HISTORY

Artboard_1_copy_2_b94f6642-394d-4ad3-9056-93d5ac4f2e0b

Company started: 1988

Founders: Brothers Seth and Mitch Nash

Starting location: 46 Waltham Street, Boston, Mass.

Location today: 703 West Housatonic Street, Pittsfield, Mass.

Approximate number of certifiably badass employees: 60

Approximate number of non-badass employees: none

Approximate number of products made to date: 3,000+

First product: Flat Cat

Favorite product of all time despite tragic sales: Nelson Mandela’s car air freshener

Favorite company motto: “Love is power”

Sort of a Choose Your Own Adventure type of thing.

The Short Version

Blue Q was started in 1988 by brothers Mitch and Seth Nash. The very first product was a cardboard cat, branded as Flat Cat, that took off in a way they weren’t expecting. Almost 40 years later, the list of surprising and gifty products is miles long!

The Long Story

An epic in chapters, for your reading ease.

(Are you sure you want to know all of this?)

1. THE BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING, 1988 by Seth and Mitch Nash

We were born into an entrepreneurial family in western Massachusetts.

Our dad was an engineer and sales maven who worked with his brother, Melvin, at a steel fabrication company they started

together. Their company cut and welded structural steel for shopping centers and the like. It was a big, noisy, fascinating plant with sparks and cranes and characters. Being in business with your brother seemed fabulous to us; Ken and Mel were successful and spent a lot of time cracking jokes and learning how to do shit their way.

Our mom, Suzanne, who’s artsy, and was the one really in charge, dragged us to museums and concerts, regrettably at the time, though today we’re pretty grateful. When we were seven or eight, we saw Alexander Calder’s Circus at The Whitney and it blew our minds. On the same Manhattan trip we went to a department store and saw our first revolving door. We went round and round while Ken snapped photos with his Leica.

At home, we weren’t allowed to watch television unless it was a National Geographic special or Charlie Brown. “Go to the junk drawer and make something!” Suzanne would tenderly suggest. Or she’d screech, “that television is SO STUPID!” if we so much as put on Hogan’s Heroes. It was horrible. The upside was that we weren’t stopped from eventually making tall, very unsafe tree forts, or shooting off Estes Rockets, built from kits, loaded with shotgun-like tubes of solid propellant, sparked by a wire attached to the lawn mower battery.

Fast-forward to 1988: We were in our 20’s, living separately in Boston, working at jobs, talking about starting our own business. There was no specific direction but the one requirement was designing something different/better, or at least “loud,” to find an audience, hopefully somewhat audaciously, but who knew. We rented a studio space in a building filled with artists. The South End was a raw neighborhood then, with amazing brick buildings -- before yuppies and oysters arrived.

We needed a name for the door buzzer on the street, so we met outside, on a nice day, to think about what to name ourselves. Looking up, the sky was blue, which sounded positive, so that was half. We added a letter Q, to finish it off, and it kinda rhymed, so we were done. Onto the door buzzer plaque it went. Blue Q means nothing, so it can be anything.

Eventually the idea of designing cool desk lamps popped up. What could be better than selling light? On a whim, and to get our first tax write-off, we flew to Milan, Italy to peruse Euroluce, the world’s biggest lighting trade show. Maybe we’d find a company on our wavelength that could build our weird, imaginary lamps.

We checked into a super-budget, hostel-like place, where, if you wanted a hot shower, and not just a cold shower, they charged extra. Brilliant system. Pay at the desk, clerk hands you the missing valve knob, attached to a rope.

We wore white suits, off the sales rack, with padded shoulders, to look legit. Embarrassingly, it was August and we were in vast airless halls, with hundreds of halogen lights blazing -- everyone else was in short sleeves.

Back home, we started sketching a series of desk lamps with little, playful rubber wheels on them. They were little mobile creatures, made with cardboard, tape, and other collected crap.

It was a noble hook and they looked pretty cool. Figuring out how to actually manufacture and sell them was still an abstract concept.

2. BIG ACCIDENT / FLAT CAT

In 1988, Canon, makers of copy machines, introduced their first word processors, branded the Canon Cat. Their marketing mascot was a photograph of a cat. The cat was striking, with emerald eyes, and on billboards and in magazine ads. We saw it in Business Week magazine, as a double-page spread, and glued it to a piece of cardboard and cut out its silhouette. A stand-up easel was stapled on.

