House of Yes’ Lady Circus

You’ve really turned your dreams into a reality. What advice do you have for anyone trying to do that for themselves?

Kae: Fundraising. It will save you a lot of time if you have money to start with. Find that money however you can – beg, borrow, or steal! Do it. We couldn’t have done this if we didn’t have the money to start it up. You’ll make it back and pay back your loans.

Anya: One of the most important things is to be accessible to as many people as possible. The more people in your network, the easier it is to fundraise or find other resources, delegate tasks, and get help. If you want to do something really avant-garde, how do you tie that in to something more accessible? Doing things that are super “out there” is great, but your audience will be very specific and you won’t be able to sustain yourself. You have to really balance out what you’re doing.

How have you done that?

Anya: We have the circus troop, the workshop, and the community space/venue. We want our space to be useful and somehow important to everyone and their mom. We have some things our friend’s 10-year-old can come to, and some borderline X-rated sex nonsense. We have music. We have DIY arts and crafts, but not too much, because we don’t want to be pigeonholed. It’s all about covering as much ground as possible, all the time. I think it’s great that people walk through the door and never know what to expect.

The House of Yes performance space (image via Brooklyn Vegan)

How do you two know each other?

Kae: Anya and I met in Rochester, where we grew up. I went to FIT and she came to New York a few months later. We thought, “Let’s make a creative space to live and work out of.” We found a large basement space, finagled some stuff with our landlord, and started a collective. It was pretty disgusting – full of mold, painted ridiculous colors. But it was really fun. We had that basement space for two years, and then Anya got a space in Ridgewood that became the House of Yes. I moved in 6 months after that, set up my sewing studio, and it became a collective of 8 people living and working.

Your previous space burned down, right?

Kae: Yeah, that space burned down in April of last year, 2008. We found this place on Craigslist and started building again. It was in awful shape – a dirty, dusty warehouse. There was a very tacky, dingy office space with fake wood paneling and linoleum floors. We had to put in a lot of work. Thankfully, people really pulled together and started collaborating. Volunteers came by to build, and we had a lot of help, financially, from people who felt bad for us when the old place burned down.

Aerial performance (image via Brooklyn Vegan)

Why did you choose this space for your new location?

Kae: It’s perfect, because it happens to have a 30-foot ceiling. It’s one of the only places like this in Brooklyn.

Anya: When the old space burned down, and we saw this building, we just went for it with the aerial studio.

Kae: When we started the old House of Yes, Anya and I would talk about how in five years we should have a theater and a costume shop. When we lost our old place, we ended up doing this much sooner than we ever expected. It was born out of necessity. To be able to afford the rent of this place, we had to get it together. The other place was more of a collective/ party space where people lived. Nobody lives here – it’s a business-oriented space.

What’s been the hardest part of turning this into a business?

Kae: The hardest part is finances. Trying to keep ours straight, and trying to find funding. And balancing everything. Between promoting, getting our name out there, and getting things done in here, and finding time to be creative and work on projects that don’t make money – it’s a lot.

Anya: You have to do a lot of entrepreneurial stuff, PR, and constantly think about how every single person you know can fit in to making this possible. Keeping track of all that, constantly scheduling and multitasking, is really hard.

Lady Circus in action (image via Brooklyn Vegan)

How do you hope for this to grow?

Kae: We’ve set it up now, but we’ve only been operating professionally for less then a year. It really has a lot of room for growth. We want to have more people come here, both to see shows and to perform. We’re at this nice spot where a lot of people know about us, but a lot more people could.

Anya: We want to write and produce more shows here. And we’re constantly tightening everything up – upgrading the lighting, getting new sewing machines. It’s great to have made a facility where artists don’t have to freak out and worry about hanging lights. They can come in and focus on their art instead.

It’s fantastic that you’ve created that! Most artists either aren’t able or just don’t want to take on the responsibility of setting up the structure.

Kae: It’s a real job, and it’s not always fun. I do jobs I don’t want to do. But without that, we would have been kicked out months ago because of not paying rent. I don’t want to sweep the floors, but it has to be done, and then we can move on to the creative things we want to do.

Anya: It’s still way better then a regular job because it’s really engaging. Whatever I’m doing, I’m actively using my brain. One of our interns has a “real job”, and she’s always telling us to give her more work because she’s so bored.

Kae: We’re always having creative input, whether it’s what color we’re going to paint the wall, or how to word the promotional material. We’re figuring out how to let the world know what we do, and what image we want to put out. Like any small business, it’s your voice.

Anya performing in the Karnival of Kuriosities

After being fans for a long time, we had a chance to ask him how he got started with photography and what he’s doing these days.

When did you first become interested in photography?

I took my first picture in the South of England, of a train going over a viaduct. I was probably around 9 or 10. I became interested in a box Brownie, and started taking pictures in London in the park. It was a large roll of film, in a Bakelite camera – fabulous design, all deco like a radio. You would get your negatives back, in these little glassine envelopes, and they would be fuzzy, or have light leaks and be all black.

Did you go to school to study photography?

When I was a schoolboy, I read all about how to develop film from these little books in the library, but it was when I was in college for interior design, that my friend Richard got himself a job in a lab. It suddenly re-ignited all my memories of photography. I started doing it quite a lot, and dropped out of college to try and become a photographer. I do miss never having a formal art training. I think that’s really important – the whole process of thinking. I ended up taking a more commercial approach to the field.

Once you realized it was your passion, how did you work towards becoming a professional photographer?

I tried to get a job as an assistant, to learn by sweeping the floors so to speak, but there was nothing out there. I blundered around for a bit, tried to find some work, and saw that Glaxo had a job for an assistant photographer in their research department. I went along, and got a job for two months in the summer.

I learned the technical stuff, which was very handy to know, but it was really dull. I couldn’t take it, so I left, and again there was no work. I was about to take a job selling over the telephone when I saw an ad in a popular English photography magazine.

