May 11, 2025On May 3, 2001, a small item ran in the New York Times announcing the launch of a new digital endeavor. “Some American dealers are getting their Paris flea market finds on the Internet,” Mallery Roberts Morgan wrote in the paper’s Thursday Home section. “Michael Bruno, a 37-year-old American in Paris, posts items he has found on his Web site, www.1stdibs.com, begun six months ago for the trade. ‘Our goal is to present items as close as possible to the moment they hit the market,’ Mr. Bruno said.”
Short but impactful, that paragraph sent the company on its path toward transforming the way people searched for and purchased fine design — at that point primarily mid-century-modern pieces and some antiques — and other luxury items, influencing not just dealers sourcing for their stateside shops but interior designers and consumers too.
Bruno returned to the U.S. soon after and set about bringing the best American dealers onto 1stDibs to expand the site’s purview and offerings. It was then that I met him in my office as Town & Country magazine’s newly promoted Arts & Culture editor. I remember being impressed by Bruno’s charisma and energy and his passion for exemplars of 20th-century design, but also thinking he was crazy if he thought people were going to spend large amounts of money on luxury items they’d only seen on the Internet. (Turns out, I was crazy not to have scraped together some pennies and asked if I could invest in the site!)
Over the next 10 years, I watched as 1stDibs’ influence and breadth of inventory grew — today, it has nearly 6,000 sellers in 75 countries — hearing from my dealer friends about the success they were having on the site and from my collector friends about their growing obsession with it. (One woman I met at a dinner party told me she’d gone on 1stDibs at 11 p.m. in search of a pair of sconces for her foyer and the next thing she knew it was 2 a.m. and she’d been sucked down this marvelous black hole, from lighting to settees to mirrors to objets d’art.)
In 2010, at Bruno’s behest, I joined 1stDibs as editorial director and director of fine art. My last print magazine job was as editor in chief of Art+Auction, so I knew the art market well, and Bruno wanted my help not just in working on Introspective but in launching the art vertical (“curating the best galleries,” as he called it), which would round out the site’s stellar offerings of furniture, jewelry and fashion.
Bruno stepped away from the company a few years later, going on to purchase a series of dilapidated Victorian buildings in the town of Sloatsburg, New York, a stone’s throw from his Georgian lakeside home in Tuxedo Park. He transformed the buildings and gardens into Valley Rock Inn — a now-beguiling compound that includes an inn, restaurant, gourmet market, wellness center and wedding venue, all less than an hour’s drive from New York City — and transformed the town as well, creating jobs and spurring economic growth, a feat for which he received the Preservation League of New York State’s Pillar of New York Award in 2018.
We’re now celebrating the 25th anniversary of 1stDibs, and I recently visited Bruno at Valley Rock and at his nearby home to ask him about his memories of the company’s early days.
Let’s jump right in, Michael. How did you come to start 1stDibs?
I was in San Francisco selling real estate because I love beautiful houses. This was in the 1990s, and tech was just beginning to take off. I was young, in my twenties, so the kids who were taking these tech companies public liked me. They were buying multimillion-dollar houses, but they didn’t want to shop at stores for furniture. They kept saying, “Can’t we find furniture online?” And I began to wonder the same thing.
I loved antiques stores. I had a house full of antiques. And I began thinking about how that would work. I was good at selling real estate, but I wanted to do something bigger. I decided I was going to make an Internet business putting furniture online. A friend of mine was visiting at the time, and I said, “I’m starting a dot-com, and no one leaves this house until we come up with the name.” I didn’t want to use the word auction. I wanted something that conveyed that whoever sees something first, gets it.
I tried the domain F-I-R-S-T-D-I-B-S, and it was taken by some guy who owned a fish company in Texas, or something. So, I put in 1-S-T-D-I-B-S, and that was available. Boom. That was it.
And then, you went off to Paris?
This was around 1999. And I wasn’t sure how I could give up my successful real estate business to launch this new venture. But then, I remembered from Napoleon Hill’s 1937 book, Think and Grow Rich, which I read when I was nineteen years old, that you have to burn all bridges. I had an opportunity to move to Paris, so I decided to take off and think about the business there.
Did you already know about the Paris flea market?
I’d been to Paris a few times, but I’d never been to the market. After I moved, I renovated an apartment there, and a friend of mine came over, and she said, “Honey, I’m taking you to the Paris flea market.” So, we got in a taxi and drove out there, and my eyes just bulged. You have to remember, this was basically before the Internet, and every good piece of furniture in Europe went to the flea market to trade hands. I was just stunned. And the dollar was high, and almost everything was going to the U.S. So, there was my Internet business: Start with the Paris flea market, put it online, and we’ll just go from there.
So, you had bought the 1stDibs domain. You knew that it was going to be furniture focused, and you knew that Paris was the capital of style and beauty. But that was it?
I sort of naively thought, “Well, how hard could it be? We’ll just build this website and put it online, and it’ll be a public business worth a lot of money before you know it!” And then, meanwhile, it was like, “Oh, it takes a long time to even build the website.”
How did you convince the dealers at the Paris flea that you were legit?
