President and Creative Director of Bernhardt Design, Jerry Helling, grew up on a ranch in a remote town with 11 people in his graduating class before venturing to USC and a potential career in Hollywood. A personal epiphany combined with serendipity rerouted him into the furniture business, resulting in a long and distinguished career as a keen mentor of talent, a champion of originality, a risk-taking, needle-moving industry voice, and a major benefactor of international design. Plus, he’s really nice!

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Clever is created, hosted and produced by Amy Devers and Jaime Derringer with music from El Ten Eleven and editing by Alex Perez.

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Clever's promotional partner is Design Milk.

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Fashion journalist and design retailer Rose Apodaca wears many professional hats. She spent her youth immersed in the lively Los Angeles music and skateboarding scenes, then became a journalist covering city politics, gang detail and street tribes. After a stint as the west coast bureau chief of Women’s Wear Daily, she started A+R, a design retail business, with her partner Andy. Along the way she’s owned a few bars, written a few books, adopted a child and lived every day with an enviably stylish gusto.

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Clever is created, hosted and produced by Amy Devers and Jaime Derringer with music from El Ten Eleven and editing by Alex Perez.

If you enjoy Clever we could use your support! Please consider leaving a review, making a donation, becoming a sponsor, or introducing us to your friends! We love and appreciate you!

Clever's promotional partner is Design Milk.

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Eric Quint, Chief Design Officer of 3M, incubated a lifelong habit of design thinking in youth at the family kitchen table. After studying engineering and industrial design he embarked on a distinguished career at Philips where he evolved from designer to design leader. Now, as the first CDO of 3M, he’s a champion of collaborative creativity and spends his energy in the exciting and painful job of pushing the front edge of progress. Oh, and he’s a jazz guy—find out how that influences his leadership style.

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Clever is created, hosted and produced by Amy Devers and Jaime Derringer with music from El Ten Eleven and editing by Alex Perez.

If you enjoy Clever we could use your support! Please consider leaving a review, making a donation, becoming a sponsor, or introducing us to your friends! We love and appreciate you!

Clever's promotional partner is Design Milk.

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Product designer and installation artist, Nika Zupanc, has always had a strong emotional reaction to furniture, both positive and negative. Born and raised in former Yugoslavia, she was attracted at a young age to books, cinema and art and that sense of drama and narrative shows up in her work. Her path to design is a pretty straight line; determined, focused and passionate, punctuated by a rebellious use of pink, and a fierce protectiveness of her creativity through time spent in nature and the gym.

Images and more from our guest!

Clever is created, hosted and produced by Amy Devers and Jaime Derringer with music from El Ten Eleven and editing by Alex Perez.

If you enjoy Clever we could use your support! Please consider leaving a review, making a donation, becoming a sponsor, or introducing us to your friends! We love and appreciate you!

Clever's promotional partner is Design Milk.

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Car designer Oliver Heilmer has known he wanted to go into auto design since he was a little kid fascinated by tractors on his grandmother’s farm. He grew up in Munich, Germany drawing machines and vehicles on any paper available, and then studied industrial and automobile design in school. Soon after graduation, he landed a job with BMW Group and has been there ever since. Now, as the head of MINI Design, he’s dedicated to designing for innovation and emotion. This is a long-term love affair, indeed.

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Clever is created, hosted and produced by Amy Devers and Jaime Derringer with music from El Ten Eleven and editing by Alex Perez.

If you enjoy Clever we could use your support! Please consider leaving a review, making a donation, becoming a sponsor, or introducing us to your friends! We love and appreciate you!

Clever's promotional partner is Design Milk.

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Metalworker and designer Meyghan Hill tells us how she opted to send herself to military boarding school and then stumbled into a modeling career before empowering herself after a bad break-up by learning to weld. She operates under the provocative and polarizing name of (wh)ORE HAüS Studios, and while it is a play on words, it is also a very powerful conversation-starter, which she then parlays into meaningful dialogue. This episode contains modeling and metal, yes, but no “blue steel” jokes, we promise.

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Clever is created, hosted and produced by Amy Devers and Jaime Derringer with music from El Ten Eleven and editing by Alex Perez.

If you enjoy Clever we could use your support! Please consider leaving a review, making a donation, becoming a sponsor, or introducing us to your friends! We love and appreciate you!

Clever's promotional partner is Design Milk.

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Strategic designer Todd Bracher regales us with tales of a serendipitous ten-year journey, living, loving and learning through Europe, on the way to launching his namesake studio in Brooklyn. Plus, he walks us through what the hell “strategic design” even means, schools us on the concept of “irreducible complexity” and explains his creative approach which he refers to as “essentialism.” Early on, he showed up to a big pitch meeting way overdressed, and now he keeps a poet on standby.

Images and more from our guest!

Clever is created, hosted and produced by Amy Devers and Jaime Derringer with music from El Ten Eleven and editing by Alex Perez.

If you enjoy Clever we could use your support! Please consider leaving a review, making a donation, becoming a sponsor, or introducing us to your friends! We love and appreciate you!

Clever's promotional partner is Design Milk.

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Collector and high-design advocate, Lisa Roberts, reflects on a childhood spent in an architecturally significant home that discomfited her because it made her feel different from her peers, and also ignited her passion for design because it seeped into her very being. Now, having collected more than 400 “Antiques of the Future,” she uses her collection to educate, author books, and advocate for the game changing power of design. Not too shabby for ol’ Curtains Roberts, eh? Mr. Waffles approves. Meow!

Images and more from our guest!

Clever is created, hosted and produced by Amy Devers and Jaime Derringer with music from El Ten Eleven and editing by Alex Perez.

If you enjoy Clever we could use your support! Please consider leaving a review, making a donation, becoming a sponsor, or introducing us to your friends! We love and appreciate you!

Clever's promotional partner is Design Milk.

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Designer, illustrator and artist Timothy Goodman was labeled a “dead-end kid” in his youth until he did four years of hard labor with a mentor/father-figure in the home improvement industry, through which he found both discipline and a desire to study design. A degree and a few more mentors later he’s now known for his illustrations, viral social experiments, murals, books and even protests. Plus, he’s checking his white cis straight male privilege and championing inclusion in ways both meaningful and practical. Pretty rad.

Images and more from our guest!

Clever is created, hosted and produced by Amy Devers and Jaime Derringer with music from El Ten Eleven and editing by Alex Perez.

If you enjoy Clever we could use your support! Please consider leaving a review, making a donation, becoming a sponsor, or introducing us to your friends! We love and appreciate you!

Clever's promotional partner is Design Milk.

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VISIT - cleverpodcast.com for transcripts, images, and 200+ more episodes

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Entrepreneur and internet pioneer, Jen Bekman, tells the story of how she founded 20x200 with a mission of making art collecting accessible to everyone. On the leading edge of ecommerce, 20x200 achieved enormous initial success and grew very quickly. Jen tells her powerful story of adapting her business on-the-fly as the internet landscape shifted dramatically under her feet—her perseverance fed by a deep belief that living with art is good for you, and the creation of art itself is an act of bravery. Bravo!

Images and more from our guest!

Clever is created, hosted and produced by Amy Devers and Jaime Derringer with music from El Ten Eleven and editing by Alex Perez.

If you enjoy Clever we could use your support! Please consider leaving a review, making a donation, becoming a sponsor, or introducing us to your friends! We love and appreciate you!

Clever is proudly distributed by Design Milk.

SUBSCRIBE - listen to Clever on any podcast app!

SIGN UP - for our Substack for news, bonus content, new episode alerts

VISIT - cleverpodcast.com for transcripts, images, and 200+ more episodes

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.