So, it’s been almost six months since we hatched the plan to greatly expand our product line and focus exclusively on jewelry. So much has happened since then! Due to the great success of our Kickstarter campaign, it was all made possible, and the new line is here. Check it out in our online store.

We’ll be launching our full new jewelry collection at the upcoming January 2011 New York Gift Fair. Come by our booth and get a first look at it in-person!

The new pieces have started rolling in, and we’re super excited about them.

We’ve been long-time admirers of Adrian Buckmaster and Deity Delgado’s work. He’s the photographer, she’s the stylist and make-up artist, and the scenes they make are magical. A little while back, we interviewed Adrian about how he got into photography, and he told us his inspiring story. This season, as Design Glut just launched a few new products and we were in serious need of new photos, we finally had an opportunity to work with them. It was such an awesome experience in creative collaboration that I thought I’d share some of the behind-the-scenes here.

We didn’t have a real concept for the shoot in mind, and Adrian talked us through many options. Finally, from the fog of vague ideas, a concrete plan emerged. Adrian has done several shoots with painted backdrops that blur the line between fantasy and reality, which we love. He even paints the backdrops himself! Talk about multi-talented.

Inspired by Adrian’s paintings, as well as Edward Gorey’s drawings and Alice in Wonderland, we came up with the concept for a painted backdrop of a huge present. A few days later, Adrian sent back photos of his full-scale interpretation. We were thrilled! He actually painted part of the giant present on the floor of the set, so that when the camera is the correct angle, it looks completely 3-dimensional. Look at how the present appears to be popping off the wall where the backdrop meets the floor. SO FREAKING AWESOME.

The backdrop literally set the stage for the whole shoot, and created a magical, surreal world. Here are the final images, featuring Liz and Kegan with the Balloon Necklace, Vanity Bookmark, Jar Tile, Money To Burn Candle, and World Links Necklace. Enjoy!

Kickstarter is an amazing platform to fundraise for creative projects, and we’re currently running a campaign to make our new jewelry line. As of tonight, we’re at 53% of our goal with just 9 days left to go. Eep, nerve wracking! If you like these designs and support Design Glut, please pre-order now so we can stay in business and keep bringing you awesomeness in the future! Click the link to see even more designs from our new line, as well as all the great rewards we’re offering everyone who contributes.

Pre-order select designs from the new collection on Kickstarter.

We believe it’s the role of creatives to start the uncomfortable conversations that cause people to grow.

“A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.” – Timothy Ferriss

Inspired by the quote above, we challenged a group of designers to create something which provokes an uncomfortable yet important conversation. Participating designers were given complete freedom with the type of object they created, the materials they used, and the topic of the conversation they set out to provoke.

As a result, we have ended up with a wonderfully broad body of work – housewares and furniture, jewelry and fashion, graphics and video. Still, everything exhibited here has one thing in common: the desire to make you uncomfortable. It’s your turn to judge how well they succeed.

- Design Glut, Curators

Where did the idea for EBOOST come from?

Really a void in the marketplace. There was no product out there that spoke to my or my partner’s needs. We’re on the go, working 15, 18 hour days. Out late, up early. Healthy, working out. We’d have to take a variety of supplements and vitamins to really operate at full capacity.

We also knew that those energy drinks and stimulants really irritate your adrenals. That temporary spike in energy is followed by a monster crash, which is your body becoming completely exhausted and depleted of all the important nutrients. So we thought, “There’s got to be a way to vitalize your body with nutrients and get healthy energy.”

That’s fantastic. I’m a huge fan of EBOOST – I got a sample at some event a while back and tried it. What I like is how it doesn’t cause you to crash the way a normal energy drink or coffee would. So once you realized there was this void in the market and you wanted to fill it, was it hard to go about making your own supplement?

Yeah, it took a minute. We originally started with a guy who just didn’t get it. I mean, he was in the business, but he didn’t understand what we were trying to create. So we wasted almost a year with him, and then we got hooked up with the biggest and the best in the industry. And he literally said, “I know exactly what you need. Come back in three weeks.”

We spent almost two years developing EBOOST. Taste was so important. Delivering on the promise was so important. We were our own toughest critics. Once it passed our standard, it was good enough for everybody.

Do you have a business background, or is this the first company that you’ve started?

I had my own marketing agency, prior to this, for 8 years. I worked with P. Diddy, Sean Combs, for 6 years doing all of his marketing.

So when you were launching your product, you definitely had the marketing part down.

That part was easy, but operating and building a company from scratch is not easy and not cheap. It always costs more money, takes longer than you want, and is harder than you think.

What was the hardest thing to learn?

We’re taking a non-traditional approach. We want to be at the cash register at a fashion place as opposed to on the vitamin supplement shelf at GNC. It’s more of a lifestyle approach. So there’s a lot of educating people, getting the product out there, so that people see this like a fashion statement with great health benefits. We’re trying to appeal to a little bit more discerning customer.

