Business Journal
Overkill busts out of garage into office
Heidi J. Stout - Business Journal staff writer

Overkill Design

The hip garage band in Southeast Portland is turning the heads of musicians and architects alike.

John Gross, Jason Krzmarzick and Matt Souther aren't a garage band in a traditional sense. Sure, they practice their trade in a garage-type studio, which is decked out with an edgy assortment of interesting junk, Fender guitars and musical paraphernalia. But the garage band isn't making music. The three men are partners in Overkill Design, an industrial-strength custom furniture company with the attitude of a street-savvy rocker.

"Together we can rid the world of lame Swedish knockoffs," the partners declared, pointing to a desk that can withstand 1,500 pounds.

Their furniture picks up names from odd places. When 6-foot-5-inch Gross "brained" himself on wall-mounted storage, that became the Headway Shelving Unit. The little square seat with wheels? "That's the Asscart," Gross said. "You put your ass on it and cart around." There's the Malarkey Bench, the Executive Jet Disk, and the Jack Kidney Workstation in the shape of ... well, you get the idea.

Overkill Design started as a weekend project for Krzmarzick and Souther, former members of the alt-country band the Baseboard Heaters, who took over a corner of Krzmarzick's father's auto body shop. It was there that Krzmarzick learned welding and metalwork--his specialty at Overkill--and it's where they first developed a coffee table in the signature shape of Fender's guitar heads.

It took more than six months for the partners to convince Fender to license its brand on coffee tables, but now the $689 Telecaster and Stratocaster tables are selling in Europe, Japan, Australia and the United States, representing one-quarter to one-third of Overkill's business.

"We've had more international business than we ever imagined," Gross said. "Now we're trying to get more into the architecture and interior design business, and [Fender tables] augment the rest of our business."

Overkill Design moved from the auto shop to its headquarters in the gritty Southeast Industrial District two years ago--a leap of faith for three guys who didn't get a bank loan or take on investment partners. "We run it lean and mean and invest in the company as we go," said Souther, who said their landlord advised them not to expand until they were absolutely bursting at the seams. But with materials literally stacked to the ceiling in the manufacturing room, Overkill Design will likely expand its 2,500-square-foot shop by taking over the space next door within a year.

> back to top

Between 2001, when the partners made Overkill Design a full-time business, and 2002, revenue grew about 400 percent, they said. Last year's gain was more modest, a 21.6 percent increase in business over 2002.

Overkill Design creates furniture in response to customer requests, custom-building almost anything a client can dream up. It is also expanding its standard furniture line of tables, chairs, lamps and filing cabinets. Souther said Auto CAD, a computer-assisted animation and drafting program, is his single-greatest design tool, transforming sketches into a building plan and cutting hours off the time it takes to build a prototype. officedepot.com

Krzmarzick added that a lot of new product development comes "half from inspiration, half from tinkering around in the shop." He and Souther create the furniture first out of balsawood or clay, then use inch-thick wood and industrial-strength fixtures for the final product.

While Krzmarzick's the metal whiz and Souther specializes in woodworking, Gross leads the firm's marketing and business development. In the shop, Gross is allowed to help with sanding, but that's about it. He joined the partnership two years ago after Souther and Krzmarzick asked him to write a business plan for Overkill. Gross and Krzmarzick used to work together at the advertising and marketing firm CMD.

A defined role for each of the partners has helped them avoid the pitfalls that can break up a band. Generally, Krzmarzick said, when the issue falls within one partner's area of expertise, that partner makes the decision. "Assigning job titles and positions sets the tone to think that way," he said.

Overkill Design's distinguishing trait is its corporate personality--irreverent, feisty and authentic. That's why they incorporated so many found objects--a beat-up cab door hung on the wall, a shower curtain, a well-stocked beer cooler--into their space.

"We're random, and it's kind of fun," Krzmarzick said. "After the corporate environment, it's like having a kid's bedroom again. It's fun to use found objects here and take it to the extreme. We try to make it a creative space, a good place for us and our customers to hang out."

The partners took hanging out to the extreme when they invited an architecture firm to the studio to tell the designers about their furniture. These "lunch and learn" sessions are typically a swanky, hard-sell affair, with top-notch noshes and product representatives pushing hard.

But Overkill Design took the opposite tack, offering peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. The PB&J and PBR show-and-tell was a hit.

Wowing a prospective client in a presentation is one thing, but the partners learned the hard way that delivering the goods is an entirely different matter.

Overkill Design's first major office furniture project nearly killed the company. Two years ago, the partners were hired to create some custom furniture for a downtown Portland business, but as the project progressed, it grew in scope, and project coordinators asked Overkill to take on larger and larger assignments.

"We were so eager to do this, we bit off more than we could chew," Krzmarzick said.

"As a small business, you want to please the client and say, 'Yeah, I can do that' but the project grew beyond what we were capable of at the time and we overextended ourselves," Gross added.

> back to top

After weeks of what the partners described as "boot camp" production, Overkill Design finished the project--and lost a ton of money. "We made every mistake we could, and all in one month," Souther said. "It ate up all the profits." But instead of breaking up the band, it forced the team to reorganize their shop and production method, and it honed its focus on a market niche where they are most competitive.