There was an opening in this architectural firm for someone to develop a way to take pictures of their architectural models through this probe. The company had been around 100 years, and built all these incredible models of various places. They had this probe that allowed them to look inside the model, and wanted to be able to take pictures through it.

They took me on because I had done 3D design in school, and had looked through a microscope at Glaxo. It was a total fluke that I got the job. If he had put the ad in the British Journal of Photography, where the professional people look, I wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Was it difficult to learn the ropes of the job without much prior experience?

About 6 months into it, my boss said to me, “If you don’t get any better than this, I’m going to fire you.” So for one week, I stayed up all night, every day, developing and processing, and adjusting film. I pulled myself out of it, became quite good, and stayed on for 8 years.

How has your work evolved since then?

I’ve stopped wondering what I should be doing, and starting pressing the button. I’ve been around so many incredibly interesting people that are very inspiring, so it feeds off itself. At 54, I’ve also been through some unpleasant experiences, but the one thing that does, it gives you an awful lot of material to work with.

For a long time I didn’t know what kind of pictures to take when no one was hiring me, and the work I was doing for myself was very marginal. Now, it’s a mixture of fashion and portrait and architecture. I decided it was important to do what I like, and shoot things that have meaning to me. Try to do everything.

The last few years, I’ve been paying my rent with fashion catalogs. That’s an incredible training – bridal and evening wear. It requires a lot of thought. You’re dealing with very fussy clients. I’ve also always liked building and architecture. I don’t think you need to specialize – a photograph is a photograph, it’s cross-platform.

With advancements in technology, photography has become so much more accessible. How do you think this has changed the business?

Photography has become ubiquitous. It used to be a very expensive medium to work with, even more so because you had to buy film. It was very cost-prohibitive to test ideas. Now everybody has a camera. I go on a shoot and the client’s baby has a better camera then me!

My girlfriend and I were invited to a wedding, and there were two young photographers with four cameras each hanging off them, laptops and satellite dishes! I can’t compete with that. They did miss a few shots I got, though.

Then there’s crowd-sourcing. Buying stock photography used to be expensive. Now a company can just say, “We need a picture of someone shaking hands in front of a modern building” and a billion people will respond. They’re just happy to have a photograph out there. 90% of what’s being published is very good, and very free.

What advice do you have for people that want to turn their passion into their career?

Do what you love, and if you’re lucky, someone will pay you for it. Money was never a big issue for me. My friend Benjamin said, “If you wanted to make money you would have gone and made money, you wouldn’t have been a photographer.”

There’s nothing there that says if you do x, y and z, you’ll have a career. It’s very individual, you need to be incredibly independent, almost able to do it on your own. Then, when two independent people come together, the sum of the parts becomes greater then the individuals. For me, as long as I can take pictures I’ll be happy. That’s really it. I’m very fortunate, there are not very many people I would trade places with.

Check out more of his work at adrianbuckmaster.com.

Screenshot:

3rd Ward gives a free bike to each of their members.

How did 3rd Ward start? What’s the beginning of the story?

Wow. OK. In 2004, a bunch of other artists and I moved to New York from Boston. We moved in together in this big loft, and we thought, “We’re all going to become New York City art stars!”

Of course!

Right? And then we got hit with all these harsh New York realities. The cost of real estate down here was out of control, so we ended up way out in the middle of nowhere in a warehouse. Nobody could find work. Nobody was getting along. “Dude, you didn’t pay rent!” or “You broke my shit!” It was totally like a reality show.

For work, Jeremy and I started doing some construction jobs. We did a lot of work for this one guy who had a bunch of real estate. At the same time, we were still trying to do our own artwork and design work. We had a lot of problems finding the resources we needed. We needed access to a shop. We needed a place to do photo and video shoots. We needed access to good enough computers to do retouching. We thought, “Man, I wish there was a place that I could go do that.”

One day I just pitched our idea to the real estate guy. I said, “Look, I know it would work because I personally need this and there’s other people out here like me.” And he said OK. He had just bought the building that 3rd Ward’s in now. He asked me how it was going to work and I said, “How about you build everything out to our specs and pay for it all, and then we’ll pay you rent.”

So he did it?

He did it, and we opened in May 2006. And then we could never pay rent! We started throwing parties for rent. I was giving him his rent money in brown paper bags that had beer-soaked cash. So that’s how we got started. There’s a long way from the day we opened to now. We’re way stable now.

How did you get past the phase of figuring out how you were going to pay rent?

Basically by learning how to serve our members. We’re customer obsessed at 3rd Ward. It’s part of our culture. We are there to serve this community of people. And we are always figuring out how to do that. If we build something that doesn’t work, we rip it out. We had a whole dance program, it wasn’t working, so we just ripped that whole room out and added a lot more to the shop.

You have to keep listening to people and responding to them. We are our members. There is no 3rd Ward without them. We have to provide resources that members want to come and pay for. So we obsess over keeping them happy and making it more and more productive for them.

What was the hardest part of stabilizing?

There are a couple things that are really challenging. First of all, you’re always treading water trying to get money in the door. You have to learn how to be a business person really fast. I really wasn’t. So I got my indie-MBA on the streets of Williamsburg! Understanding cash flows and all that.

Then there’s learning to really look down the road long-term. What we’re going to do today, we’re not going to feel until 6 months from now. You have to think, “How are all these moving parts going to impact each other in 6 months?” You don’t want to fall into short-term thinking, where something might seem good right now but is going to hurt you down the road.

The front desk at 3rd Ward.

Can you walk us through all the different services 3rd Ward offers?

It’s a lot of interrelated resources that are under one roof – two roofs now. A big thing that we do is desk space for freelancers. All the furniture is there, all the internet is there, all the utilities are there, basic secretarial stuff is there, there’s always a lobby for clients to wait. We take your mail and packages, that kind of stuff.

We have four photo studios – there’s a lot of photographers who sign up for membership just based on that. We have a huge shop. There’s a digital media lab, which is free for all members to use whenever they want. And then we do a lot of classes.