Where do you hope for your company to go? What are the plans?

We’re going to put a huge emphasis on trying to scale the business up in New York, and then roll it out to LA and to other markets from there. Trying to really get concentric and dominate in the market as opposed to being a lot of little places.

Have you had the same strategy from the beginning, or has that changed?

No. To be honest, we threw a lot of stuff against the wall the first two years, just to get feedback and proof of concept. We saw what worked and what didn’t work. We realized that as small as we are, and as undercapitalized, we have to really focus on an area and put all of our resources into it.

What’s been your happiest moment along the way?

Maybe seeing the very first sale online come through? Or the very first PO from the W Hotels – that was exciting. Or just hearing people’s feedback, saying that they love the product. When you hear people talk about it on their own, that’s exciting.

Now that you’ve gone through a lot of the work, what’s your advice for entrepreneurs that just have an idea or are just getting started?

I think it’s important to work with experts. Listen to them, and invest in them, because ultimately it will save you time and money. We’ve stumbled along the way because we’ve been under-resourced or spread thin, and not paid attention to some of the details that we probably should have, from an operational standpoint. Operations are the most critical piece. You have to have all that in place so that when you do grow, you’ve got a solid foundation.

Visit the EBOOST site and check out all of their products.

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.

How would you describe the Factory Vintage aesthetic, to people who haven’t been in here?

It’s retro. The store that I really emulated is Biba, in London. They started out in a store that was probably about my store’s size, and then moved on to have a whole department store. They only lasted like 10 years, because they got so big that it imploded. The founder was really into Art Deco and the 1930’s and 40’s. They used these Victorian coat racks to hang clothes on. It had so much of her personality in it. That’s what I’m shooting for with Factory Vintage – it’s more like a lifestyle than a boutique. It’s just an extension of me.

Where do you get all your clothing?

Sometimes I go thrifting around the city, but mainly people bring it in and I buy what I like. I just go through it and pick out what I think is salable, and and then I wash or dry clean it. For the accessories – I buy new sunglasses and earrings and things like that, for people who want them for parties.

When did you start the store?

At the end of August, it’ll be 2 years since I opened. A store called Viva Vintage used to be here. I worked there for 5 years, through college and after. Then the old owner decided that she didn’t want to have a storefront anymore – she’d been doing it for 10 years. One day she told me, “I’m thinking about closing,” and I thought, “Crap! What am I going to do?”

So I took over the space, painted, added carpeting, and got all new racks and furniture. I wanted it to be more homey. I also wanted it to be more open, so I can keep an eye on people. The old owner used to have tons of problems with shoplifting. One summer we had a mass theft of tube tops – you’d go to organize and there would be like 15 of them gone. They’re like $8! Is there a black market for tube tops?

On that note, what’s been the hardest part about running a store?

I’ve been really lucky in that my dad started his own studio, and so he has been awesome at helping me out with my spazz-outs! He told me, “Caitlin, when I opened the studio, I had 6 months where I didn’t have any clients.” You’ll have days where it’s totally dead and you’re like, “Fuck! Nobody’s ever going to buy anything ever again!” And then the next day is amazing.

I was talking to one of our neighbors, who owns a bookstore on Printer’s Row that’s been there for 20 years, and she told me, “We definitely have days where we make $10 and think, ‘Crap this is it, we’re done.’ And then the next day is fine. That never goes away.”

Also, trying not to take stuff personally is really hard. Because it’s your taste, it’s an extension of you. So I have to remember that when somebody doesn’t like something, it’s not against me.

So where do you hope for the store to go?

The direction I would love to go is to have vintage, but also have new clothes. I would love to be bigger. It would be awesome if I could have a store in London!

How have you funded this, starting out?

I took out a $40K bank loan. It took about 6 months. I did a business plan – I just got a book from the library and I basically copied it with my own information. I took it to 3 different banks, and we ended up getting it from Devon bank, because my dad had a relationship with them. He co-signed, since I was 24 and I don’t have anything in collateral. And even so, it still took a long time. Now, with the recession, I can’t imagine what it would be like to try and get a loan. It was definitely stressful. And $40K isn’t anything, really.

Your concept of money really changes. Especially when you’re our age and you’ve never bought a house, you’ve never dealt with tens of thousands of dollars before.

I know – for a while I thought it was the weirdest thing to write a check for like $2,000. But it’s amazing, when you’re starting, how much everything adds up.

What’s your advice to people who want to work for themselves?

Make sure that it’s not all about your job all the time. That can be really hard, when it’s your business. You’ve got to compartmentalize. If you have a really bad day, you have to be able to go home and turn it off, otherwise you will drive yourself insane! It took me a year or so to figure that out.

