Digital By Design: Christiane Lemieux’s Breakout Summer

It’s highly unlikely that history will look back on the summer of 2020 as a good period of time. But if anyone can find a silver lining as the season stumbles to its close, perhaps Christiane Lemieux can – because it has been an eventful period for this designer, author and entrepreneur.

It started in June with the publication of her first business book, which just so happens to focus on eCommerce. Next, she started a new furniture line under her personal brand called Lemieux et Cie, with her retail partner Anthropologie. But while the summer has been a good start for Lemieux, any story about her will have to start with her resume.

There are resumes, and then there are resumes. Lemieux’s professional story starts right out of college, when she leveraged her BFA from Parsons School of Design to start a groundbreaking interior design and eCommerce company called DwellStudio in 1999. In 2010, she wrote her first design book, and three years later she sold Dwell to furniture eCommerce pioneer Wayfair. A year later, she wrote her second design book, “The Finer Things.” In 2014, Lemieux went into television, as she and eight other designers were recruited for Ellen DeGeneres’ HGTV show, “Ellen’s Design Challenge,” a project she is still engaged with today. She then entered the DTC furniture space in 2017 with The Inside, and picked up a writing gig with “Architectural Digest.”

So by the time summer 2020 rolled around, Lemieux had done more in 20 years than most people achieve in an entire career. Although she has been able to thrive during the pandemic, it has also changed how she looks at design and the digital world.

“Home is fundamentally the most important thing,” she said. “It’s all about how it makes you feel when you walk in your door. Some people want to be stimulated, and some people want to be sedentary. And now our homes have to be everything for us – our vacation, our office, our school, our gym. We’ve completely changed our relationships with our homes, and more than ever, a 360-degree approach is critical. The comfort and the smell and the feeling – all of those things will experientially change how you live your life, and that’s huge to me.”

Despite the fact that she is an intensely visual person, Lemieux has been immersed in digital technology since her earliest days at Dwell. But it was after Dwell was bought by Wayfair in 2013 that her education began in earnest, at the hands of CEO Niraj Shah. It was then that she learned the eCommerce concept that is fundamental to her experience, and is also the title of her book: “Frictionless: Why The Future of Everything Will Be Fast, Fluid and Made Just For You.” In the book, she interviews Shah and 30 other digital executives to case the future of eCommerce and retail in general.

“We all became ‘digital citizens’ at the same time in March,” she wrote in Architectural Digest in early August. “Even in 2020, there were still customers who might have said, ‘I’ll never buy my kid a desk online!’ But those days are gone. And those same customers, having now realized how frictionless online commerce can be — specifically, how much of their personal time it saves them — have likely become converts for life.”

And that is the basis for the argument (and one shared by PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster) that the removal of friction is the key to a successful retail experience.

“I wrote the book because I wanted to bring my analog 1.0 experience and explain through the lens of Wayfair what the future of business would look like,” Lemieux said. “And the one thing that makes it a make-or-break situation is how much friction you cause your customer. I only use one airline now, because their interface is so much better than everybody else’s. The less friction we have in our lives – not only in the way we interact with goods and services, but also in our own personal lives – the better off we’ll be.”

Lemieux is also interested in giving back. She has two kids and sits on the board of Every Mother Counts, a non-governmental organization started by her friend Christy Turlington Burns to fight maternal mortality.

“It made a ton of sense to me to join the board, because a lot of the places where we are doing fundamental work are places that I actually manufactured,” she noted. “And so for me, it became like a full-circle situation. Now I can give back to the communities that were working for and helping me.”