A Q&A with Apparel Entrepreneur Scott London

A Q&A with Apparel Entrepreneur Scott London

Spotlight articles shine a light on designers and design materials we admire. Our founder and principal designer Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman has met many wonderful designers as an educator and career designer, and in our Spotlight interviews we ask them about their work and their design journey. In this interview we spoke with entrepreneur and angel investor Scott London. We were especially excited for this Q&A, as Interwoven just helped Scott launch is new padelwear brand, GLDN PNT, and seeing a product launch on the market is always special for us.

Scott London is a seasoned entrepreneur and angel investor with a remarkable career spanning over three decades. London has founded several iconic apparel brands, including Aspen Apparel, Wu-Wear, Zoo York, and Baby Phat, demonstrating his expertise in fashion and brand development. He was an active member of NY Angels, where he was instrumental in mentoring and funding early-stage companies. He is the founder of Metarama Gaming + Music Festival and has made significant contributions to the esports industry through investments in ventures such as Las Vegas Rogue, Millennial Esports, and Enthusiast Gaming. Currently, he serves as the CEO of the newly launched GLDN PNT. His experiences and entrepreneurial spirit make him a great person to talk to about the intersection of design and entrepreneurship. We asked him about the inspiration behind his new brand, what’s special about the sport of padel, how to foster a culture of creativity, and what it was like to work with a design consultancy.

Portrait of entrepreneur Scott London
Photo courtesy of Scott London.

Q: You’ve created a number of companies. What first drew you to entrepreneurship?

A:  I don’t know if there’s a real answer to that other than that it was a natural, organic thing. I started out of school just trying to make money. I hadn’t thought about getting a job. I hadn’t thought about being a professional. I didn’t plan to become an architect or a doctor or whatever. I was an art dealer because I was an art collector and I was friendly with some artists that happened to become very well known. One of my parents’ friends asked me if I could get them a painting from an artist I knew. That morphed into making some T-shirts. I started working for a friend, making T-shirts, and then started my own little T-shirt business. I manufactured for bars and restaurants and things like that. I ended up getting one big account, I remember it was Eddie Bauer. From there I built a private label knit business. So the answer is that nothing was planned.

Q: You recently launched your newest brand, GLDN PNT, what inspired you to start this collection?

A: I play a lot of padel. I moved down to Miami about seven years ago, after selling my last business, and I took up padel. I played a lot of tennis and then was introduced to padel. Padel is super big in Latin America and in Europe, and it’s a real melting pot, especially in Miami. I always thought that if I was going to go back into the clothing business, it would have to be activewear. Everybody’s wearing activewear these days, whether you’re dropping a kid off at school or you’re going to the local coffee shop. You’re no longer dressed up, you’re in your activewear clothes. I thought there was a need for it.

Q: This isn’t your first apparel brand. What makes this brand different? 

A: This became a more personal project for me, a more personal company design-wise than any I’ve done before. I used to manufacture for a company called FUBU, which stands for For Us By Us. And GLDN PNT is sort of my FUBU in the sense that it is something that I’m manufacturing for myself. I’ve always loved what Rick Rubin says about his taste in music and why he’s a successful producer. He says that he doesn’t know anything about music. He produces for himself and, luckily, people like that. This time, I’m taking that approach. I know what kind of shorts I’d like to have. I know what kind of t-shirt I’d like to wear. I don’t have to be everything to everybody. It’s a small capsule and I can design what I know I like and what I know my friends in the community like. We’d like to say that this is by padel for padel.

Q: How do you approach brand storytelling generally?

