CityFabric Blog

We are 1! – SALE – 20% OFF Everything + New Tri Blend Heather Tees + Grey Prints

cityfabric — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:08:40 +0000

Walk [Your City] Launched @ City Share – Off to a great start!

cityfabric — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:51:55 +0000

Yesterday, I had the great opportunity to speak at City Share, a collaborative, virtual speaking series in Chattanooga. The series is hosted by two different organizations ( Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise and Glass House Collective ) that are striving to make Chattanooga a creative, connected and collaborative community. During my closing remarks at the event, I launched (live on my iPAD) Walk [Your City] via Kickstarter. W[YC] is our new initiative to scale Walk Raleigh and help make it accessible for more cities and citizens to create their own guerrilla wayfinding campaigns. Walk [Your City] is off to a great start!

Grey Prints Debut on Fab.com Today!

cityfabric — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:12:33 +0000

We are really excited to partner with Fab.com for a second flash sale. The sale starts today at 11am and continues through 11am on Thursday. We are debuting 10 new grey city prints during this sale. Our other new partner, DENY Designs will be offering their Duvets with our SF, NYC and Paris maps on them as well!

Not a member of Fab.com?? Use the following link to sign up! http://fab.com/bms8vz

Walk Raleigh on the Atlantic Cities

cityfabric — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:29:01 +0000

On January 18th, with the help of some friends, I installed 27 signs at 3 different intersections around downtown Raleigh. These signs are very basic, stating in plain text “how many minute walk it is to a local destination”. Accompanying the text is an arrow, QR code, color boarder and website. The signs have remained up for the last couple weeks without much fuss or interest… until today when the project was featured on the front page of The Atlantic Cities, an online civic-minded blog and publication that is part of The Atlantic’s online collection of sites. Thanks to a local Raleigh resident’s comments on a previous article about the signs, Atlantic Cities writer, Emily Badger featured the coined “Guerrilla Wayfinding” project as the main story today. Needless to say, the project has struck a nerve and emails/phone calls have been in abundance today. Check out the article below.

Guerrilla Wayfinding in Raleigh via The Atlantic Cities

Quick Trip: NYIGF in NYC

cityfabric — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 07:16:12 +0000

Whoa. A week ago I ventured up to NYC via Megabus (on the cheap) to check out NYIGF (New York International Gift Fair). The event was held at the Javits Center, which has to be one of the largest exhibition halls I have ever seen. The event spanned multiple floors and multiple city blocks, jam packed with booths selling any and all type of stuff/crap you could image. I journeyed up there to gather data about line sheets, pricing, packaging, promotion and presentation of products. The range in quality of both product and booth display was astounding, especially considering it cost thousands of dollars to showcase your brand at the event. The image below is a sampling of all the take-a-ways that the brands had to offer. My favorite booth had to be for Mighty Wallet. as I scored myself a new, recycle-able and tear-proof wallet on the cheap (free!), a true sign that marketing works. While up in NYC, I attempted a second guerilla wayfinding project titled Northisthatway.com that you follow the link to check out. We just submitted the project for the America Exhibit at the Venice Biennale, titled “Spontaneous Interventions”.

Be Our Presidential Valentine! Save 20% for 2 weeks!

cityfabric — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:41:53 +0000

Winterize ourself with civic-minded goodness! Use code ” 204PANDVDAY” at the end of checkout for 20% thru Feb. 17th!

CityFabric, Onward! But first… 2011 in Review

cityfabric — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:39:05 +0000

We are now, finally, almost caught up…

2011 was a tremendously rich / mind-blowing / righteous start to CF-Inc. Between school and the business, I lived week to week, action item to action item… only having to move on to the next event, paper or project before the last was even complete. For this reason, I decided to take a step back and create a simple, visual recap of our 7 month journey in 2011.

http://cityfabric.net/pages/2011-review

Post 92 :: Busyness as usual

cityfabric — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 16:18:36 +0000

We have an exciting 2 weeks ahead of us and wanted to quickly share what we will be up to. Very very soon we will be getting back to our more informative commentary about the ups and downs of starting a small business. Until then, we are furiously prepping for these 4 events below, all happening in the next 2 weeks. Oh yeah… I finish grad school this week as well!!!