STPLxAIRWALK collection

You do so many things – I’m really curious, timeline-wise, what was first? What was the first project you created?

First was clothing. I was at Parsons School of Design for graphic design, so I guess you could say that was first. But it was just schooling. I didn’t make any money from it.

What inspired you to do clothing?

It started because I was taking a silkscreening class. They taught you how to silkscreen on canvas and paper. Well, my friends weren’t really about putting art up on the wall of their shitty apartments that they shared with six people. There probably wasn’t even a wall – more like a curtain! I wanted to make tees for my friends to wear. That was really how it started. And the funny story is that Parsons didn’t allow you to print on t-shirts.

Really?

Yeah. They didn’t allow it. So a friend of mine and I would break into the silkscreen lab. We would leave a window open and climb in at night. We would come in with a pillowcase full of tees, set up a sweatshop, and print stuff. It was really, again, just to give out to friends.

STPL collection Spring 2009

That changed on March 7th, 1997 – my birthday. I was going to go out with my girlfriend and get a nice dinner. She wanted to get her hair done, so I dropped her off at a hair salon. While she was there, I went shopping and walked into a store on Lafayette – Triple Five Soul. Back then, in ‘97, Triple Five Soul was a boutique; it was a much smaller operation. I walked in and the manager said, “Hey, that’s a cool shirt you’re wearing, where’d you get it?” I told him I made it, and he said, “Well, if you make 12, I’ll try to sell them here.”

Nice!

That was the first order. I always wonder, if my girlfriend wasn’t doing her hair, or if I didn’t go in that store, literally this whole thing that you see might not exist. I had no plan to do it. It’s weird to think that if I’d made a left on Crosby or something, my whole life could have been changed!

So what happened next? Did you start trying to sell the shirts more?

No! [laughs] It just happened.

In a week, the guy at Triple Five Soul told me, “We sold out. We’ll take 24 this time.” So I made 24. Then another store in SoHo, called Union, saw what we were doing. They said, “Hey, we love your stuff. Why don’t you do a different design for us, and we’ll start ordering.” So I was selling to two shops in SoHo, all the while, still breaking into school with my friend to make the shirts.

Eventually it got to the point where my studio apartment in Chinatown was like a sweatshop. There were boxes everywhere. I had my friend in fashion design cutting labels and sewing them in. I had another friend making hang tags for me. I remember one time when we had to get an order out the next day, the needle on the sewing machine broke. It was the last needle. And it was 3AM! I started calling all these places to try and get more, and finally found a place that was open. I skated up to 70th St. When I finally brought the needles back, they were like the holy grail! That’s how we started. It was pretty fun.

STPL collection Spring 2009

How did you go from having your clothing line to doing work for clients?

People who were fans of the t-shirts would come to me and say, “Hey, I heard you’re a graphic designer, can you help us with our CD cover?” Or business card, logo, party flier… Various little odd jobs . I started taking that on as well, and the business kind of became twofold.

So when you graduated, were you set up enough that you just went straight into doing your own thing?

I didn’t graduate. I dropped out. It was my second year, sophomore year, that I was doing this.

Wow, that was quick!

I’m a hustler. I get bored easily. I’ve gotta do something! My sophomore year those two SoHo stores were putting in orders for 24 or 36 shirts. Then this Japanese guy bought one of my shirts at Union and told them, “I want to talk to this guy,” so they gave him my number. He calls me at home and he says, “I want a shirt, and I live in Japan.” And I was like, “That’s awesome! I’ll send you a shirt in Japan.” And he’s like, “Uh, no, I want 1,000 shirts.” My third order! 1,000 shirts.

No way. That’s when you have to drop everything and just do it.

I was like, “Please hold,” and started screaming and jumping up and down on the bed. And then got back on the phone, “OK, yes, 1,000 shirts, we can do that.”

But I had no idea how – how was I going to break into school with 1,000 t-shirts? That was really when I said, OK, I can always go back to school. But this opportunity – I’m not going to tell this guy, “Let me graduate, let me take my finals first.” It was now or never. I took the opportunity, and I haven’t gone back yet. But I do teach now! I teach at NYU, Parsons, and I just started teaching at Columbia University, at the executive master’s program. I don’t even have an associates degree! It’s kind of ironic.

Reed Space in the LES

It makes you think about the value of school.

It does. I think school is for some people and not for others. It just depends on how your brain is wired.

So your clothing brand was taking off, and your consultancy was taking off – when did you open Reed Space?

Right as the clothing line was doing well, I knew I wanted a retail store. When I would go to visit stores that carried Staple, I’d always be a bit disappointed. As a store, you’re not worried about individual brands, you’re worried about your whole shop. I would think, “Why are they displaying it like that?” Or I’d listen to a guy selling it to a customer and I’d think, “That’s not the concept!” It just wasn’t right. I always felt, “Man, I want to open my own store.” And not just to sell Staple, but to represent brands properly and in a way that they respect and appreciate.