A: There aren’t a lot of padel brands. A Wilson or an Adidas – they are trying to be everything to everybody in a way. They have a tennis line that they say is also for padel. So this is padelwear specifically for padel athletes. And I’m going to get to what I think that means. But the first thing in creating this brand was asking: what is the soul of the brand? A partner and a friend of mine, who was the first person I spoke to about this, was José Moya. I started doubting myself and thinking, is this gonna be just a crazy idea? Is there really a need for this? Am I just gonna be making a bunch of clothes and giving them away to friends? We started talking about golden point and what it means. In padel, golden point is a term in lieu of deuce. When you get to the juncture of deuce, to move the game along, you sometimes play golden point, which means sudden death. Next point wins. And we thought, that’s actually really interesting. That means, make the next moment count. He said, That could work for anything. That could work for running, that could work for any sport. It’s like our version of just do it. That’s the essence of the brand right there. That’s what we’re building: it’s performance apparel for the moments that count, on and off the court. That’s our true north.

Q: Can you tell us about a key piece in the GLDN PNT collection?

A:  There’s a couple. I love our cotton and lyocell graphic tee. It’s a performance T-shirt. You can wear it to play. You can wear it to the gym. You can wear it to get an avocado toast. It’s a really comfortable, great feeling T-shirt. And it’s logo-driven but it’s not in your face. In my past life there were a lot of big logos. Now it’s more tonal, so it looks like a nice shirt and you can wear it on the court and it’s great to play in. A great piece for men and women is the short. We can’t be an Alo or a Lululemon, where everybody can find something in the collection. I want people to say they have to have the GLDN PNT short – that’s a great short. At 7 inches it’s a great inseam length and everybody can wear it. It’s a great fitting short with water resistant pockets, so the balls don’t get wet when people sweat. Then there’s a skirt called the flirty skirt, with two ways to store the ball and a sexy logo hit on the bike-style shorts underneath the skirt. I think those three products are the core of our brand right now.

Q: How do you find your customers and how do you work with them to create a GLDN PNT?

A: One of the great things about padel is that it’s a real community. There’s something about padel. I could talk about padel forever in terms of why it’s so addictive, but I think that there are a few big reasons. One: you’re playing in a box. You’re playing with four walls for the most part. It’s something that four people are doing together. In tennis doubles, you’re not necessarily even talking to your partner so much, let alone the people you are playing against. In padel, you’re talking to your opponents as much as you’re talking to your partner. It’s like golf in that sense, it’s very social. That bleeds out into the greater community. There’s a real sense of community in padel. You get everybody’s feedback. I joke around that I have a padel wife. I don’t even know where she lives, I just know her on the courts when we’re playing. I see my son’s friend’s parents. You can hear from the players what they want and what they need. I can see what they’re wearing day in and day out. 

Q: How much do you pay attention to current trends when making decisions about a collection?

A: I was paying attention to attitude more than trends. I told a friend of mine that I was playing with that I was doing this collection and he said, That’s great, because there’s nothing to wear. I was surprised by that. There’s a world of tennis clothes out there. It’s not actually anything different, right? It made me think about what he meant. I think it’s similar to the early days of snowboarding and skiing. Now it’s a whole category but, in the early days, the snowboarder didn’t want to wear the ski clothes. They could have, technically. There were some things that had to be adjusted with the pants but they could have worn ski clothes and they could still wear ski clothes today. But athletes want to differentiate themselves, because a sport is a community. 

Q: You worked with Interwoven to create this collection. Could you talk about some of the challenges and rewards of working with a design consultancy?

A: When I owned a private label knit business, I worked with other people’s designers and just did the manufacturing for them. Then, when I had my own brands, we had in-house designers. That’s how I got to know Rebeccah. We knew each other from a past life. She was working at Fila at the time, and I was manufacturing. Years later, I reached out to work with her on GLDN PNT.

As a startup, it was so great to work with Interwoven. It’s great to outsource design skills. You’re watching every penny and you can’t necessarily have an in-house designer. You probably don’t even know who you are yet as a brand to invest in an in-house designer. So you can go to somebody that you’ve worked with in the past and, potentially, as in the case with Rebeccah and her team, you know you speak the same language, and you can hit the ground running. That’s the pro. The con is that I wanted a hundred percent of Rebeccah’s time, but that’s not how it works. It was a great balance for us as a new brand and a great fit for the project. 