Our lighting workshop now had a maintenance-free pet cat.

We put the cat on a desk and didn’t think twice about it, until a buddy came by to say hi. He walked in, locked in on the cardboard kitty, and said, “Wow, didn’t know you guys had gotten a cat!”

In his haste, of course, Dave Peacock thought the cat was real. And that’s how we designed our first item: the blockbuster Flat Cat.

We called the marketing department at Canon world headquarters, and asked who’d photographed their awesome cat. They steered us to their ad agency, the mega-huge Grey Advertising, and someone else directed us to photographer Manny Denner, a legend in animal photography. He was a specialist who shot anything but humans for blue-ribbon clients in advertising and packaging. All of the Purina pet food items, for instance. Manny told us he owned the outtakes from the Canon shoot and invited us to come to his Manhattan studio to look. Days later, we went, picked our favorite cat pose from contact sheets, and struck a fast deal: five hundred dollars for two years of use.

We learned that the New York Stationery Show, a trade fair for retail shop buyers, was opening for a five-day run in just four weeks and we rented a ten-by-ten booth from George Little Management.

We told our dad, a structural steel guy, about our nascent plan. Ken hated cats as much as our mom hated TV. “Best of luck, boys! The only good cat is a flat cat!”

Perfect. We trademarked Flat Cat with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

We printed ten thousand cats, which were mounted to cardboard and die-cut by Pearl Bookbinding. Graphic designer Dean Noble designed the package, and Research Packaging, a contract product assembly operation, shrink-wrapped the cats against a rectangle of cardboard. Twenty-four pieces went into a display box. The retail price was about six dollars per Flat Cat. When we picked up the firm batch en route to New York, it was still warm from the printer.

Craving attention, and to distract from the fact we only had ONE item for sale, our Stationery Show booth was decorated like a surreal apartment in a strange dream.

Everything was painted bright yellow: yellow broken TV, old chairs dipped in yellow, yellow coat rack, yellow broom, and so on. It was crazily eye-catching, with roaming Flat Cats arranged about. We were shocked to be swarmed by sales reps who wanted to sell Flat Cats to their accounts. Actually, we didn’t even know what sales reps WERE until someone explained it to us. One, Jeanne Teller, promised, “Sign us up, we guarantee we’ll get these into Bloomingdales.” Hearing this, we drooled. The store was a legendary, hip tastemaker then. So, we got our first sales rep agency and, as promised, Bloomies bought hundreds of Flat Cats. Cleverly, they unpackaged most of them and placed them in a Christmas window on 59th street, as an art installation. We had our first marque account, and worked it, and soon had really great reps, who sold other wonderful lines coast to coast. There was a palpable buzz, quickly. In a few weeks the phone was ringing with reorders and we installed a second landline. After tortuous internal debate, we invested in a fax machine.

Flat Cat led to Instant Infant, Flat Fido, Compact Cow, Big City Bovine, Flat Fish, Porta Pig, et al. Altogether, over several years, the Flats sold over a million pieces.

Logistics were sorted out. We rented space for our inventory at Research Packaging, which piled them on pallets for us. We’d drive there every other day and put shipping labels on them. We hired our first employee, Kelly Storrs, to be the customer service and order entry queen. Every morning yards of faxed orders were spilling onto the floor.

We renewed our Flat Cat agreement with Manny Danner several times, even though he’d never hear from us again. He went on to photograph the Jack Russell Terrier for Flat Fido, and we rented a bovine from a farm in New Jersey for Compact Cow. It shat all over his floor.

Soon, of course, our growing distribution system wanted more stuff. Several lines of greeting cards and funky stationery followed. They sold OK, and stand the test of time. But the laser-cut 3D wooden animal puzzles imported from the UK and cast metal pins of rocket ships tanked

Starting Blue Q had been accidental and lucky, but creating the next ideas that were popular was a whoooole other thing.

Business ebbed. Eventually, due to negative cash flow and a quieter fax, we had to lay poor Kelly off. Being a delightful and understanding human, she said, “Hey! no problem! What took you so long?”