In 2001, 9/11 happened. Our office at the time was on Division St., which is in the shadow of the World Trade Center. I couldn’t go to my office for weeks. Sometimes they would let us in, but the electricity was shot. If you printed and faxed and got a phone call at the same time, all the power would just go down. We had to move.

Why did you move to the Lower East Side?

One of the other things that I like to do is DJ, and I was DJing at this place that doesn’t exist anymore, that was on Orchard St. DJing would mean getting off of work at 5AM, standing outside with your records, and waiting 20 or 30 minutes for a cab to come. This was 2001, so the LES wasn’t like now. You had to hope that cabs would come by.

One night, as I was waiting for a cab, I looked across the street and I saw this “For Rent” sign on a storefront. When I looked in the window, I saw that the store went through the whole block and had a second entrance on Allen St. It was amazing! I immediately typed down the phone number. I called the guy, and then the next day I went to go look at it.

Reed Space in the LES

So you moved your office into that storefront?

Originally, it was Reed Space on one side, and Staple Design in the back. I built a partition to separate the space.
The idea was to have a design studio, and then make clothes and just put them in the store. Plus we could talk to our customers – it seemed perfect.

A couple years later, we moved Staple Design out, and made Reed Space the whole thing. The split space wasn’t big enough to carry all the brands that I wanted to be in Reed Space. And we were trying to work in the back, but every 30 seconds someone was coming in. In the beginning, only 10 people a day would come in, and it was fine. But once there was a constant stream of people, we couldn’t get any work done. So we had to separate.

Wow – so Reed Space just kind of took off on it’s own.

Yeah. Again, maybe if I wasn’t DJing that night, or if I didn’t look in a certain direction, there would be no Reed Space. I never said, “I’m going to open a store. I’m going to hire real estate agents, and scout locations, and create a P&L, and a budget.”

In the beginning my path was very random, and it felt random. But more recently, I’ve learned the ability to listen to that voice in me. You could say that it was totally random that I went to Triple Five Soul, or totally random that I found Reed Space. But I think that there is some sort of ethereal voice that compels you to do these things. The key to success is listening to that voice and acting on it. I think if you can get yourself in tune with that, whatever you want to call it, third eye, or soul – different people have different words for it – then you can start really rocking.

STPL collection Spring 2009

So as the whole thing grew, and you started bringing other people in and making a business out of it, what was the hardest lesson to learn? What was the hardest part of all of that?

People management. I’m still working on that one. It’s hard. We have a team of, depending on the time of year, anywhere between 18 and 20 people. The team is the most important thing, because no matter how smart or how hard-working you are, there’s only 24 hours in the day, 7 days in the week, and you’re only one person. You can only do so much. You need an army of people to help you.

I didn’t take any business classes or anything like that, but I do now read a lot of business magazines. The one thing that I always am intrigued about is management skills, for lack of a better word. Trying to figure out how to get the most out of people. A really big part of my job now, as President or CEO, is making sure that people are in the right position to do the best job possible. You might have a person that is a great person, but stuck in the wrong seat. You put them in the right seat and all of a sudden they’re a star! You don’t want to just fire somebody – you’ve got to make sure that you’ve vetted them properly.

That’s a really good attitude to have. What are you working on now? What are you excited about at the moment?

Well, let’s see. I just came back from Europe, and we showing/selling our Spring 2010 collection. Now, the second you get back from that, you go straight into designing and brainstorming for Fall 2010.

We’re also working on the next issue of Reed Pages. Quite honestly, I haven’t been this excited about a project in years. And it’s ironic that it’s this old-school art form – making a magazine. It’s experimental, in the way it’s done, and the feedback we’ve gotten on it has been incredible. I’m not looking to make millions of dollars with it, because it’s a dying industry, but it is something that I’m really excited about.

Jeff’s new magazine, Reed Pages

One last question. What does it take to succeed as an entrepreneur? What’s your advice to people who want to work for themselves?

Be prepared to work the hardest you’ve ever worked in your life, and multiply that by 100! And, hey, some people aren’t cut out for it. That’s cool, that’s why they make desk jobs where you just clock in at 9, clock out at 5, and you’re done. Your definition of “hard work” really has to be redefined. I talk to some friends, and they say, “Oh my god, it was such a busy day, I had a meeting! And I had to go to the bank! It was so hard, there was like a long line at the bank…” And I’m like, “I did that from 9:15 to 9:30!”

One comment I always get is, “Man, if I was just as lucky as you…” You know what, come to my office at 3AM, and I’ll show you how lucky I am. You don’t see that part – all you see is the Nike that came out, or the finished art exhibit, or the trip to Paris. It’s really hard to explain how much work goes into making those things happen.