Q: How do you foster a culture of creativity and innovation within your team?

A:  I think you just have to keep an open mind about everything. It’s the same for every business, I imagine. You can’t bash bad ideas. You can’t have people afraid to come up with ideas because the diamonds are in the rough. The good idea is somewhere, it’s going to reveal itself if you let it. If people are afraid to present ideas, a great idea is not going to come out. Having open communication, open dialogue – it gets everybody flowing. You make sure everybody’s comfortable, make sure everybody’s collaborating, make sure everybody respects everybody.

I really like what James [Jebbia] did at Supreme. I like what Ronnie [Fieg] does at Kith. These are big shoes to fill but I like how they stuck to their core in terms of building the brands. They stuck to having capsules and drops and things like that versus trying to be everything to everybody. Supreme is a mature brand at this point but it still has an incredible soul. They were always true to that skateboard brand, even as they expanded into fashion, and I would love to be core like that to padel, and then be able to branch out from there and make the next moment count. I previously owned a brand called Zoo York. Downtown New York was a different thing than it is today, but the kids were wearing the product and skating up and down the streets, and it was the same with Supreme. It was being worn by the kid that was skating. Right now I’m focusing on stuff that’s primarily being worn on the court.

Q: How has your approach to creating new ventures evolved over the years?

A: It’s a lot scarier now. Now I know too much. When you’re young, you don’t know what’s ahead of you. You don’t know how hard it is. You kind of stumble along. I felt like I knew so much. I knew I needed to get the right pick and pack, I knew I needed the right designer, the right production person, and all these things are costly. There’s a very low barrier to entry, but there’s a big barrier to scale. Now all of a sudden I’ve created this brand, I’ve created this product, we have product in the warehouse, and now I actually have to get it to scale. I actually have to get it out there in the world. 

Q: What advice would you give someone who is thinking of starting their own apparel brand?

A: Just do it. It’s a lot of fun. if they’re passionate about it, if it’s something that they know and love that they’re designing for themselves, they should do it. I had a partner at Baby Phat and we would look at deliveries. Every single month, we had a new delivery. It was a lot of product, 30 or 40 new styles a month, and we would guess which one would do the best. The one we guessed was always the one that did the worst, because it wasn’t designed for us. We weren’t the customer. I think if you’re designing for yourself and you’re designing for your friends and your community, you can be more passionate about it.

I think It’s a hundred million little things, because there are so many different aspects of the clothing business. It’s multifaceted, especially in a startup where I’m wearing the CEO hat, the CFO hat, working with the head of design and production…you’re making a lot of different decisions that all have to coordinate. I think of the people I’ve worked with in the past and try to think how they would do things. I try to bring lots of those little pieces to the table and make sure that the ship stays upright so we can get to the next level.

Check out the rest of our Insight series to learn more about the design industry. Sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn for design news, multi-media recommendations, and to learn more about product design and development!

A Q&A with Inclusive Entrepreneur Marianne Weber

A Q&A with Inclusive Entrepreneur Marianne Weber

Spotlight articles shine a light on designers and design materials we admire. Our founder and principal designer Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman has encountered many talented designers throughout her career, and in our Spotlight interviews we ask them about their work, their design journey, and what inspires them. In this interview we spoke with Marianne Weber, the founder and CEO of the inclusive lingerie line Even Adaptive and a licensed occupational therapist at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Marianne worked with Interwoven to realize her empathetic vision, founding Even Adaptive in 2021 and launching the adaptive lingerie line in 2024. That our team contributed to Marianne’s incredible project, which won a Core77 design award in 2023, makes this a particularly special Spotlight feature for us. We asked Marianne about what inspired her to become an entrepreneur, the power of designing for a traditionally neglected audience, and what it was like to work with a design team. 

Portrait of EvenAdaptive CEO Marianne Weber
Photo courtesy of Marianne Weber.

Q: You had a career in occupational therapy when you became an entrepreneur. What inspired that transition? 