The class program that we have at 3rd Ward is massive. The woodworking classes, the welding classes, and our core digital design classes, always fill up. We also try to do weird stuff, you know? We’re always trying new classes, and some work and some don’t. We know that and we’re comfortable with that. Somebody once said, “You have to learn to see failure as progress.” We believe that at 3rd Ward. We’ll always try new stuff. We did bag building, which was really popular. Screenprinting is really popular.

What are the plans for this second location?

There’s a drop-in co-working space, where you can just show up with your laptop and work. There’s a bunch of desk space and work studios. We’re going to have a couple new classroom spaces. Down the road there will probably be a real screenprinting setup. And we’re putting in a commercial kitchen and doing culinary classes. I’m really excited about the culinary program. It’s more universal, you know what I mean?

We’ve noticed a few people in Brooklyn starting up food companies, it’s pretty cool.

It’s true. There’s actually a kind of renaissance of culinary stuff happening in Brooklyn right now. I’m good friends with the guys at Roberta’s. They have a little farm in the backyard, and they have beehives on our roof.

Do you want to keep 3rd Ward in New York? Have you thought about expanding outside?

Yeah, I have thought about it, but we have a lot of work to do here. We get courted by a lot of people. Somebody from the Detroit government called me and was like, “Please come to Detroit. I’ll do all these great things for you guys.” But I can’t just go to Detroit. I am of this community. I know these people. I don’t know what’s going on in Detroit. So the short answer is, we’re focusing on New York right now. The long answer is, wherever we’re needed. 3rd Ward Moscow!

Jason Goodman and Jeremy Lovitt at 3rd Ward. [photo via NY Mag]

What’s been your happiest moment so far with 3rd Ward?

There’s this whole economy that happens, where the jewelry designer hires a photographer to shoot her work. And then the woodworker goes to the metal guy and says, “Hey, I’ve got this table I need to make. I’m doing the wood work on the top, but the client wants a steel base. ” It happens every single day, all the time. Seeing that happen is pretty magical. And giving the free bikes out was pretty exciting. I don’t know if you guys know about that.

I saw the sign outside and I was wondering about it.

Last year I was thinking, “What is another thing I can do to enrich my members?” and the lightbulb went off. “What if I could give everybody a good, urban bike for New York City? That would be amazing.” We threw a huge party and we were like, “Free bikes from now on!” The bikes are single-speed, so they can’t really break. They have a nostalgic old Schwinn frame look, set up for a street bike – skinny tires and straight bars. It’s something that meant a lot to our members, and it also did something good for the world. Every bike on the street is better. Every day with that is progress.

Absolutely. You guys are doing amazing things.

I have a super awesome team of brains. We have a really creative culture in the office. There aren’t a lot of rules, and we don’t need a lot of rules, because we’re all really engaged with what we’re doing. I would never be where we are today without them.

And we have a great front desk crew. We’re staffed from 8am to midnight every day. They’re constantly taking care of our members. Whether people need food delivered, or to packages coming in, or a circuit blew. We make it so you don’t have to worry about if the roof’s going to leak, or if the circuit’s going to pop, or if your delivery guy’s not going to be able to get in. You can focus on what’s in front of you right now and making this photograph happen, or whatever it is that you do.

Handmade Music at 3rd Ward.

Ed Chair: A simple lounge chair with a storage hatch hidden under the cushion.

You launched your company ICFF this year, in a pretty unconventional way. How did that come together?

Well, when I decided to do the show, I didn’t think I could afford a booth on the show floor. And I didn’t really want to be in the middle of a sea of people who were all doing the exact same thing. But I wanted a kickoff date for myself. So I had the idea of putting my pieces in a truck and parking near the show. I scouted the area around the Javits Center for a couple of weeks to figure out where I could park.

I thought up a bunch of different scenarios like, “If I got a film student to help me and make a video, would that enable me to get a permit for the street?” I was throwing around a bunch of ideas like that.

Eventually I found a guy who owned one of the parking lots right out the front doors of the Javits. I harassed him for a few weeks to give me a space to park in! Finally he said, “OK, let’s make a deal.” So I rented a truck and parked it there during ICFF. That was the first time I had real products that people could touch.

Kristen in her truck at ICFF

Did that show get you momentum for getting started?

Yeah, definitely. Nothing huge came out of it, but it was good to just get out there and meet people. It was mostly industry people, so they weren’t buying my stuff. They were showing theirs. But I think it was worth it, all-in-all.

Did you go to school for furniture design?

No, I went to NYU for communications. Which pretty much has nothing to do with any of it! But while I was in school I started working for a real-estate developer doing high-end condos. I spent almost 4 years on the construction site, so there was a lot of building, and I kind of learned from that. I also learned the process of turning drawings into something that exists.

Arthur coat rack: More storage than the traditional coat rack.

What kind of design are you attracted to? What’s your aesthetic?

I feel like if I look at too many pictures of new designs, I’ll subconsciously replicate something, so I try to avoid that. I mostly look at architecture for inspiration. Sometimes I look at vintage stuff. I love hidden drawers and things like that. I try to take old pieces and update them with cleaner lines and less materials and less hardware.

What is your design process? How do you work?

I have a workshop in Bushwick, where I make prototypes and test ideas out and see what they look like in real life. I take the dimensions from the prototypes and put them into Rhino, and then I take those drawings and shop them out. I make the prototypes and then have someone else do it in the real materials.

Kristen finishes her designs up in CAD.

Are your pieces all made here in New York?

Yes, so far. I like to be able to shake somebody’s hand when I’m giving them money.

Where do you hope for all this to go? What’s your dream?

I’m really interested in using design to increase interactions in public spaces. Friendly graffiti. I’ve been hanging up hooks everywhere, just on the streets, in hopes that people will put bags on them!

Tom Dixon did a project where he developed chairs out of EPS foam, and he left a bunch of them out in Trafalgar Square in London, and people just could take them home with them. I’d like to be able to do projects like that – guerilla stuff.

What are you working on right now?

