Interview: Michael Santoro, President of MacCase, The Former Car Designer Who Saved Chrysler

Monday, December 6th, 2010, posted in Interviews with 1 Comment

Michael Santoro established DesignStar, Inc. in 1996 and is currently President and Chief Creative Officer of the company’s three divisions, MacCase, CasePC and Studiopack. Born and raised in New York City, after graduated from Pratt Institute with a bachelor degree in Industrial Design, Mr. Santoro spent six years as an automotive designer at Chrysler during which he created the exterior design for the ground breaking 1995 Car of the Year, Chrysler Cirrus as well as its sister vehicle the Dodge Stratus. Before leaving Chrysler, Mr. Santoro penned the exterior design for the 1996-2006 Jeep Wrangler, returning the vehicle visually to its iconic roots while pushing it forward towards the new century. Returning to New York City, Mr. Santoro spent two years as a consulting designer for Walter Dorwin Teague, the nation’s oldest design consultancy. There he worked on numerous programs for Rubbermaid and Samsung, as well as creating conceptual design interiors for Boeing and the production interior for the Gulfstream G5 aircraft. Just before starting DesignStar, Mr. Santoro did design consultant work for the Vector M12 and Lamborghini Jota super cars. Mr. Santoro has been featured in several articles for his design innovations at Chrysler including “Passage by Design” (AutoWeek, January 9, 1995) and “The Designers Who Saved Chrysler” (The New York Times, January 30, 1994).

I had a professor at college who used to tell us that his only job was to take the talent that we already had and make us more aware of it so we could honor it more fully. I always felt that way about my creative abilities, that I was on a path to greater and greater levels of awareness, always looking for the next means of expressing what I wanted to say and what I wanted to see exist in the world. The opportunity to express myself in automotive design, product design, environmental design, painting, music and now video are all expressions of achieving greater levels of awareness about one’s own talent. But the creativity, the passion, the vision were always there. Joseph Campbell would say I have just “followed my bliss”. So I would not say I “became a designer” in the sense that one becomes something like an accountant, I just learned to honor something that was always present in me.