A: I’m still currently working as an occupational therapist and keeping up my license, so it’s a long, slow transition. I’m still providing people with what we do as occupational therapists: providing independence and helping them relearn how to do things for themselves. It’s definitely a career change, moving into a CEO and founder role and away from being a full-time therapist. But I feel like the change is necessary for touching more lives than I could in my occupational therapy role. When I had the idea to make this happen, I didn’t immediately think, I need to switch jobs. This has been a three-year journey so far, and I’m still doing both roles. 

The job I have is in acute care. What that means is that I come in when people are initially in the hospital or post-op day one. I’m seeing people at the most heightened and scared time of their lives, and it has to be taken very seriously every moment that I am working as an OT because one wrong step and I could seriously injure somebody. I’m not able to focus on being a CEO when I am at my job, I still have to be a hundred percent there and present. Then when I’m not there I can be 100% present as the founder of Even Adaptive. 

I think one element of the transition that changed my perspective was starting to talk to all of my patients about their engagement and their sexual health as well. As occupational therapists, we focus on making sure that everybody can complete their activities of daily life, their ADLs, and sex is one of those things that we have within our scope of practice. Before becoming the CEO and the founder of Even Adaptive, I was a bit more shy about asking those questions because my toolbox wasn’t full. But, through this process, I’ve done a lot of continuing education. I became more educated on how I can help people through the process of creating our products.

Q: You explain that confidence and sexiness are the pillars of your brand ethos, could you elaborate on that?

A: When you’re faced with these disease processes or you have a disability of some kind, a lot of society communicates that these people are not allowed to express themselves in any kind of sexual manner. They’re not allowed to date, and they’re not looked at as valuable in that way that other women can be when they have full function. The pillars of being independent and sexy go hand in hand for Even Adaptive. If we can make you feel good, and increase your confidence and your independence by providing you with something that you want to be wearing instead of something that was made for 75% of women out there, then we can help to drive change. Sexiness is not just about how someone else is perceiving you but about how you perceive yourself.

Q: Your brand focuses on a neglected target audience. Did anything about this audience surprise you? 

A: I don’t know if they’ve surprised me so much because I’ve been working with this community for many years now, but one thing that I was excited about was how willing they are to lift everybody up. In so much of the world, when you’re trying to do something new, you hear no over and over again. But this community says, Let’s make change. Let’s do this. Let me post about it. Let me share your website. Everybody is excited to be involved in the ambassador program and get their name out there and their story out there. They are used to being told no as well, so when somebody finally tells them, This is for you, they grab onto it and they’re excited to be a part of it.

I’ve got both sides of the coin. We’re looking for fundraising and venture capitalists are 98% men. You’re faced with talking to men about women’s bras and underwear but also about women with disabilities and underwear. It’s this far out concept to them. They think, Who out there would need this? No we’re not going to fund that. I don’t see how it’s going to make money. But when you give it to the people who need it, they’re extremely excited to hear about the product and want to know more and be involved.  As an entrepreneur, there’s one side that’s beating you down, but then the other side that’s lifting you up. There’s a balance.

I think my personal story into why this business came to be is a pretty powerful story and seems to resonate with a lot of people. It doesn’t resonate so much with men but whenever I can tell it to women entrepreneurs they get it right away.

Q: Could you tell that story?

A: I was in graduate school in 2018 and it was finals week. I was having trouble with my vision and I was thinking, I’m going to go to the doctor and get really cute glasses!  The doctor thought something was strange, so he sent me in for an MRI. The MRI resulted with multiple lesions in my brain and my cervical spinal cord, and a very long diagnostic process led to a diagnosis of MS [Multiple Sclerosis]. So I was diagnosed with MS during finals week of grad school to become an occupational therapist. I already had my career laid out for me. I knew what I wanted to do, and it just happened that this was happening at the same time. The whole disease diagnosis process is fairly unpredictable with MS. Being me, with well-established anxiety, I was going through all the terrible things that could come from it. It was a very taxing year for me before I got on medication and was able to deal with it. In that process, I started working at Johns Hopkins in neurology. I was watching these women, who were dealing with a more advanced disease process than I had, not be able to do basics for themselves because that’s my whole job: to help people to be able to do those things again. These women couldn’t put bras on. Those were always the first things that women with neurological conditions gave up on, their underwear and their sexuality. They would just say, What? I’m never going to leave my house again, so why do I need to do this? But that doesn’t have to be the only option.