"We were thrown to the wolves and we got our asses chewed," Gross said. "It really matured us to button down our costs, be more formal with our bidding and improve our manufacturing and client communications."

Overkill Design's least likely clients are those who prefer a $200 Ikea desk, some assembly required, to a practically bomb-proof Overkill kidney desk that costs $600 to $1,200, depending on its size and features. Favorite clients include those who appreciate irreverent, creative work--sound engineering studios, Doc Martens, Adidas and the University of Oregon's Lillis Business Complex are among their clients.

"We target people who want unique furniture, who recognize the value of a custom job," Gross said. "We're in the ballpark on price with Ethan Allen, but our furniture fits a specific need, and we're easy to deal with."

"Anytime we can tell a story about our furniture, I think it holds more value for [clients]," Krzmarzick added. Overkill's web site, www.overkilldesign.com, features product photos and the story behind each product's development.

Take the product description for the '53 Recycle Center: "Recycling is important. Recycling in style not so much. But damn if this doesn't look cooler than a bunch of garbage cans festering in a corner. The dude we made it for sure thought so. And what's more fun than throwing a bottle through the headlight bezel of a classic car? That's right, a recycle center made out of recycled car parts. Word."

Letting their personalities shine through has been a business asset, the partners said, because it encourages customers to form a connection with the company. But they admit it's also an occasional liability. One woman was offended by the use of swearing on the web site and refused to work with the company. As the partners wrote in one product description: "If you're offended by our use of 'Jesus,' then you're probably too much of a pain in the ass to work with anyway."

> back to top

Willamette Week
Fender Benders
Overkill Furniture takes rock 'n' roll to the rec room.
By Elizabeth Dye

One visit to the Southeast furniture showroom it calls home might convince you that Overkill Design is a slick outfit. There are neatly arrayed business cards in the reception area. There are floor models. There's an astonishing lack of sawdust.

But that's only if you don't pay any attention to the men behind the curtain. Back there, you'll find a drum kit, an orphaned taxicab door, and the means to make a million guitar-shaped coffee tables.

"I wanted to design something tangible," says Jason Krzmarzick, Overkill's 31-year-old CEO and lead designer. To do that, Krzmarzick, while toiling away as a graphic designer for local media/design firm CMD, approached co-worker Matt Souther, 32, about busting out a prototype for a table.

But Souther wasn't just any cubicle crony. He was also Krzmarzick's Baseboard Heaters bandmate [Editor's note: Check out the Heaters' liquor-and-cigarettes, born-in-the-USA sound Saturday night at Berbati's for MusicfestNW, although Krzmarzick no longer smacks the drums for them]. And with the help of Jason's dad, a custom hot rod guru who lent them space to tinker with a slab of MDF (medium-density fiberboard) and some exhaust pipe, Overkill's first creation rolled off the dock.

It's been almost two years since Overkill's first whine of the belt sander. Stretching itself into a 2,500-square-foot shop next door to Southeast's raging underage nightclub Meow Meow , Overkill boasts a self-contained shaping tent (hence no sawdust) and the biggest damn table saw you ever, um, saw. Much of their current business is custom projects for corporate work environments. Without the high overhead of fancy furniture vendors, they are almost always able to undercut their competitors' prices. And it's custom work--in other words, not IKEA. Overkill also has a product line of sorts--notably a tomato-hued MDF modular desk they call "The Red Swinger." The furniture has an informal, retro-industrial feel--primary-color surfaces, steel tubing that forms table legs and the backbone of a leaning shelving unit stabilized by T-shaped pins.

"Yes, that's our 'patented' T-Pin design," jokes Jason. But Overkill is also serious business. Most ambitious is a recent merchandising deal with Fender (you know, the guitar people). Because it takes more than moxie for two rock-'n'-roll desk jockeys to swap Powerbooks for power tools--it takes marketing.

You can design a table based on Fender's trademark headstock shape, but Fender doesn't have to like it. And that's where another friend/co-worker comes in, marketing guy John Gross. Overkill built a prototype and transported it to the Seattle studio of rock veteran and sometime Baseboard Heaters producer Pete Droge. They posed the table like a Playboy bunny among Droge's collection of Fender guitars. Fender was suitably wooed by the image, so Gross, Krzmarzick and Souther packed the table to Los Angeles and waited for the news.

And then things got very quiet.

"Our contact at Fender loved the idea, but he got axed," explains Gross, 32. "I learned that the box with the table in it had been sitting unopened on their dock for months," said Gross. His marketing chops riled, Gross applied pressure over the next eight months. They were able to resurrect the deal two months later, and things have begun to taste like gravy at Overkill.

"This is a dream for all of us, to be doing this on our own," says Jason. In other words, pushing product is great, but Overkill's principals are mostly pleased as punch to be working their own angle--even if it looks like a Stratocaster.

> back to top

Fender Frontline 2004 Catalog
This year Fender is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Stratocaster and helping the celebration is our Stratocaster Table of course. They littered the catalog with it. Check it out at: www.fender.com

> back to top

Computer Gaming World
One of our custom desks made it in an "Ultimate Gaming Pad" feature. This desk is a monster. It is 6' long by 3.5' wide. The surface is a solid black laminate with a 2" thick metal edge. The shape was something straight out of star trek. They liked it so much that the writer kept it.

> back to top