I’m working on designing some smaller things and soft goods. And I’m working on buying a truck, so I can go out and show my work all the time. Each time I go out with the truck, I want to have a new set of people do it with me – local artists and designers. That way it’s different every time. A lot of the post offices in New York are closing, so I’m hoping I can get one of their trucks. I found a bunch of delivery trucks, and I keep chickening out from buying them on eBay. But it’s going to happen in the next month or so. Right now I’ve really been focusing on getting the smaller products out there. It’s hard – there’s so much stuff to do!

Paul desk: More than a basic work surface but less than an entire workstation.

Design Glut on Design Glut… Super meta.

“I was contacted by Design Glut for an interview a few months ago, and I’ve been a dedicated fan of their products and weblog ever since. Upon our meeting I was instantly fascinated by these charming ladies’ design story, and I thought if anyone would make for an amazing interview, it’s Liz and Kegan. So for this very special guest feature the tables have turned- and I bring you the founders of Design Glut generously sharing the inner workings of what makes their operation tick. Enjoy!”

Thanks Paul! Be sure to check out his work here.

Paul: So how did the Design Glut blog come about?

Kegan: We were bored. We had a really slow period in our studio last summer and didn’t have much work to do and the website needed a revamp.

Liz: It was more of a portfolio website, at that point, which wasn’t really working out. We went through different ideas to try something new: event calendars, covering events, editorials, pictures that we liked – each day there was a different thing that we wanted to include in our website. But the one thing that really worked was the interviews.

K. We started having so much fun meeting people and hearing their stories. At first we mostly just convinced people we already knew to sit down with us and talk.

L. Then there was a turning point; it stopped being people we already knew. We started contacting people we really admired. Harry Allen and David Weeks were some of the first established people we interviewed who we didn’t already know- that’s when we felt like we were actually becoming journalists.

Liz and Kegan in the Design Glut office [image via New York Magazine]

Is it ever hard to get interviews with well-known people?

L. Some people that I would liked to have met didn’t respond to our request. But we are always surprised how getting a response doesn’t seem to have any correlation to how famous someone is.

Design Glut is a great example of how someone can leverage a design background to build a successful product business. How much time, percentage-wise, would you say you spend on the business vs. the design side of development? Be honest.

K. 90/10.

L. Shipping and emailing take up the bulk of our time. In the beginning we had trouble getting back to our creative sides after spending all day doing the business stuff, because it’s such a different part of the brain.

K. As a small business, all these balls are up in the air and you can’t drop anything. But it’s gotten much easier now, and all those mundane tasks have gotten more streamlined as part of our routine.

In your experience, is self-production more profitable than licensing?

L. Yes. For licensing to work, you have to have a bunch of products out. Then it adds up – but the royalties for a single product are very small. For a designer just starting out, I think it’s a lot easier to be profitable with one product if you do it yourself, rather than if you have a licensing deal. But you have to do a crapload more work, so it’s kind of a trade off. You can’t really have a day job if you need to go to the post office every day to ship your product.

Promo photo shoot outtake

How do you find a manufacturer to make your products?

K. Google.

L. We usually Google a manufacturing process, email ten of manufacturers, and get three responses back. Of those, one will be affordable. There’s always just one. We never really have to make a choice.

K. It would be nice sometimes if we could! Then once we have a manufacturer to work with, we try to do an initial smaller run of 100 pieces and see how those sell. We learned that as we went along. In the beginning, right of the bat we’d have 2000 pieces made.

L. We were crazy. Our first two products were the Egg Pants and the Hookmaker, and we got thousands of them made right away. I would never do that now…

But the Egg Pants were a huge success, right?

L. Egg Pants were kind of a perfect first product – by completely dumb luck. They’re tiny, they’re super light-weight, you can drop them and they won’t break, and they have this cuteness that everyone likes. All those things together meant that the product took off. So this huge success in the beginning led us to believing that selling our products would be really easy. “Let’s just start a company and make stuff and sell it!” From there, it took a long time, pretty much the last two years, to get back to consciously being able to design products that are smart as opposed to stumbling into it.

Packaging Egg Pants in the studio

So you got a thousand Egg Pants made at once? Where did you put them?

L. Luckily, Egg Pants are really small. Even 2,000 of those didn’t take up that much space – I was warehousing them in my bedroom.

K. But 2,400 Hookmakers… Luckily the Hookmakers weren’t shipped to us until we had a larger studio space. Otherwise it would have been a disaster – and it was already a mess. We had to receive pallets to a residential address. We were literally breaking the pallets down on the sidewalk and loading them into the basement of our building, where we weren’t even supposed to store things.

L. …and each pallet was 1000 pounds!

That must have been a big financial investment.

K. It was a huge financial investment. For the amount of money that goes into bringing one product to market, you have to be really sure that it’s a product you want to go with. And you have to find that money somewhere.
So how do you figure out how much something should cost?

L. Trial and Error. I remember pricing Egg Pants for the first time – I just had no clue. I asked people and nobody had any idea either. Now we know that stores will mark up the price 2-3 times from the wholesale price you sell to them at. I don’t know why that isn’t common knowledge; it should be. I think a lot of designers play a lot more with value and see what they can get for their objects, but we try to price things as low as we can. Our goal is to make conceptual design accessible.

K. For the cost of a product, there’s a lot of things you don’t think about at first: The bag that it goes in, the stickers, the box, the wrapping paper, the bubble wrap, the ink, the printing… The things that just cost a few cents add up really quickly.

L. That’s become part of our design process. It relieves a lot of stress down the line.

Liz and Kegan hard at work in the office.

How did you guys link up with overseas manufacturing?

K. The Hookmaker is the only thing we’ve done overseas so far. We had a factory recommended by a friend of ours. I don’t know how we would have found one on our own.

L. People that we’ve interviewed who are looking for overseas manufacturers seem to go over and look at factories themselves and find the one that’s right for them.

