But every start-up that survives its first few birthdays must eventually grow up, and that’s what’s happening to Knock Knock. After years of running most of her operations herself, Ms. Bilik has hired an executive team to help her in the areas where she acknowledges she isn’t strong: reining in spending and long-term planning.
Always, she has been clear about the niche her products occupy: a quirky sliver of the market that balances novelty and utility. Now, she’s determined to make the most of that clarity by behaving less like a design collective and more like a for-profit business. She has good advice on this front: her uncle and mentor is Bruce Kovner, the hedge fund founder and billionaire.
Another role model is Todd Oldham, with whom Ms. Bilik collaborated when she worked as an editor for the coffee-table book publisher Rizzoli. In the book “Without Boundaries,” “he talked about wanting to live his life as a studio, like the Eameses had done,” she says. “What came out of the studio in some ways was secondary. It was about the ethos, the process, the stimulation and the inspiration.”
But it isn’t lost on Ms. Bilik that Mr. Oldham also designed for Target. For the last two years, Knock Knock has been honing an offshoot called Who’s There by Knock Knock, a mass-market line of witty organizational products that has been sold in Target and other big-box retailers.
NOT long ago, Knock Knock introduced a Dating Kit, a binder full of contracts for each stage of the dating process, including an Exchange Form for Contact Information, a Sexual Release Form and a Relationship Résumé. It didn’t sell.
“The guts were great,” she says, “but we didn’t present it right.”
Ms. Bilik didn’t despair. Next spring, Knock Knock plans to release a Break-Up Recovery Kit. (Never married, she says she is basing it — as she does many of her products — on personal experience.)
Asked to describe the void that she thinks Knock Knock fills, she doesn’t hesitate. “The blank page is too scary,” she says. “We like to make people feel better about themselves.”
E-mail: proto@nytimes.com
