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Blu Dot is an American modern furniture retailer based in Minneapolis, MN. It has 15 retail locations throughout the United States, Mexico, and Australia. The company has nearly 200 employees worldwide, with most located at their Minneapolis headquarters. Blu Dot’s warehouse is in Otsego, Minnesota.

History
Blu Dot was started by three founders: John Christakos, Maurice Blanks, and Charlie Lazor. The company was founded in 1997 with $50,000 of the founders’ own capital. The three met as undergraduate students at Williams College in Massachusetts and came up with the idea for the company through a post-graduation backpacking trip through Asia. The founders cite attempting to furnish their first post-collegiate apartments as the catalyst for the company. The three found that the options for furniture were either exorbitantly unaffordable or designs that they themselves did not enjoy.

In 2018, Blu Dot won an award for Product Design at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards and in the same year published a memoir written by the founders detailing the company’s history entitled “Less Is More (Difficult): 20 Years of Design at Blu Dot. "

Development Process and Products
Contrary to other similar brands, Blu Dot has a unique product development process insofar as they control the product from its design through its retail life. Additionally, the company puts an emphasis during the design process of collective ideation rather than any designer’s individual ownership of a product’s design. Designs ideas are put up in their early stages for critique by the larger design group to refine the idea, in lieu of the initial designer working through the products’ creative and practical challenges alone. In this vein, Blu Dot does not put its designers’ names on the products they sell as some similar modern design furniture manufacturers do.

Blu Dot brings this democratic design to a fairly standard but diverse product assortment. Their product offerings include things such as indoor/outdoor dining chairs, glass nesting tables, plastic lounge chairs, storage ottomans, pillows, as well as your everyday, living room staple sofas.

Marketing Campaigns
Throughout the years, Blu Dot has become known for their relatively out-of-the-box marketing campaigns/promotions, primarily in collaboration with the Minneapolis-based advertising agency Mono.

Real Good Chair Experiment
In November of 2009, Blu Dot conducted an experiment that played off the practice of curb mining, leaving 25 of their “Real Good” chairs in various spots within New York City with GPS tracking to celebrate the One-Year Anniversary of their New York storefront. The company created both a Twitter and Flickr account to announce the locations of the chairs and document the experiment in real time for digital viewers as well as create a de facto Easter Egg hunt for New Yorkers following along with the experiment. They then used the GPS tracking on the chairs to ask a select number of the people who had taken the chairs if they would like to be a part of the video documenting the experiment, asking questions such as how they came to find the chair, how they brought it home, and how it was being used within their household. The eight-minute documentary-style video was then released a month later on Vimeo.

Swap Meet
Blu Dot launched their Swap Meet promotion in 2011 to briefly eliminate any monetary barriers to their products. During the promotion, fans of the company submit their proposed “swap”—the piece of furniture and the offering on their behalf that would be exchanged for it—and the owners of the company review the proposals on social media, deciding which select few to accept. Submissions for offerings include a custom-made razorback meat smoker, magazine clippings, Bush/Dukakis cigarette packs , and a life-sized motorcycle model made exclusively of Popsicle sticks.

Musical Chairs
In December of 2012, Blu Dot hosted a week-long game of virtual musical chairs. On the webpage, musical selections from the band Doppio would play. When the music stopped, a phrase would appear on the screen. The players would tweet the phrase, and the first players to tweet the phrase with all spelling and punctuation correct would advance to the following round. Four rounds would be played in total and the overall winner would receive one of the company’s new-at-the-time “Hot Mesh” chairs. In total 1,000 players participated in the game over the promotion and 100 Hot Mesh chairs were awarded to winners.

Couch of Rock
In September of 2015, Blu Dot hosted a two-day concert in Austin, TX consisting of 30 different acts. To add to the promotional dimension of the show, Blu Dot had the show centered around one of their Couchoid couches that had been modified to serve as a guitar amp and a custom Fender Telecaster guitar that was plugged into the couch arm. The concert went for 8 hours each of the 2 days, from 2pm until 10pm both times.

Blu Dot in the Media
As Blu Dot's designs have grown in prominence, the brand has had several of its pieces featured in film and television.

Queer Eye
In the season 5 debut of the Nexflix show Queer Eye (2018 TV series), the episode consists of doing a makeover of several rooms within the Philadelphia Evangelical Lutheran Church of Atonement. Several Blu Dot pieces were used for the makeover of the bedroom for the pastor, Noah Helper, including their Note Side Table, Nook Bed, Field Lounge Chair, and Rule Console.

Beef
Netlfix original series Beef (TV series) also featured a couple of Blu Dot's designs in its second episode. The company's designs shown in the episode were the Field and Buttercup Lounge Chairs.

Star Trek
A Blu Dot design can be found in season 1 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The company's Field Lounge Chair is shown within the crew quarters.

Don't Worry Darling
Blu Dot's Field Lounge Chair makes another appearance in the 2022 movie, Don't Worry Darling, found in the characters, Jack and Alice's home.