K. I would love to manufacture everything here, but if you want to sell products at a reasonable price point, or if you want to use a certain process, you sometimes have to go overseas. Each product we do involves a new process, so we figure out what’s best overall.

Can you recall a business mistake you made that you would never want anyone else to repeat?

L. Every single one of our mistakes has taught us something. I can’t think of any mistakes I wouldn’t repeat. I guess that’s how I am. If I don’t see a silver lining, I have to find it.

K. Having pallets delivered to the house was a pretty big mistake.

L. The vinyl!

K. Oh my god, the vinyl. When we did ICFF last year, we wanted a black background in our booth, but you can’t paint the walls unless you pay a fee for refinishing, which would have been like $600. So to get around that, we had the genius idea of getting solid 4’ x 8’ sheets of vinyl and sticking them to the wall. We started putting it up and it started bubbling and wrinkling like crazy. Every single person that peeked in our booth was asking if we needed help. I was about to have an utter meltdown. We still paid like $500 for the vinyl and it looked so bad. We were completely miserable.

So what’s the moral of the story?

K. Don’t try to apply large sheets of vinyl!

Liz and Kegan at their very first show, the DesignBoom Mart, in 2007
[image via Metropolis Magazine]

There’s an old adage that says you shouldn’t go into business with your friends. What would you guys say about that?

K. Well, we were business partners first and later we became friends.

L. At first we didn’t know each other at all. At Pratt, we had senior studio together and one day Kegan happened to tell me about the DesignBoom Mart at ICFF. I applied for it and we decided to split the table. Neither one of us was a “plays-well-with-others” type of person. We were both kind of surprised how well we worked together. So we figured we should probably keep the partnership going! Neither of us was looking for a business partner and I think that’s why it worked so well.

K. I’m sure that in any company with more than one person, inevitably there’s going to be some drama- but we’ve been really surprised how much other people expect there to be drama between us. It was funny how friends, family, even strangers would dig for it – they wanted to hear the drama!

L: Yeah, there isn’t much drama at Design Glut – but we joke about making stuff up and giving people want they want!

When did you start making hats?

I started when I was really young. I was married, and I was kind of a kept wife – I didn’t do anything. I was living in London, at the time. I was very bored, and my husband said, “Why don’t you take some night classes? You might enjoy it.”

So I took a fencing class, an archery class, and a hat-making class. I couldn’t fence for the life of me. I was so passive that I would always retreat. I was also very bad at archery – I was so weak that I couldn’t string my bow. In those days they were still wood, and you had to push them down very hard. I couldn’t do it. But I excelled in the millinery class. I was really, really good. So I said, “OK, that’s it, I’m going to be a milliner!”

And then life took really wild, wacky turns. My husband died. I moved to the United States. Then I had to support myself. So I didn’t think about making hats much, all of these years. But I always wore hats. Then when I turned 40 I thought, “What the hell, you have one chance in life to do what you really want to do.” I decided, OK, I’m going to make hats. I had a really cushy job with lots of great benefits, and people thought I was out of my mind when I quit!

How did you start your company?

In those days the East Village was really the happening spot, so I rented a tiny little storefront there. I’d had a full-time job up to that point, so I’d only made like 6 hats. And when I opened, I sold out of them immediately. I thought I was a great success – I’d sold 100% of my inventory! So I made more hats, and this is how it started going.

I have no formal training. I’ve never gone to school for anything. Even as a kid, I never went to kindergarten or grammar school or middle school or college. My parents were very radical and decided not to send the kids to school. So I have no sense of business, math, anything. I learned everything by doing it.

That’s amazing!

I think it’s pretty cool, in some ways. But it’s been difficult. If I had known how hard it was going to be, I would never have gone into business. People said, “Do you have a five-year plan? What’s your strategy? Have you done market research?” I never did any of that. I just opened, and I thought, “Well, if it fails I’ll do something else!” I think that’s the only way to go. Once you’re completely immersed in it, you can’t stop!

How did it evolve?

More and more people started coming to the store. Stylists came to borrow hats for fashion shoots. And then designers came, asking me to make hats for their runway shows. I started feeling overwhelmed and hiring students to help me. Then Bergdorf Goodman asked me to make hats for them. I turned them down; I didn’t want to get involved in anything that big! I just wanted to sit in my store and make my hats! They kept asking, so finally I gave in.

It became so much work that I had to close the shop. That was the only way I could make enough hats to fill the orders. I decided to take a space next door, turn it into a studio, and hire more assistants. It started rolling by itself.

What is your studio like now?

I design 4 collections a year, 2 for men and 2 for women. And then I do special projects for whomever asks me. Some companies might ask me to design a couple hats for them – Nike, or The Gap, or whoever. And for the rest of the time I just deal with financial stuff. That’s really my job, these days. The minute your business is viable, you start thinking about money instead of doing what you love. I find it incredibly frustrating.

I don’t make the hats anymore. I design every hat – I come up with the original idea and I make the prototype, but then I hand it off. I have a great staff. Some of the people have worked for me for more than 10 years. We make pretty much everything.

It’s incredible that everything is made here in Brooklyn.

The reason we do it all in-house is because there’s no one else who can produce things like this. There used to be – there’s a city upstate called Gloverville that had dozens of factories that just made gloves. And there were factories that made hats. But all of them closed down in the ’60s when the fashions changed, and not everybody wore hats and gloves anymore. Now the skill for making those things is gone. There are a couple hat factories left in New Jersey, but they make horrible, industrial things that are stamped out like cookies and have no life.

How did you end up in this studio space, in the GMDC?

I have a friend who makes fine jewelry, and her husband is an iron-worker. He made the stairway at MoMA, for instance. He was looking for a place to move his shop and he visited the GMDC building. His wife told me about how cool this place was. I came to look at it and thought it was fantastic. I love that they’re supporting craftsmen and artisans. Previously, I had a very nice studio in the Garment District, with very cheap rent. But when the lease ended the rent went from $9 a square foot to $42 a square foot, so I had to get out.

