Our math coasters were chosen to be featured in Target’s Red Hot Shop this month. Red Hot Shop is Target’s online boutique that refreshes monthly with new products by small or independent designers based on monthly themes. I guess this month has been appropriately themed “back to school.”
You can find our coasters here.
It’s taken about a week for me to recover, but here a few photos of our booth from the gift fair last week. We made great friends with Jill and Aaron from Sanford Burrows (beautiful bedding) next door and miss going to work every day on the Piers. . .well, not really.
We printed some oversized images of our products onto Tyvek (doesn’t bend or tear, but is not quite waterproof as we learned at the February show when it rained on our booth) for the walls which let some nice light through.
We’ve added rattles to the animals and we’re calling them “Feltimals” now. Below are some process photos. If we get enough orders for them, we’ll get a die made for faster cutting, but until then they are all hand-cut and sewn by me. They are also stuffed with kapok, an all-natural, sustainable, hypoallergenic fill.
Also, we had not one, but three fantastic little models for this shoot. Our over,under co-worker and friend Roberto has triplets. That’s right, triplets.
Sadly, we couldn’t sew the vegan leather to the industrial felt properly, so we’re substituting another material with the design. However, we had a photo shoot for our post card and catalog before making this realization. New products will be updated on our website in the next few weeks. Promise.
The Book Box.
A clutch called The Public.
And a new bag called The Northampton.
I came across these photos today while looking for something completely different. These were our very first screenprinted tees. We quickly learned that people don’t typically buy products with a brand or company name they’ve never heard of printed on them. . . . but our friends were nice enough to support us.
Makoto modeled with me on these!
The ladies were from an old sewing manual on how to sew patterns on skirts properly. The dots and stripes never made it on though. . .and in fact we’ve yet to print more than single screen prints on our shirts.
I came across this folder with images from May 2005 today! Early, early etcetera stuff, where everything was custom and we only had a few felt colors. We stopped making the iPod case this year because we couldn’t keep up with Apple and all of their little changes. This is also why we’re shifting away from the “media” part of our name and moving toward “goods” as a better description of what we make.
Our friend and old co-worker Balazs did some line drawings over some of the photos. We didn’t use them enough, but they made their way onto emailed post cards for markets and shows that year.
We got an exciting order from the Art Institute of Chicago for their 2008 catalog and needed to design some box packaging quickly. Inspired by some product packaging (bottom photo) by droog, we designed some labels to wrap around the top and side of the box. We found some wicker balls on sale at C+B and almost painted them, but left them as is and photographed them outside with the natural sunlight.
It’s prototype time around here. The Northampton is named after Ann’s street, who shares the studio space and helped with the design of this thing. Better, less grainy photos coming soon.