TEDxRaleigh – Dec. 10 8-5pm @ The Lincoln Theater in downtown Raleigh. Great list of speakers, networking potential and CityFabric exhibit awesomeness.

Rock and Shop Market – Dec. 17 12-6pm @ Motorco/Fullsteam in Durham, NC. Awesome Saturday afternoon of shopping, music enjoying and beer drinking. Last year was a blast and we expect no less this year.

Renegade Handmade Holiday Market – Dec. 17 & 18th @ Concourse Exhibition Center in San Francisco, CA. This will be our first Renegade market as we sell at their shop in Chicago. We are really excited to get out to the Bay Area, catch up with friends and enjoy a much needed “break” from NC. We will also be visiting a few companies while out there, including the up-and-coming intrepid brand – Betabrand.

Fab.com – If you have not checked Fab out yet, click on the image below. We will be launching a sale with them the week before Christmas which we are REALLY excited about. This is our first major major publicity outreach since Kickstarter.

Post #91 – Kickstarted – Timing is everything.

cityfabric — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:25:25 +0000

What an incredible 2 months it has been since the last post. I have had my head down, focusing on Kickstarter fulfillment, launching our new online marketplace and tending to a plethora of other side & special projects speckled throughout the 2 months. The list below is a brief breakdown of what we have been up to.

Kickstarter Fulfillment
Launching our new Online Marketplace
Participant in the Bull City Startup Stampede
Partner with the North Carolina Museum of Art
Featured twice in the Atlantic
Received a student ASLA Honor Award in San Diego
Vended at our first convention – the ASLA Annual Meeting Convention

Fulfilling our Kickstarter project was definitely the most time consuming and intensive task we have been charged with to date. One of the biggest decisions that we had to make in order to fulfill the Kickstarter project was actually deciding on our finished product. Over the past year, we have experimented greatly with a variety of different shirts, inks, images, packaging, processing, tagging, etc. When producing over a thousand of anything, we have to be absolutely sure that all the minute details work and fall in line with our vision and goals while also allowing up to make a profit to keep this idea going. After-all, the whole reason we are doing this is to afford us the ability to continue conversations about where we live through a spectrum of products and projects. We plan on sharing more about the whole experience, but wanted to simply get back in the weekly regime of information sharing that we were all about prior to the Kickstarter project.

The whole idea behind running a Kickstarter project was to launch our initial Wear You Live line of 13 (now 15) cities. Just over a week ago, we achieved our true goal of Kickstarter, launching our comprehensive online marketplace, offering 15 different cities in 3 socially responsible and eco-aware products. We believe that timing is everything and could not have gone from 2 boxes of Raleigh tees in my apartment to a multi-thousand unit inventory managed outside of my apartment in 4 months without the help, encouragement and serious idea validation that Kickstarter granted us. Where do we go from here? We are thinking all about scale, big scale. We are really excited that school is ending so we can pursue our CityFabric quest to great conversations about place, full-time in 2012.

Blog Post #90 – Which City Won? Kickstarter – Fulfilling / Growing / Learning

cityfabric — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 20:48:15 +0000

Well…. this has been the longest hiatus between blog posts since I started building this blog a year ago. My lack of posting is not a result of lethargy, but rather the opposite. To put it simply…. things are crazy right now. Kickstarter fulfillment has been super hectic and cumbersome, but it is all coming together and looks like our shipment dates will be pretty close to our original mark of early October. With most of the production finishing up this week, we are efficiently organizing the CityFabric “warehouse” for our Wear You Live wears. Every back end operation is a custom designed function at this point, especially due to the prototypical nature of this Kickstarter project (if we ever get to the point where we will have to ship 900 packages in 1 day or even a week, CityFabric will not be a staff of 1 operating out of the said staff’s apartment and storage unit. Ha!) You can check out our “warehouse” below, beginning to fill up quickly with inventory and shipping materials. Also pictured below are our “Pin Your Place™” Stickers that we are really excited about distributing as well.

Now that almost all the surveys are in and we are beginning the tee printing process, we have a final tally (minus a dozen or so backers) for the Grand City Total for all CityFabric/Wear You Live products ordered through Kickstarter. The total units we are responsible for providing to backers topped out at over 1200 pieces (between all the different backer levels). SF just barely beat out our hometown of Raleigh for total units represented. Check out how your city faired below. Lots of great news/updates to come soon!