We’ve made these little showrooms here, one for the men’s hats and one for the women’s hats. But sometimes it’s hard to get people to come here. The buyers for “The Majors” – Bergdorf’s, Saks, Nieman’s, Barney’s, all those places – they won’t come to Brooklyn. They’ve never been in Brooklyn! The foreign buyers love it, though. They have heard of Bushwick, so they trek all the way out here and take lots of pictures!

One of the reasons we started our blog was because it was so hard for us to transition from art school into trying to run a business. You went to art school – you know!

Going from college to the real world was awful. Awful. College was not even an approximation of the real world. It was not even 1% similar. And I’m not saying that my degree was a wasted effort, but nothing I did really prepared me.

We always say that graduating art school feels like landing face-down on the cement.

It’s like you were just academically roofied! You’re waking up from like a bad night out, and you’re thinking, what the hell just happened to me?

That might be the best analogy EVER. What led you to furniture design?

Looking back, it all makes sense. My mom was an antique store owner. I grew up around that – the decorative arts, in a really broad sense. And I was always building things, like tree forts. While the other kids had a one-story tree fort – I had to build a five-story tree fort. I had to outdo every other kid on the block. I made little trap-doors so you could climb up to the higher levels. And in high school I designed and built the sets for the school plays. Now, I can see that I was already on the path to being a furniture designer, I just didn’t know it.

Fife tripod lamp by MFD – spun brass shade, ebonized oak legs, & brass feet

Where did you study?

I went to RISD, and, like so many people, had no idea what I wanted to do. Growing up, I was exposed to a narrow view of what fine art is. Ceramics was exotic. So I went into RISD thinking, “If I’m going to go to art school, I guess I’m going to be a painter.”

And then the summer between freshman and sophomore year, I met this amazing woman named Megan. She was in furniture design. Her car literally broke down in front of my house. I was kind of handy, so I helped her jump-start her car. We got to talking, and she invited me over for dinner. I went into her apartment, and it was full of all this furniture she had made. I was so impressed!

“You mean furniture design is also an art? Artists make furniture? I thought furniture came from a factory or something! ” It’s incredible that I was so naive at that point of my life. I started calling the furniture department and begging them to let me in. The program was a great experience. There was a core group of us that really became “wood nerds.”

I love that term! Wood nerds!

Yeah, like, “Ooh, check out the finish on this surface!” Or, taking a human hair and trying to squeeze it between the joinery in a table. If you can’t get your hair in it, then you’re good. So I was one of the wood nerds.

Barrett writing desk by MFD – leather, bronze, and walnut

What did you do after school?

I came to New York. I’ve been here for six years. I can’t believe I’m saying that!

I got a job working for a hotel company, designing hotel interiors. Going from wearing shellac-encrusted jeans to dressing in a button-down shirt and tie every day and working in a cubicle was total culture shock. The people who I worked with were all branding experts, and that job was an immersion in how companies brand themselves. We were designing collections of furniture to go into different hotels, depending on where they were. For a coastal hotel, we would do a coastal scheme. That was so foreign to me. Now, it makes so much sense, but coming out of college I had no awareness of how the world organized itself.

So I did that for three years. Then I continued the brand education – I went to work for ducduc. And that was the total opposite extreme, because it was a startup company.

What was working for a startup like?

I showed up for work the first day and we didn’t have computers or seats to sit in. We literally took an open floorplan of a loft in SoHo, built walls, painted, set up desks. Man, you could not get a more complete crash course on how to start a business from the very beginning. And then once we were set up, we started prototyping furniture. We produced 5 lines of furniture, and it was basically just four of us. Because it was just us, we did everything. We designed the postcards, we designed the website, we designed the furniture. Everything you can possibly think of.

So when did you start Matthew Fairbank Design?

Sort of on the sidelines of all of that stuff, around 2005, I decided that I was going crazy being away from the shop. My sanity depended upon having more hands-on experiences. So I decided to look on Craigslist for people out there who were looking to share space. I met this guy who was a guitar maker, and we rented an illegal woodshop on the Lower East Side. I had that shop for a couple years. No ventilation, no light, no freight elevator… You had to carry everything. Imagine carrying a 4′ x 8′ sheet of plywood up a stairwell as narrow as a fire escape. One time I made a project and I had to cut it in half because it didn’t fit out the door.

Oh boy. That’s a design challenge in and of itself.

That’s an ongoing challenge – getting pieces into elevators and stairwells.

Otley chest of drawers by MFD – pickled oak cabinet & hand rubbed lacquer drawers

Can you describe what MFD does?

Well, from the time of the Lower East Side shop, I’ve been making furniture for other people. A homeowner comes to me and says, “I saw this coffee table but it’s not the right size. Can we do some things differently?”

I’m both a designer and a fabricator. 90% of what I’m asked to do, at this point, is other people’s designs. Maybe there will come a day when I say, “These are the pieces that I make. If you want to buy one of them, that’s great, and if not, you’re shopping at the wrong store.” Sure, that would be a lovely day. But for now, I’m billing myself as a custom fabricator who also designs his own collection of furniture.

At BKLYN Designs, the pieces I showed were suggestions for what I could do – but they could be any size, any shape, any color. It could be your own design. I really just wanted to show that I do a lot of materials. I specialize in lacquer, I specialize in solid wood joinery, I specialize in metals.

How did BKLYN Designs end up for you?

The show was great. For me, personally, it was kind of a benchmark. It really forced me to crack down and do all the official stuff for my business, like getting an EIN number. In addition to that, the feedback has been tremendous. From consumers, homeowners, and also design professionals – architects and interior designers. Although I’m finding that a lot of this feedback isn’t materializing into anything yet. Since it was my first time doing the show, I can’t gauge if it’s because of the economy, or because it just takes time and a lot of follow-up work, or because BKLYN Designs is a great PR show but not a great business-generating show. So it’s a lot of things that I’m trying to figure out.