Even Adaptive was created from my own experience of going through this diagnosis and feeling like my self-worth was down in the dumps, and then watching women have this reaction over and over and over. I wondered, What is the thing that I can do to help these people? And the answer was to create an adaptive intimate line, because it was the one thing I couldn’t solve. I can teach anybody how to put on a shirt one-handed or a pant or a sock, there are tools out there for that. But nothing existed for these women that could lay the foundation of confidence and help them to feel good again. 

Q: Could you talk about your experience working with Interwoven? What was it like to have a vision realized with a design consultancy? 

A: When first I called Rebeccah, I remember her calling me back very quickly. She was immediately interested in the concept. Hearing that, I realized, Someone is going to help me with this! It was very exciting that she was able to see the vision, wrap her head around it, and know confidently that she could come up with a functional solution. It was so exciting to have a team of experts that had this portfolio behind them, that actually listened to what the product needed to be. I think Interwoven did a great job of taking the requirements that I knew that the product needed and creating something that has never been done before; to make it the best in the market and the only one-handed functional bra product that exists. The other beautiful thing that they did for me was to think about how the product was going to survive in the world in an extremely realistic way. They thought, We’re putting this work in, has this been created before? Has this been patented before? Are we going to be able to get a patent through? They did work to find out how it’s going to be manufactured, and they thought about the pricing. Interwoven thought about every detail, so they knew that the product would be viable once it left their hands. That was one of the most important things that they gave to me besides the clasp design. They wanted to see the project succeed, so they designed it with that in mind.

Q: What is something you experienced in the Even Adaptive journey that you didn’t anticipate? 

A: It was surprising how much attention went into creating this product. The multiple iterations and all the trial and error, all of the tiny little changes that Aybuke would make along the way…the product is highly fine-tuned and functional. When you’re not on the inside, you don’t think about what it takes to really create something like this. I was surprised at how much they cared.

Q: While awareness is growing, inclusive design is not yet a universal priority. What does the landscape of the inclusive market look like from your perspective? What are your hopes for this market? 

A: Since I started, I do see more adaptive companies. They’re starting to get funding and they’re popping up more and more often. I am seeing a big shift in the normalization of it. It’s still really slow moving. In terms of taking into account the look of the products and being fashioned forward, a lot of them are stuck on function. I do think that we’re going to move into a realm—and this is part of what Even Adaptive wants to help accomplish—where you don’t have to search endlessly online to find the thing that will help you get dressed after breaking your arm. You should be able to just pop online, already have a brand in your head, and order it up. There are a ton of inclusive designs that have been normalized in our homes, like all of the door handles that are levers instead of knobs. That’s an inclusive design option and we don’t think twice about it. It’s just in houses everywhere now. 

Hopefully that’s where adaptive clothing will go. It happened with baby onesies overnight. Somebody came up with baby onesies that have magnets and moms are like, Yes!  That’s a cool normalization, and that inclusive normalization is going to move up the line as long as we can make things that people want to wear.

Check out the rest of our Insight series to learn more about the design industry. Sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn for design news, multi-media recommendations, and to learn more about product design and development!

A Q&A with Franca Ceramic Studio Co-Founder Sierra Yip-Banniq

A Q&A with Franca Ceramic Studio Co-Founder Sierra Yip-Banniq

Spotlight articles shine a light on designers and design materials we admire. Our founder and principal designer Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman has met many wonderful designers in her time in the industry, and in our Spotlight interviews we ask them about their work, their design journey, and what inspires them. In this interview we spoke with Sierra Yip-Banniq, a ceramic artist who co-founded the Brooklyn ceramic studio Franca in 2016. The studio is known for its elegant slip cast ceramics featuring bold, distinctive patterns. Sierra studied industrial design at Pratt and enjoys exploring new materials and production methods. We asked her about starting her own business, developing new products, and the relationship between her practice as a designer and her practice as an artist.