3. WESTWARD HO / 1993

Now both with young families, and tons of plastic baby shit in tiny apartments, we were ready to get out of Boston. We relocated to western Massachusetts with a truck of inventory and plywood tables. We settled into a decrepit but once-glorious mill building, which our grandfather, Leo, had bought in the 50’s. Business was pretty weak, but in the spirit of Ken and Mel we kept laughing enough to not care. Eventually we got smart and started collaborating with graphic artists more and more. We’d started finding our voice, and just needed help polishing it into bigger and more focused ideas. Thats when the idea of Blue Q as a collaborative place took shape.

4. BIGGER JUMPS, FINALLY

In 1993, we arranged to meet up-and-coming graphic designer Alex Isley at the New York Gift Show. Alex showed up with his shirt half untucked and a shopping bag filled with amazing, clever portfolio pieces. So unpretentious, so funny. We got on like a house on fire. Alex asked what we were thinking of having him problem-solve, and we mentioned refrigerator magnets, somehow reimagined. Faxed sketches went back and forth, leading to the obvious and fun idea of themed magnet sets. White Trash Magnets, Coffee Time Magnets, Heart Attack on a Plate Magnets and countless others were designed in a loose, idea-driven style.

We repeated the process of taking our new things to trade shows, and thankfully, we were mobbed.

Our fridge magnets required hand assembly so we established a program of employing individuals with disabilities, through an innovative program with Berkshire County ARC. (Insert link). The team was spirited and amazing and brought a huge, new cultural vibe to Blue Q. Soon we had a team of ten workers with two amazing job coaches, gluing zillions of fridge magnets to backers. Several members of this original magnet team are still here today. (link to BCARC page)

5. FASTLY FORWARD

More things were fed into the pipeline, including Dirty Girl, a brand of bath products, which exploded.

We learned how to source soap, lip balm, and body wash. Wash Away Your Sins, Tough Guy, Total Bitch, and other brands followed.

They attracted many new customers and we staffed up. All sorts of things were transformed and we got more and more hooked on the emerging drug of choice: change.

One product line led to another. We made a recycled shopping bag for Miso Pretty, one of our bath brands, and Fiona Hewitt’s neon-drenched illustrations looked dazzling blown up big, like a poster with handles.

Soon we had a whole family of differently sized bags that took plastic out of the waste stream and became “The System to Carry Your Stuff.” Barack Obama was photographed with our Mighty Michelle Shopper.

We introduced gum after finding the world’s only supplier that could put eight chicklets into a small box. The original Cat Butt Gum is still with us.

Then, breath sprays, with artist Dana Wyse, to help you instantly understand your mother or have an instant Irish accent. They were drenched with her amazing writing and were affordable art pieces in disguise.

We made some popular car air fresheners, and graciously settled several legal claims when it was discovered that if they fell from the rear-view mirror, the chemicals ate holes in your dashboard. The Nelson Mandela Car Air Freshener was our favorite. The factory could make them smell like anything we wanted, and we requested fresh baked bread.

We made Tattoos for the Elderly, Reindeer Meat Christmas Tree Ornaments, I’m Savin’ Up for Some Weed Tin Banks, and Maybe You Touched Your Genitals Hand Sanitizer. All were part of larger groupings that held together nicely. We even made some lighting. In the span of 30-plus years it’s become a library of over 3,000 items.

6. MAKING STUFF IS COOL, MAKING A GROUP IS THE BEST.

As the company grew and hired more people, our culture became more and more of an obsession. Employees were granted company stock. We bonded with Doctors Without Borders and other groups, and now product revenue’s linked with making the world better. Christmas parties got bigger, and more ridiculous, with madcap skits and pigs cooked on rotisseries and, one year, a thirty-person high school marching band showed up, which the crew surprised us with. (We cried, obviously.)

Trade shows became more involved and decked out, with mechanical, kinetic displays, and a pop-up kitchen that illegally served free sandwiches. (Got busted, kept on anyway. Fuck ‘em.)

We’ve built a huge company garden, painted murals, made a library in the warehouse lobby, and scheduled art classes for the ARC crew, now known as the Arts and Assembly Department. Their recent puppet show was smashing. We took the whole company to New York for a long weekend and everyone ran around the city together. If an idea isn’t absurd, there’s no hope for it.

A few years ago, we outgrew the beloved office in the piano factory and moved in above the warehouse, which means… we finally have a dishwasher!

The End.