Costco Connection

supplier profile
The farmer

Laurie Gates brings the future of design to the table

By J. Rentilly

INSIDE ONE OF the world’s largest kitchen cabinets—an enormous industrial warehouse roughly 10 miles south of Los Angeles in Wilmington, California, holding some 40,000 table settings neatly boxed—Laurie Gates, once an Alberta farmer and now a pleated, pressed, wildly successful designer of fashionable tableware, muses on the incongruous, apparently serendipitous nature of his résumé.

“Biology major, Canadian farmer, table-
ware designer,” Gates says, pausing for comic
effect. “Makes perfect sense to me!”
To add an additional element of screwball
comedy to the Laurie Gates saga, Laurie is not
a she, but a he, and a he who refuses to name
his age at that. (For the record, Gates appears
to be about 22—but with a silver Errol Flynn
moustache). “If people know my gender and
my age, then they’ll begin formulating ideas
of what my designs are, or should be,” he says.
“I try to minimize that.”
Whatever the baroque back story, Gates is
now one of the mainstream tableware mar-
ket’s greatest creative minds and most suc-
cessful businessmen, lending an eclectic,
progressive edge of shape, color and pattern
to his work. In 2009 alone, Costco warehouses
in the United States sold nearly 600,000
Gates-designed units, for which Gates is both
grateful and complimentary.

“When I go to Europe, Paris or Milan, I can see into the future of fashion, sometimes two or three years into the future, and I can create my own designs based on what people want in their homes right now,” he says.

Twenty years ago, Gates was more concerned with plowing fields and wrangling cattle than hatching haute couture tableware. He was raised in an artistic environment, and says many of his college friends— potters and painters, like his mother— were “oozing talent from their fingers.” When “some things ended” in Canada in the mid-1980s, Gates sold his farms and, on a whim, fingers.” When“somethingsended”

moved to Southern California with his son,
then 11 years old, eyeing a possible retirement.
Instead, he did some pickup work for a friend’s
design-driven production company, and
before long was in the midst of a full-fledged
renaissance: The cowboy was now the fash-
ionista. “I loved the design work,” he says, “and
I was good at it.”
In the fall of 1992, Gates began his own
company with little more than his own will
and sensibility, and a small team of loyal co-
workers, many of whom are now celebrating
nearly two decades in his employ.

Today, he has 20 employees, including eight design workers and longtime creative director Elena Lomeli. “This is a cohesive group,” he says. “People care or they don’t. You can’t pay people to care. My people care.” Inspiration strikes Gates several times a day, and everywhere he goes. “Those faxed napkins, scribbled with ideas? They drive my design staff crazy,” he says.

One of Gates’ creative beliefs is that
“nothing is new in fashion, except the unex-
pected combination of shape, pattern and
color.” To that end, his tableware merges cus-
tom-made colors, progressive patterns and
surprising shapes to create what Gates calls
“fashion for your home.”
“It’s an intimate part of your life, eating
and mealtime,” he says. “Setting a table is
showing your regard for those you are feed-
ing. It is a privilege to be a part of that.”
Gates periodically returns to western
Canada and Vancouver Island, where his
mother lives, and he sometimes
visits the land he once
worked as a farmer—in
the years before he be-
came a globe-trotter
and a fashion celebrity.
“The truth is, no matter
how strange it might
sound, there’s really not
that much difference
between being a farmer

visits the land he once

JULIAN CONCEPCION

supplier profile

Name: Laurie Gates

Company: Laurie Gates Inc.

Employees: 20

Address: P.O. Box 157 Wilmington, CA 90748

Phone: 310-513-0820

Web site: www.lauriegates.com

Items at Costco: Melamine tableware; the new print, Groovy Garden (pictured below and above), will be available in May.

Comments about Costco: “To Costco’s credit, they’ve got a great eye for color and shape, the more progressive designs. They’re willing to be playful. I like to say, ‘There’s always a little room for cheetah in your home,’ and Costco seems willing to back me on that.”

Advice for setting the table: “Don’t be afraid to mix. Something from Grandma, something old, on top of something hot is a great idea. A touch of vintage pops beautifully against something new.”

and being a dinnerware designer,” he says. “The palettes are different. The medium has changed. But either way, I’ve been a part of what people are doing for dinner—either what they eat or what they eat on. And either way, it’s a privilege to be in people’s homes.” C