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It was March 2014 and we were barely 3 months into our year-long sabbatical, and we’d already decided that we wanted to start some type of creative venture where we could work with our hands. We were excited for the 9+ months we had to go & to see the other places which we’d earmarked for travel — Thailand, Africa and parts of Europe — but we were also anxious to write our business plan and get going!
The original idea we had was around the two areas of craft which we’d learned in Bali: ceramics and textiles. The first working name was ‘cloth + clay’ (notice how we always eschew capital letters….it’s a design decision!!). And the idea was to start a small label of products so I (Melissa) could continue designing fabrics using batik & indigo that could be sold as home goods. Thomas’s area of focus, coming out of his two months at Gaya Ceramics Art Center would be pottery and ceramics for the home. But we had a few months before any of this could become a reality because, unlike other entrepreneurs who could be digital nomads creating content & ideas from a cybercafé anywhere in the world — we actually needed physical space to create. So we continued as planned to our self-guided safari throughout Namibia and Botswana, with hopes we’d find a physical space soon…
It’s a bit unfair to gloss over these months of our travels because Africa was the part of the trip that probably stretched us the most. While these scenes show quite the adventure, we definitely started out a bit out of our element in Africa. Looking back, we shouldn’t have gone it alone, but we had decided to rent a Toyota Hilux with a tent on top that could be assembled each night for sleeping. Most people who do this type of self-guided safari do it in groups of 2-3 couples. Well, we didn’t and found that there were quite a few things we couldn’t go alone — for one, the trip through the Okavango Delta in Botswana for fear our truck would get stuck in the water and no satellite phone coverage to call for help. Despite all of this, however, we saw some corners of the Earth and animals we may never see again, and the month was an incredible adventure. We hope to do it again someday (but with friends for support!!!).
We landed in Berlin just in time for summer, in a huge Altbau (historic building with preserved architecture) in the Bötzowviertel area of Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood. We were so excited because after a month on an island in Thailand and a month camping in Africa, we were finally grounding ourselves in a home where we could build a makeshift studio to see if this idea of cloth + clay would go anywhere. We got to work right away: enrolling in sewing classes, taking courses in textiles at the local community center and building a painting & dyeing area in the kitchen & dining room of our rented apartment. We were scrappy, making due with regular kitchen pots & pans for cooking the dyes and emptying out one room so we could paint on the floor. We didn’t have close to the number of resources we would actually need to get this business up & running. It was like art camp. And while it felt like we were operating at 50% for the whole summer, we definitely taught ourselves a lot and realized that having a corner carved out of our home was never going to be the solution for what we hoped would turn into a proper business one day.
Here are a few samples of work we created in our makeshift kitchen/workshop. As you can see, the majority of what we designed were small format textiles in the form of scarves (with the exception of that huge pink & brown bedcover). We were constrained by so much, first of which was: where do we buy high quality, dyeable fabrics in Berlin? While Thomas is German, he had never lived in Berlin and was completely unfamiliar with the city’s landscape in terms of resources. We had brought back some sample fabrics we’d bought at a market in Bangkok, but this was the first AHA moment for us: sourcing beautiful fibers & fabrics has to be a priority for our business. Secondly, we were a bit all over the place in terms of design: as you can see, we designed some really graphic pieces and we did tie dye. These were two styles we could easily execute in a small space, but neither really felt like our style. So, decision number two was really about expanding into different techniques that felt more suited to our language, our style & something special we could own as our own.
As our time in Berlin came to a close, we had a lot of decisions to make. Berlin for me (Melissa) had become home. I loved the city, its energy, the young people starting new ventures at every turn, the food…. But for Thomas, it felt like an old life. He had spent his first 25+ years in Germany and to return felt a little bit like going backwards. So, we decided to keep one foot in Berlin for me, and to find another place that felt new for Thomas. On top of this, we struggled with so many aspects of creating the business: were we content with making scarves (not really), what other unique pieces could we make, how could we design unique colors & patterns that felt like us (not something anyone else could do), where in the world do we source all these resources…? In the next installment of our blog posts, we’ll tell you more about how we discovered Mallorca, our materials, our process and honed in on our special style which would eventually be called espanyolet…