Excellence by design.

Style sells. Fortune favors the fashionable. Design delivers the dollars. You buy a car because you need reliable transportation, a watch to tell time, a chair because it's impractical to sit on the floor. But you buy a particular luxury sedan, timepiece, or chaise lounge for one reason: design. You love bow it looks, how it feels, bow it works--and often all of the above. That, simply put, is why well-designed products are the lifeblood of global industry. Great design--or, more to the point, great designers--makes all the difference.

You need look no further than our cover subject for this issue, automotive designer Ralph Gilles and the Chrysler 300C, for a perfect illustration of this business reality. Why did more than 120,000 people worldwide buy this award-winning car last year? Here's a hint: They weren't lured into showrooms by the car's fuel efficiency or engine torque. This car is powerfully designed and breathtaking in appearance. As a member of the board of directors of DaimlerChrysler, I am particularly proud of Gilles' accomplishments as Chrysler's design director--and highly appreciative of the resulting contribution of sales to the automaker's bottom line.

African American design achievement is in no way limited to the automotive industry. Excellence in design is also represented by furniture designer Cheryl R. Riley, whose one-of-a-kind creations can be found in the private collections of the likes of Denzel Washington; athletic footwear designer Wilson W. Smith III, the Nike Tennis & Court Division creative director who dreamed up the Nike Shox Glamour SW for Serena Williams; and toy designer LaMont Morris, a product design manager for Hasbro. The creations of these and other designers featured in this issue represent cutting-edge style and substance, delivering measurable, positive impact on the bottom line.

Not enough young African Americans are aware of the vast and varied career options in automotive, industrial, interior, and other design fields. Even fewer are exposed to these opportunities early enough to gain the training and education necessary to compete for design jobs. Despite the fact that African American culture defines the contemporary American aesthetic for everything from automobiles to fashion to jewelry, blacks remain underrepresented in nearly all creative fields.

Together, we must work to change that. Design schools such as Detroit's College for Creative Studies (Gilles' alma mater) must increase their outreach to talented black youth. The corporations that rely on innovative product design to maintain their competitiveness in the global marketplace must create initiatives dedicated to bringing more African Americans into design professions and support industry groups such as the Organization of Black Designers.

And just as Gilles benefited from the example set by Ed Welburn, the dean of black automotive designers and only the sixth design chief in the 96-year history of General Motors, we must uphold Gilles as a role model for young people like Matt Frazier, a West Orange, New Jersey, high school student and aspiring automotive designer who wrote to us earlier this year in search of information on black auto designers. (We sent him a copy of "Designed for Performance," an article published in our November 2001 issue which profiled Gilles, Welburn, and other black auto designers.) Likewise, the designers of tomorrow are all around us--in our schools, our churches, or up in their bedrooms, lost in their own worlds of sketches and doodles.

It is up to us to identify and encourage them and provide the information, educational opportunities, and mentorship necessary for them to take advantage of the great opportunities in design. Consider this issue of BLACK ENTERPRISE Exhibit A as you make the case that they, too, can make a mark in the world of design.