Rhodes chaise lounge by MFD – saddle leather, bronze nail head, & pickled oak frame

It’s probably a combination of all of those. Although, in our experience, you have to do a ton of follow-up work after a show. Lots of emails and phone calls to actually hammer things down.

There’s one client that came out of the show, who I started doing two pieces of furniture with, and now she’s got about five more that she wants me to bid on for her. That’s incredible. Even if it’s just that one client, that’s worth it.

Right now I’m still working 3 days a week for my day job that I’ve had for the last 3 years. And then I’m MFD two days a week, plus weekends. I think the secret for me has been always being really transparent about what I’m doing. I’m not trying to appear bigger than I am.

Would you like to have your work produced by other people, or do you want to stay both the designer and the maker?

I think both! Do I outsource things? Of course. Do I do lathe turning? No. Do I do my own veneering and cutting joinery? Yes. I think I do more myself than a lot of designers do, and that gives me the advantage of quality control.

Captain Smith by Grow House Grow! – photo via The New York Times

When did you realize you wanted to make wallpaper?

It took me years to connect the dots. I knew since I was really little that I wanted to be an artist. My mom is a professional storyteller and children’s book author, and as I got older I realized it was important to me that everything I made had a story attached to it. This led me into illustration. I felt more confident in my artwork because there was a purpose – I was telling a story.

I moved to the city, started doing freelance illustration, and became totally dissastified. I still felt like I was just making work for someone else – not doing it for myself. I was sitting in husband’s apartment one day, messing around in Illustrator, and I started repeating some of my little drawings and thinking about pattern. The great intuition spoke, and I realized I wanted to make wallpaper.

That was in 2005. I didn’t officially become a company until 2007. In those two years I got married, got a studio, realized there was no class for how to make wallpaper, and just started chipping away at it myself. My first line of wallpaper was totally inspired by children’s book characters and memories from when I was a kid.

Cottontail by Grow House Grow!

How did you get attention for your first line?

One thing they don’t teach you in art school is marketing. That was super hard. I saved all my money and hired one of my husband’s co-workers to put up a website. Then I just emailed lots and lots of companies and blogs. Most were receptive, some weren’t.

Were there any specific blogs or magazines which really helped out out?

I got really lucky and Daily Candy featured my papers last September. I still get a ton of hits from them. Then, randomly, I was bartending and mentioned to a guy that I design wallpaper. He said he worked at Time Out and I should give him my card. I did, and it took like three or four months, but I got a phone call from them.

They didn’t feature the wallpaper specifically, but agreed to do a how-to guide on making your own light-switch covers. Then I realized I had to figure out how to make a light-switch cover… That’s the definitely the way I roll. You have to be a yes person. I got a great response to that article.

Nellie by Grow House Grow!

How is the wallpaper made? Your colors are incredibly rich.

Originally I had a studio on Morgan and Grand, and was doing the printing myself. I had these huge screens that were impossible to move, and it just hit me that doing it this way wasn’t going to work. At the time, I didn’t really know my options, but I knew I wanted things to be handprinted. I liked the craftsmanship.

When I decided to approach a professional printer, I asked several people for help. Jill Malek gave me her contact, and I am eternally grateful. The printer is amazing. It’s this husband and wife team that has been handprinting wallpaper for over thirty years. They’re located upstate, in this old converted bowling alley with super long tables that they roll the paper on. Even though they do really high end stuff, they are also so helpful and understanding. It’s been a huge relief to me to work with someone who is so professional, and yet so easy going.

How would you like Grow House Grow to, um, grow?

I’m really working on selling my paper to individuals right now, through my website. It would also be amazing to work with contractors, architects, and interior designers.

I could also see myself, under a different name, producing patterns which are machine printed. I hate that my wallpaper is so expensive, but I think I’m pretty much at the bottom, price-wise, of what people charge for hand-printed wallpaper. To create a product that is beautiful, handmade, sustainable, and actually priced to sell it is really difficult.

Could you tell us about your new line?

My new line is a bit darker than my last one. I took three historical characters and thought, “What would be on their walls? What would their parlor rooms look like?”

The first pattern is for Captain Smith of the Titanic. It’s a jellyfish damask. As the Titanic sank in those early hours on April 15, 1912, Captain Smith was lost and his final actions remain unknown. It’s easy to imagine the luxurious ocean liner gliding under the currents to the soft ocean floor, and being taken up by a new, undersea crew – this time with tentacles.

Captain Smith by Grow House Grow!

The second one is for for Aleister Crowley. I read this one specific story about him, that details the summer he spend in 1933 in Cornwall. He was having these crazy drug-induced parties, and this couple got involved in his black magic debauchery and feared for their lives. They approached a woman named Ka Cox, who was married to a well-to-do man, and good friends with Virginia Woolf. She was down to business. She said she’d help them, went to their house to prove that the black magic didn’t exist, and for whatever reason, inexplicably dropped dead that night. The pattern is for her – it’s a damask with hands.

Aleister Crowley by Grow House Grow!

The last pattern is for a woman named Cattle Kate. She was an incredible lady who bought some land and decided she was going to raise and drive cattle. She branded her cows, and was living happily with her husband until her neighbor, a very wealthy cattle rancher, decided he wanted her land. He started a rumor saing that her cows were stolen from the state and misbranded. Not only that, he roused up a bunch of angry neighbors who dragged her and her husband to the river, and lynched them. The wealthy rancher was put in prison for the murder, but mysteriously every single witness disappeared or backed out from testifying.

Cattle Kate by Grow House Grow!

Amazing! I can’t wait to see your booth at BKLYN DESIGNS. Before we close, do you have any advice for your fellow entrepreneurs?

When I first started all of this, I had so many questions; they really don’t make it easy for you. Trying to figure everything out business-wise, and logistically plan out the future of my company, was really hard. I couldn’t believe I didn’t take any business classes in college. Then again, there is something to be said for learning it along the way.

One book that really helped me is called Craft, Inc. It’s for the typical Etsy designer and craftsman. It really lays out every step of the process: having an idea, making a couple for your friends, taking it seriously, the legal stuff, how to market yourself and onwards. I basically just followed every chapter. I have a few friends that have tried to start businesses, and I recommend it to everyone.