I grew up in a very blue collar neighborhood in New York City. It was one of those places were you either became a cop or fireman. Those were the choices. Pick one, that’s it. Have a nice life. When I got accepted to attend an all art high school that I had to travel an hour each way to get to, my world suddenly became so much larger and included so many more possibilities. I realized that this was my ticket out. Across the street from the school was a Ferrari dealership. I spent a lot of time in there. It was like being on another planet. Looking back, that was really what inspired me to want to be a professional car designer. I was well on my way to a career in painting. High School of Art and Design where I was a member of the first ever Industrial Design  class that ever existed at the high school level. Then off to Pratt Institute on a scholarship where I studied Industrial Design and Transportation Design. I was also granted the first ever post-graduate internship at Chrysler so they could see if I had what it took. William Folger was my professor at Pratt who taught me to trust my talent. Who taught me to believe in myself and my aesthetic convictions and to understand objectively why something was aesthetically correct and why is wasn’t. That’s a very powerful ability for a young designer to have. To be able to see through other peoples bulls&*t. It didn’t make me a lot of friends (laughing) but I gave me an ability to look at my own work objectively and make the choices to make it better. But more importantly to understand why I was doing so.  Above that though, is understanding why you want to do what it is you want to do with your life. What is the purpose of my life? How do I honor that purpose by choosing a path that allows me to express what is important to me? What is it that I value and how do I honor those values? How do I live in a non-conflicted way so each part of my life is supporting the other, where I am not saying one thing and doing the opposite? For me, design was the not the sum of the equation, but one part of many that gets added together to create the sum, which is happiness.  As far people who I look up to, I’d say Frank Lloyd Wright, sculptor Isamu Noguchi, writer Ayn Rand, and Thomas Jefferson were among the biggest influences. They all pushed things forward in a better direction. The thing I think they teach you at Pratt but don’t really promote, is a disrespect for authority. Maybe contempt is a better word. They were not creating “yes men” at Pratt when I was there.   Freshman year you take drawing and you’ll spend a week on a drawing and present it to the class. The teacher will take the drawing and throw it out the window. No, really. This is your heart and soul and you put hours and hours into this and he just threw it out the window! Then you realize it has nothing to do with the drawing and everything to do with provoking a reaction. They wanted you to learn how to stand up for yourself, to defend your work. Many students could not deal with it and left the program. I thought it was great. By the time I was a junior I was doing what I wanted, ignoring the teachers I didn’t respect and listening intensely to the ones I did.  At Chrysler I remember early on, walking out of a meeting, leaving work and going home at 10:30 in the morning because they wanted to take the front end from someone else’s design and put it on one of my designs. It sounds somewhat childish now and probably was not the most professional way to handle that situation, but I was young and at a crossroads. As an employee, I did sign a contract that said everything I did while there was theirs. But there was something fundamentally wrong with what they wanted to do and after my protest walkout, they never tried anything like that with one of my designs again.  My design education is where I learned to listen to my inner voice, not only in design, but in life. To seek the truth in all things. People that know me now would say that I don’t “apply” those lessons, I just am those lessons. Well getting in the door is a struggle. You have a better chance of playing professional football in the US than you do of becoming a professional car designer. It’s a very small world. My most memorable struggle and greatest achievement were the same thing, designing the 1995 Car of the Year, Chrysler Cirrus (and it’s sister car the Dodge Stratus). Two and a half years of constant battling to insure the design came out the way I wanted it to. Now when I see one in the world, I remember when it was an idea, a sketch, in my mind, and there it is, on the road. I smile and feel a happiness, a sense of accomplishment that no one can ever take away. It’s the best feeling and one that I think every creative person is after in one form or another. Fear. Fear of stagnation. Fear of growing old in a place I didn’t want to be. Fear of not moving on to whatever the next thing in my life was going to be.  I loved being a car designer, it’s an amazing job. I loved working at Chrysler at that time in it’s history. Once I had achieved all I wanted to achieve in the car industry, I was pretty bored. I did not like living in Detroit. I realized, while laying on a beach in Bali, that my value of personal freedom and autonomy was not being honored having to be in a specific place at 7:15 am, five days a week.  While some people would say that walking away from a great job with a secure future to go do something I knew nothing about and had zero experience in, is an insane risk, not going off and doing it is a much greater risk. To what? My integrity and my personal ethics.  When fear of staying in a situation, no matter how comfortable, causes a greater anxiety than the fear of the awaiting unknown, you know it’s time to go. So I went. I walked away from Chrysler at a time when I was getting a lot of attention from the national media for the work I had done. I set myself a new goal, much to the consternation of media, my parents and everyone else who thought I was crazy. I always wanted to run my own show. Take the ideas that were in my head and bring them to market without having to ask anyone’s permission, or get someone’s approval. It was a huge risk and that’s how I knew it was the right thing to do. I’ve never looked back and never regretted it for a single moment. Before MacCase, if you had an Apple laptop and wanted a specific bag for it, your choices were nonexistent and none. MacCase created the Apple specific case market. Since the first case design, MacCase products have always been about innovation, style, fun and function.  A few years ago I moved the whole thing up market with the introduction of MacCase Premium Leather. I was able to take the designs to a whole new level of aesthetic expression, much closer to where I see myself going in the future. Reviewers have called my Flight Jacket design, the “Greatest Laptop Bag Ever”. I’ll take that. Again, it gets back to values. Personal freedom, autonomy and creative self expression are three of my highest values. So I designed my life, just like I would design any other product, to provide me with a way to express those values. The whole experience is operating on a much deeper level than whether I’m calling myself a “designer” or a “business person”. Much deeper. Doing the business side of what I do allows for the personal freedom and autonomy values to be honored and expressed.  If you need a label, I prefer to use the term “design entrepreneur” as that encompasses almost everything I do in a day. It tells you everything and nothing and keeps me out of a box. When I am not designing, I am racing my bike. Any person that wakes up everyday to provide quality product or a service voluntarily is improving not only their life, but the lives of others they are interacting with. As far as having examples of work I have done that promotes a better life for individuals, I would suggest checking with owners of the cars I have designed or any MacCase user. I know the various discussion boards are full of praise for how much people love their MacCase products. I would say 9 out of 10 MacCase owners would say their lives are better for owning one of our products. And that last 10th person who was unhappy, I’m talking to him now about how to make the improvements he was looking for. I don’t have a “design philosophy” in the traditional sense.  I do not compartmentalize things like that.  My design work stems from this philosophy—The purpose of my life is to be happy.  That’s it.  Not happiness at the expense of someone else. Happiness by achieving my values.  So then the question becomes,  what do I value?—Personal freedom, autonomy, creative self expression, beauty, productive achievement, doing good work, honesty, integrity, etc.  Given that, any product I create would have to embody these same values, otherwise I would find myself philosophically conflicted. The idea is to have a life that is one organic whole with each part expressing and supporting the other parts under a single set of unifying guiding principals. And it works very well. Don’t limit your idea of design to something you do at a “job” or “work” or a way to make a living. Your first responsibility as a designer, should be to design the life you want for yourself so you can be happy. Think about the things that are important to you and how you can make them real, as if it were a product development program with the goal of honoring who it is you are and who you want to be. The good work will take care of itself. The new Ipad Case by MacCase.