We went there every week to create a process — measuring things, cataloguing them. I brought a photographer and a translator. I’d pick out the pieces that we liked and get all the details. But we didn’t have any customers. And we didn’t have a website yet. After about two weeks, I thought, “The French are going to hate me if I keep coming back here every week just measuring things and asking all these questions for this website that doesn’t even exist yet.”
Then, I decided to sell my house in San Francisco — furnished. I figured if I didn’t have any furniture, I could pick the pieces I wanted and tell the dealers that we had customers for them. I was the only customer for the first six months. We’d photograph like five things a dealer had, and I knew if I called back the next day and bought one of them, they’d feel like, “Oh, this thing’s working.”
Word started spreading that wherever we shot, something sold. They couldn’t believe it. We got the site built and were close to launching when my sister, Sally, was visiting and happened to meet an American writer. Sally told her I was starting a website selling objects from the Paris flea market, and she said, “I write for the New York Times Home section, and we have a Paris page that comes out twice a year. I have a deadline in three weeks. Can I meet your brother?”
Amazing. And that was the wonderful Mallery Roberts Morgan, now an L.A.-based interior designer.
So, Mallery’s New York Times story came out, just a paragraph, really, on May 3, 2001, and everyone in the New York design world went nuts that you could now shop the Paris flea market on the Internet.
This was just months before 9/11.
Yes. We went live, and then a few months later, 9/11 happened. Everything went quiet. And then a few weeks later, the site went wild because designers and dealers realized that they needed to keep their businesses going. No one wanted to fly. It was kind of an amazing thing to see how the Internet could actually help out in an emergency situation and just keep the design world going. Same thing after hurricanes Katrina and Sandy.
So, that little paragraph in the Thursday Home section of the Times launched you?
Yes, I didn’t know how powerful that section was until it did its job for us. And from then on, I believed in the power of print media.
When I came to work for you, I remember telling my parents about my move, and they seemed confused. But then, my dad saw the 1stDibs ad in the Times, and he was like, “Oh, this is a real company!”
It actually took us a long time to convince the New York Times to let us advertise in that section. Back then, you had to be super-luxury. And I’m like, “Honey, we’re going to show you what Cartier and Tiffany really are!” We would have a vintage dealer with a two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar tiara or a necklace or a bracelet, and it would be in the same spot that Tiffany’s ran their ads on other days for, say, a new twenty-five-hundred-dollar necklace, targeted to the masses.
So, to back up a little, were you aware that Sotheby’s had tried to launch a digital division and reportedly lost one hundred million dollars just a year or so before you ventured forth? Were you not daunted by that?
Sotheby’s was kind of going for it, but the brown furniture they were focused on wasn’t what the market wanted. We were focused more on twentieth-century design.
It’s no coincidence that the rise of interest in twentieth-century design, particularly mid-century modernism, was in tandem with the rise of 1stDibs. Some people even credit 1stDibs with creating that demand.
People could easily find it on 1stDibs.
What was the next move after furniture?
I thought jewelry should be next because so much of it is made by esteemed brands and it’s a stable industry. And fashion came after that. No one had the vintage fashion thing down yet. We saved fine art for last because we knew it was the hardest nut to crack, and I thought the art dealers would feel more confident seeing we had sold a fifty-thousand-dollar handbag or a vintage Chanel dress. That way they weren’t just joining a furniture site, they were joining a bigger lifestyle site.
How did your expansion to the U.S. unfold?
When it was time to come to the U.S., New York City seemed too big, so we started in the Hamptons. I had a house in Sagaponack. Dealers would come over to my barn, and we’d teach them how to use the software and sign them up. It took off pretty quickly. And then, we were ready for New York. And then, L.A. And onwards.
I want to talk to you about Introspective magazine because I’m very grateful for it. What made you decide to start a weekly online magazine in 2006, long before anybody else on the Internet was creating that kind of content?
We actually launched the magazine after Hurricane Katrina to bring attention to our dealers in New Orleans. And then, we realized people wanted content. We moved into stories about dealers and designers and creators, so people could learn more about who, say, Knoll was and why those tables or chairs were in every house.
It fit into my overall vision for 1stDibs. I remember so clearly when I was in Paris thinking the site should be a fun place for someone to spend hours obsessing and learning and dreaming about beautiful things that they’d never seen before.
And in some ways, this all lead to your latest endeavor, Valley Rock. How did it come about?
1stDibs is part of my DNA, and it’s my time there that led me on this path to experiencing great design. It really enchanted my imagination. You could call Valley Rock a make-work project I did in the early days after leaving 1stDibs, when I really didn’t know what to do with myself and I had a vision for what could exist there. As we began, we created these beautiful gardens, and it became sought after for weddings. People appreciate that we have many vintage and antique pieces.
I love that this place started with beautiful gardens and beautiful old buildings filled with beautiful furniture. That was your springboard, just like at 1stDibs. What’s next for you?
This year we’re introducing a wellness and retreat program. We want to help as many people as possible. I’ve spent the past three years developing an app called Call the Future, which will guide you to manifest the life of your wildest dreams. Our tagline is “Hope Is Waiting for You.” We’ll introduce it this summer with some workshops at Valley Rock. This is my give-back chapter. My time exploring the design community expanded my consciousness in its own way and put me on this path, which I couldn’t be happier to be on.
