. If the client can focus on defining the needs of the business (which they should be best positioned for), the designer can focus on defining the solution (and, where needed, challenge the brief). The more a client can communicate their context—company culture, past successes and failures, the passions and aversions of their audience and shareholders—the better able the design team will be to solve from this foundation. I often say, “The more context the better.” I personally benefit from all the data, the good stuff and the ugly stuff, the realities as well as the dreams.

❸ Adopt a Healthy Sense of Abandon

Here’s an interesting paradox: Clients come to designers to push them out of their box and yet struggle when the design feels beyond their current reality. The most successful projects I’ve worked on have come from my relationships in which my client trusts me, trusts our design strategy, and empowers us to guide them into the future. And this sense of risk and innovation should exist with every step of the process—from conception through hitting the market. “Trust that we have your best interests in mind, because our partners’ success is also ours,” says Kristine Arth, our director of brand. Herman Miller, with whom it’s been a privilege to work for the last 14 years, previously established long-term partnerships with Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson by, in the words of Herman Miller founder D.J. Depree, “abandoning ourselves to our designers.” Don Goeman, the vice president for R&D at Herman Miller, demonstrated this deep trust when we designed the Sayl chair and the Public Office Landscape system.

❹ Go Long

It’s hard to know when the job is done. But the truth is that design is never done: The value of design grows over time. Companies that succeed are ones that constantly refine their products, experiences, and offerings. We currently experience a circular feedback loop with evolving customer needs: Improving technology, growing brands, and experience touch points are taken into account regularly. The best thing a client can do is find a partner who understands their essence—why they exist—and invest in a future together. One amazing product is great, but having a brand that’s cohesive, and sustainably and organically growing, is what we all need to build. Long-lasting relationships—that’s an investment that pays off handsomely for both outsider and insider. In this current era of disruption, if a company isn’t actively creating its future, you can be sure of one thing: Someone else will.