Factory Fresh by SKEWVILLE

What is Factory Fresh?

Ali: To me, art is a constant, feverish evolution. I want to see what’s new. An artist came here a couple weeks ago, with stuff from 2003 in his portfolio. That’s not what we’re about. I want to see what you did last week. That’s Factory Fresh. It’s supposed to be the freshest work. I really only like when people come to me with site-specific proposals.

Adam: I think a lot of these artists share my same lifestyle. There’s no weekends, no nighttime – just pauses where you get to go out and do something.

Ali: People don’t realize how much artists work to make things really happen. Artists, the really talented ones, work non-stop. The self promotion, going to shows, making sure you’re showing face – it’s a lot of work. People think going to an event isn’t big deal – but have you ever talked to 100 people in a night? It’s exhausting.

From Elba to Helena by Jon Burgerman and Jim Avignon

Tell me about the show that’s up right now.

Ali: I wanted our friend Jon to do a show here. When I asked, he said, “Your space is so big; I can’t do the whole thing myself. But I’ve really wanted to work with this guy Jim…” So I flew Jon in from the UK, and Jim from Berlin. They’d never met before.

Adam: Jon said he was going to bring some work, and then he showed up with nothing. He came, we set everything up, and they just worked – passing the pieces back and forth. Even though their styles are very similar, they’re two totally different personalities. Jon would be up at like 9AM drawing, while Jim would stroll in at 2PM – it was a funny dynamic.

So let’s back up a little. You started with the Orchard Street Gallery. When did you think, “We could open a gallery.”

Adam: I lived in Queens, in a building that my twin brother and I called Skewville. Then my brother got married, moved out of Skewville, and I had to find tenants. The whole point of Skewville was him being there! It got weird, and rent went up, so Ali suggested I move into the city with her. I said, “The only way I’m moving of Manhattan is if we have a storefront that we can do something with.” I wasn’t going to pay all this money to live in Manhattan unless we could do something. So three weeks later, we find Orchard Street, a second-floor storefront that they didn’t care if we lived in or not.

Ali: We lived very small, in the back, with a raised bed and closets on the way to the bathroom.

Adam: Very Japanese living.

Ali: The gallery really started because we threw a show of our own, to use the space.

Blah Print Radio by SKEWVILLE

How did that transition into showing other people’s work?

Ali: Our friends Jeff and Rubble asked, “Can we use your space to do a show?” So we booked them. It started developing into more and more, and we just went with it. We were under the radar. We let people do whatever they wanted, and didn’t tailor it towards being sellable. Nothing we ever did was sellable. Those were awesome shows, though. For one of the shows we curated, we hung markers down from the ceiling and let everybody draw on the walls. It was crazy – it was a scene. Then another gallery then moved in next door. The owner met with us, and we talked about both doing monthly art shows. We ended up just doing random shows that filled space to keep up with their once-a-month thing.

Adam: Fail did a show there, next door. Fail was a big street-art collective back in those days. We knew they were having a book launch and art show next door. Really stuffy and white-wall. So what I did was give blank sneakers to 75 other street artists, make a fake city scene inside Orchard Street, and hang wires. When people came with their sneakers they’d made, we hung them up. Our show was jam packed, and the Fail opening was empty. After that they didn’t want to do anymore shows with us.

Ali: We didn’t do anything properly at Orchard Street. Now that we have this space, we also have a website, an accountant, a license… Things are by the book.

Ride or Die by Ad Deville

When you closed Orchard Street, did you know you were going to open a new gallery? What happened there?

Ali: We got kicked out of Orchard Street. Our building is now a giant hole, and they’re building some luxury condo. It made us realize that this could happen to us anywhere in NY, so we decided we wanted to make an investment and buy a place.

Why did you pick Bushwick?

Ali: We knew that this area had artists, we liked it, and we could stay here cheaply for a while. We didn’t want to start something and get kicked out again in five years – it goes fast.

Adam: It’s funny because this area has been getting so much press now. People think it’s up-and-coming. I’ve been living in NY my whole life, and even in Williamsburg, if you walk down the wrong block, it still looks just like it did fifteen years ago. Only the rent has quadrupled.

Ali: Then we hear Chelsea galleries are moving into the neighborhood, and it makes us a little nervous. We were just doing this thing in the middle of nowhere!

Adam: On the flip side, it definitely helps. It’s stressful to have competition, but it’s not like we all sell hammers and screwdrivers. Galleries don’t sell the same exact thing.

What separates you guys out?

Adam: In the year-and-a-half between closing that gallery and finding this space, street art has become a huge commodity in the gallery scene. Being a street artist, I feel a little icky about making money off the whole scene. Even the mentality of the artist now has shifted. It’s, “I can make money, so I’m going to put art on the street”. I feel like that whole movement is unpure now, it’s about making money. Those artists will put the art on the street, and sell the same piece of art in the gallery – it’s just shameless promotion.

Ali: A lot of the people we deal with do one kind of work on the street, and then they show a totally different side of them in the gallery setting. We’re exploring that aspect.

Ali and Ad in the gallery

I feel like you’re also confusing the situation by being both artists and gallery owners. Isn’t that kind of cheating?

Adam: When we started Orchard Street, street art wasn’t even gallery art at that point. The only way for us to show, was to do it ourselves. Now, Ali pretty much runs the gallery.

Ali: I’m just a jack of all trades. I do fabric art, so I have nothing to do with anyone else’s thing. I’m just following an aesthetic and a purpose, And I don’t care if I’m confusing things. I’m promoting Adam’s art, and all these other people that I know.

That’s so great. I love that. It’s much better then pretending to be something you’re not.

Ali: We’re lucky like that. We’re not rich, but we’re rich with friends in the art world. We call ourselves B team. There’s a crazy art world out there, people slinging millions of dollars around. We’re here on a “lower level”, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.