Five years ago, Mona Hoffman quit a secure, high-paying, high-status job at a good old fashioned Midwestern manufacturing company where she was a valuable employee, and began a journey inspired by the book Concrete Countertops by Fu-Tung Cheng.  Her journey has resulted, this year, in the formation of Rough Edges Design, which produces interior design items made of concrete.  The first product line is lamps.  Others are soon to follow.

Mona Hoffman is August’s GameChanger of the Month because her brand is an exploration of themes that matter.  One of her responsibilities at her former company was sustainability, and the company, though appreciated as a major employer in the community where it’s headquartered, was not committed to moving in that direction (its major product lines are made of wood).   Another of her passions is craftsmanship, the ability to turn readily available materials into something extraordinary.   In transforming herself into an artisan who works with concrete, she combines the themes of sustainability and craftsmanship.  The exploration of these two themes creates and informs the Rough Edges brand narrative.

Mona Hoffman is the GameChanger of the Month, because in forming her new company, she acted on what she is passionate about, yet she didn’t leap before looking.   Rough Edges Design is grounded in diligent study and immersive apprenticing in the craft of concrete-shaping.  The transition from cushy-and-corporate to rough-and-tumble is not one to make without a lot of preparation.   Preparation is the key to a successful journey.  Preparation gives you the ability to improvise in a way that a plan, no matter how meticulous and thought-through it is, cannot.   A GameChanger prepares.

Works like The Unknown Craftsman, by Soetsu Yanagi informed Hoffman’s education.   Yanagi’s words, though originally written in another language about artisans from a different culture, described a world familiar to her, one in which everyday objects and materials become sources of what Yanagi calls “calm and friendly beauty.”

Having spent her professional life in a world of zero-tolerance manufacturing and super-repeatable processes, Hoffman has created a brand where the production process, by design, yields unexpected results, where “flaws” are in fact an artifact of the human touch on the material, and are embraced as part of the product’s charm.

Mona Hoffman is the GameChanger of the Month because she interacts with the familiar in a way that makes it new and remarkable.   This is the alchemy of improvisation.  With its artful line of lamps, Rough Edges Design literally turns heavy material into objects of light.  And if that ain’t changin’ the game, we don’t know what is.