Photo courtesy of Sierra Yip-Banniq.

“We want our pieces to be enjoyed and used every day.”

Q: How did you come to start your ceramic studio?

A:  I’m actually only one half of Franca. My business partner is Jazmin De La Guardia. She’s based in Florida at the moment. We started Franca together back in 2016. We both went to Pratt: I went to Pratt for ID [Industrial Design], she went to Pratt for printmaking. In 2013, a few years after we graduated, we met up for dinner and realized that we both wanted to start our own thing, but we weren’t a hundred percent sure what it should be. We decided to work on a studio together but we didn’t settle on ceramics right off the bat. We had the idea to start a design studio and then we were trying to brainstorm what medium or what products we could feasibly make ourselves in Brooklyn. We both really liked ceramics. It was something we did as a hobby. I had a membership space in a ceramic studio and she had a background in hand building. Ceramics was something we were both interested in but it is also something that is relatively quick to make. From start to finish you can come up with a design, make a sample, fire it, and test it – all within about two weeks. That’s uncommon. For most other materials, to make a finished sample in the right material would take a lot longer. And now it’s been six and a half, almost seven years of us solely doing ceramics. It’s not what we had originally planned, but it’s a happy accident, I guess. 

Q: Did you have business experience when you started Franca?

A: I took this introductory course. I didn’t do the full course because I was working full-time, I only did the evening and weekend sessions that I could fit into my schedule. It was about how to trademark designs and how to start a business. It was a really good course. That prepared me a little bit. 

Not everyone is built to work for themselves. It does take a particular type of person. Jazmin and I are very different in terms of our personalities and how we work. I think we’re really fortunate to have found each other. We met at Pratt in the first year and we lived together, so we knew each other well as roommates and we got along really well. That gave us hope, even though we knew that we were very different going into starting Franca together. There are things that I’m better at and things she’s better at. I think it’s very hard to find a good business partner. That was the one piece of advice I got from a good friend of mine who started a foundation. He wishes that he had started his business 20 years ago with a business partner. He says it’s almost impossible to find and bring on a business partner later. Not impossible, but it’s very hard. The idea of me doing Franca by myself… I don’t think we would be sitting here right now. It’s so much work that I can’t fathom doing it all by myself. We can lean on each other and we do everything together. 

Q: Do you distinguish between a design practice and an artistic practice in your process? What is the relationship between the two?

A: We see-saw back and forth because we think of ourselves as designers but at the same time we also think of ourselves as artists. I think there is kind of this gray area. We are not fine artists in the sense that we’re not making one-off pieces. We wanted our pieces to be producible in a way such that the price point wouldn’t have to be at that fine art level. But because our things are handmade and all of our patterns are hand painted, our product falls in this price point where they’re designed objects. We want them to be as accessible as possible, and it’s important for us to try to keep that in mind when designing new things. So we see ourselves as both artists and designers, both at the same time. Ceramics is traditionally more of a fine art field but I think, especially in the last decade or so, so many small practices have been started.

Also, the power of social media has allowed makers to share the process of small batch manufacturing. A lot of it is how to produce things efficiently, and how to be able to produce well-designed and intentional objects.

Q: Have you seen changes in the market for artisanal ceramics since you started your business?

A: We have. Even before Franca was founded, there were definitely studios we looked up to. It’s interesting to see that now, six years later, some of those studios have stayed the same, some have closed, and some have gotten a lot bigger. But we’ve always had customers—both stores and individual customers—who really appreciate handcrafted and handmade objects. That’s our ideal target audience; someone who appreciates handcrafted design and pieces. Because you can buy a mug at Target for $1.50, and you can also buy a mug from us that is definitely not $1.50. Then there are mugs that are $200 on the market if you go to a place like ABC Home.

