Donald Judd Furniture sues Kim Kardashian

[Andrew Joiner]

I read this here:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/29/style/kim-kardashian-donald-judd-furniture-cec/index.html

“These Donald Judd tables are really amazing and totally blend in with the seats,” Kardashian said in a video tour.

I'm not a lawyer, but if she would have said these Donald Judd inspired tables there might be no lawsuit. I never heard of this furniture brand so of course I Googled it. Wow, what high prices for basic plank furniture. Of course it's the exclusive designer branding.

[Brian Elfert]

Man, the Donald Judd furniture website leaves something to be desired. No actual pictures of the product. There are just basic line drawings of everything.

[Bill Dufour]

No pictures? The buyers can't complain they used the wrong wood and the finish doesn't look right.
Bill D

[Brian Elfert]

I'm not buying furniture without at least seeing a photo of it. In person would be better. Of course, if I was really buying a $90,000 table I would probably be flying out to the showroom to see the item in person before plunking down that kind of money.

[Mark Gibney]

Last week a friend sent me an NYT article on the "Most Defining Pieces of Furniture from the Last 100 Years".
Donald Judd's Single Daybed 28, 1978 is included and is one of the few pieces that has any appeal for me. It's very simple, boxy and uses knotty pine, by the looks of it.

[Mark Wedel]

Given those prices, I wonder if each piece is custom built, so the customer can specific the wood, finish, and other details.

[Brian Elfert]

Given those prices, I wonder if each piece is custom built, so the customer can specific the wood, finish, and other details.

Some items are shown as stock on the website. The rest are custom order with a lead time of 48 weeks for wood furniture.

[Alan Lightstone]

Some items are shown as stock on the website. The rest are custom order with a lead time of 48 weeks for wood furniture.
48 weeks!!! :eek:
That's almost as slow as me.

[Mark Wedel]

Even for in stock items, at $90K, I think I'd want to see it in person and not just go on photos on a website. So I could see that adding photos on the website may not add a lot of value for the company. They probably do have the profit margin that they could hire a professional photographer, find some place to appropriately stage it (not in the back of the shop), but that does all add cost.

Or if you have enough money that $90K isn't a big deal, then maybe not seeing it in person is also not a big deal.

[Brian Elfert]

Even for in stock items, at $90K, I think I'd want to see it in person and not just go on photos on a website. So I could see that adding photos on the website may not add a lot of value for the company. They probably do have the profit margin that they could hire a professional photographer, find some place to appropriately stage it (not in the back of the shop), but that does all add cost.


Furniture companies provide pictures of their products for items that cost less than 1% of that $90,000 table.

[Lee DeRaud]

48 weeks!!! :eek:
That's almost as slow as me.
Those are like Sam Maloof lead times, but his "factory" consisted of him and two helpers. They turned out about a piece (chair/table/whatever) per week: the real gotcha was the multi-year backlog. (That was in 2005, I have no idea what it was up to when he died.) His head assistant is still producing stuff out of Sam's shop using his designs and patterns, not to mention the 30-year or so supply of wood. https://www.sammaloofwoodworker.com/

[Mike Henderson]

Those are like Sam Maloof lead times, but his "factory" consisted of him and two helpers. They turned out about a piece (chair/table/whatever) per week: the real gotcha was the multi-year backlog. (That was in 2005, I have no idea what it was up to when he died.) His head assistant is still producing stuff out of Sam's shop using his designs and patterns, not to mention the 30-year or so supply of wood. https://www.sammaloofwoodworker.com/

One issue when Sam was working (maybe still a policy) is that an order for a crib always went to the head of the line. Otherwise the kid would be too old for the crib:)

Mike

[One time when I visited Sam's place (while he was alive), I talked with Roz, his manager. She said when she went to work for Sam, she looked at the backlog for rockers and it was three years. Then she looked at Sam (who was probably late 70's or early 80's at that time) and she said "I don't want a three year backlog, I want a one year backlog." So she started raising the price of a rocker. But no matter how high she raised it, Sam always had a three year backlog.]

[Lee DeRaud]

One issue when Sam was working (maybe still a policy) is that an order for a crib always went to the head of the line. Otherwise the kid would be too old for the crib:)
Hadn't heard that one.

One story he told had to do with a family friend who was in the queue a rocker. The guy said, "I used to worry that I wouldn't get it before you [Sam] die, now I'm worried that I won't get it before I die." When I met him in 2005, he was 89 and still driving his Porsche around at insane speeds when he wasn't working.

Some of the things he did in the shop were a lot more dangerous than his driving. I took one of his weekend "classes" through UCR extension. Under the "don't try this at home" category, I watched him free-hand a chair arm through the bandsaw, blade so loose you could see it wobbling, only one end of the workpiece touching the table, and twisting it as he fed it through. Then he cut another one, absolutely identical to the first, except for being a mirror image. He said, "Ah, good...half the time I forget and make two left-hand ones." :)

[Jim Koepke]

Hadn't heard that one.

One story he told had to do with a family friend who was in the queue a rocker. The guy said, "I used to worry that I wouldn't get it before you [Sam] die, now I'm worried that I won't get it before I die." When I met him in 2005, he was 89 and still driving his Porsche around at insane speeds when he wasn't working.

Some of the things he did in the shop were a lot more dangerous than his driving. I took one of his weekend "classes" through UCR extension. Under the "don't try this at home" category, I watched him free-hand a chair arm through the bandsaw, blade so loose you could see it wobbling, only one end of the workpiece touching the table, and twisting it as he fed it through. Then he cut another one, absolutely identical to the first, except for being a mirror image. He said, "Ah, good...half the time I forget and make two left-hand ones." :)

I shared this and Mike's post with a friend from another forum whose wife was a friend of Beverly, Sam Maloof's wife. He enjoyed it and shared this with me and gave his permission to share it here:


It seemed that every time we visited them, there was always a cradle in process.

Re: the bandsaw work, he was really amazing how well he could rough out a rectangular piece of wood into a chair arm. It used to drive his wife, Beverly nuts because she thought it very daangerous that he was pushing the wood around this whirring blade, & also that he didn’t wear a mask to protect him from the dust.

Re: his Porsche, I rode with him twice on errands then gave it up as he was like a brainless 17-year old, zipping around, & at least on each ride, would run a stop sign.

jtk