We want our stuff to be used and cherished. We don’t want it to be so expensive that someone buys it and then doesn’t want to use it because it’s too fragile, you know? Or too precious. We want our pieces to be enjoyed and used every day. We love hearing stories from people who say, Oh, I broke my wife’s favorite mug and she’s upset because she uses it every day for her coffee. We like hearing those kinds of stories, and we’ll work with them to replace it. The pieces are actually being used and enjoyed and they bring happiness into people’s lives.

Q: Could you walk us through how you develop a new product or collection? 

A:  It varies depending on the time of year but basically Jazmin and I usually come up with an idea for a collection that we want to either expand or launch. We’ll test a small new product or pattern or shape and see how it does at these in-person sample sales. We’ll see if it seems like people are really interested in it, or if people don’t buy it at all. It lets us do these little user tests organically before we actually invest in making molds and producing the product. 

We usually come up with an idea of what product we want to make. Maybe we want to make new planters or we want to do lighting. Lighting is an example of something that we’ve been working on for many years and are finally hoping to launch later this year. Once we pick the product type, we both sketch separately. Then we come together, see which designs we both like, and work on developing those further. Basically we design everything together. Jazmin, because of her printmaking background, is stronger in pattern-making. I have more of a production background. Our goal is to design products that are producible by our studio. We decide if they are going to feature a lot of surface finishing or hand painting. We don’t want to make anything that’s too complicated or that’s something that we don’t specialize in.

With slip casting and mold-making there’s quite a lot of freedom. Sometimes we make a mold and it doesn’t work, and we need to fix it for production. But other times we come up with a design of something that we already have a mold for. We just don’t punch the hold in it to make it a planter, flip it upside down, and it could be something else. We like to play around with existing forms and see what else they could be. It’s a lot of stacking things, playing around with things, and trimming things down to different sizes so we can physically visualize the forms three dimensionally. We can sketch in 2D, but it’s really different when you can see something and manipulate the clay with your hands in 3D. Clay is a very therapeutic material in and of itself. You can shape it and sometimes it cooperates, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it cracks, sometimes it blows up in the kiln. You never know.

Q: Could you tell us about one of your favorite projects and share why it is important to you?

A: One of my favorite projects has been one of our longest ongoing projects, a collaboration with the New York Times. We were already making our own products and showing them at trade shows and different fairs around New York when the creative director of the New York Times store e-mailed us out of the blue. This was probably in our first year, maybe our second year. Our brand recognition was quite low and he actually e-mailed us…and we kind of ignored the e-mail because we thought it was spam. Then he followed up a second time and we replied. They were working on a project to restructure the New York Times store to bring production back to the U.S. and to New York in particular.

While they make certain products overseas, and they have for a while, they wanted some of their knitwear and their ceramics to be made in New York, to be true to the brand name. They chose to work with us and with our price point, and they’ve never pushed back when we need to do a price increase because it’s important to them to have products made in New York. We deliver small batches and mugs whenever we can and they’re really flexible, working with us when we’re too overwhelmed or having production problems. It’s nice to see bigger brands that want to work with small artisans 

Q: What are you working on that’s interesting to you at the moment?

A: We’re working on a bunch of lighting. Before starting Franca, I worked at a higher end residential and commercial lighting studio. So I knew the background of not just wiring lights but also lighting certification and everything goes into selling lights. Lighting has always kind of scared us because we don’t want to launch a product that isn’t fully ready to go out into the world. We’ve spent a lot of time researching different types of lighting and how we want the lights to look. We’re going to be launching a couple of different collections of LED lights that don’t look like LED lights due to glass diffusers. Mainly we didn’t want the bulbs to be producing too much heat, as ceramic retains heat quite well. So it will look like a traditional globe light but essentially produce no heat. It’s a big project but we’re hoping to launch pretty soon! In late summer.

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