Friday, June 5, 2015

Fridays with Foz: Meet the Intern, Julia Spahle

Hello, it's been a while. I have a lot of excuses for not writing here, but instead let me introduce you to the newest member of the Revive crew: Julia Spahle....


Ms. Julia if you're nasty.

Julia and I like to drink our coffee outside

Julia came to us a few months ago when we moved into our new home in Kenton. Did you hear we moved? Well we did! We moved to 2030 N Willis Blvd, and will be opening a showroom on August 1st. Anyways - Julia! - is pretty amazing and we thought we'd share a little bit about her today in quick rapid fire questionnaire: 


Martini or Champagne: Depends on the occasion but current mood would say Champagne. Add a little absinthe and you have last Saturday night.

Who’s your design icon: Gotta be either Isaac Mizrahi or Alexander McQueen because they are wild and crazy and their flamboyancy is a true expression of themselves...although Mizrahi is kind of a sell out.

South of France or South of Spain: The Moorish beauty of Southern Spain is unparalleled to the lavender fields of southern France. Plus, I’m all about that ham.

Who is your guilty pleasure band: Savage Garden because Justin Bieber is to cool.

Wegner or Eames: Eames because its more fun to say – it pops out of the mouth like a ball of confetti. EAMES! It also makes you sound like a Pokemon when you say it a bunch.

What do you think will be the big trend of 2015: 2015 is almost over. It was all about purple and dyeing your hair blue, which means in 2016 tons of people will have blue hair. Feathers are going to come back full force as well as Desert chic (which is Turquoise jewelry, feathered headbands and big hats). People will be like “I make my own caramel and I douse my own water.” Douse-ing water will be the trend of 2016.

East Coast or West Coast: West Coast is the best coast! Keep your bagels and your snowy winters East Coast – you’re mean. Just Kidding! Jersey Shore for life.

Weird hidden talents: I am an excellent freestyler. I just do it a lot. I'm really good at jingles. I’m always singing things off the top of my head and people will ask me if they are songs. I’m also really good at getting free stuff.

Tack Hammer or Tack Gun: Tack Hammer…I’m a traditionalist.


Why’d you want to intern Revive: Because I like smelling leather and they (the people at Revive) are really nice and when I met you Fozzie, for the first time, I knew our lives were meant to be entwined.

Julia may just be my favorite person yet.




Friday, February 20, 2015

Fridays with Foz: 2710 N Interstate

A week from Sunday, Revive and I will be moving into our new location in Kenton. It's going to be incredibly hard to say goodbye to the place (and the people) we've called home for three years. Next week we'll say goodbye. 

Today I thought I'd take you on my favorite walk at 2710 N Interstate.













Friday, February 13, 2015

Fridays with Foz: The Couch


Today we completed the final steps of our newest creation. This gorgeous couch started out as another run down vintage piece. (If only we had taken a before shot!)


Although the arms originally had a yellowish varnish, Leland refinished the walnut wood arms with a  
hand rubbed wax finish, exposing the original grain.


We decided to use a combination of Pendleton and Danish wools when upholstering the cushion and frame. The subtle differences between the two shades give the couch a dynamic and modern look.


The original legs were a stained oak that didn't really fit the couch, so Robert from Beam & Anchor was kind enough to make us a set of matching walnut legs.


The backrest cushions are a natural latex, while the bottom cushions are a high resilience foam.


This couch is quite a beauty and is currently for sale at our Rejuvenation Pop Up Shop. 

Hope you stop by for a sit.














Monday, February 9, 2015

Mondays with MAAK LAB: An interview with Anoria Gilbert

Yesterday I was lucky enough to find myself downtown at the new Maak Lab location. Surrounded by the best smelling smells in all of Portland, I had the chance to sit down with Anoria Gilbert and chat about their new space, their new products, and why no free time is a good thing.

Fozzie:  How did Maak Lab come about?

Practicing our Waltz
Nori: Well, my background was pretty opposite, not much to do with what we do now. My education was in behavioral psychology and Spanish, which was great for school but work wise a little unsatisfying.  Taylor has a background in architecture so he had a lot of design experience. We came to Portland together after graduating from school in Arizona, worked some crummy jobs, felt out our new city, and considered going back to school in Eugene. But when we checked out the school one quiet rainy Sunday, we just couldn't bring ourselves to leaving Portland -- it felt wrong. So we decided against that, and stayed here to start our own thing instead. On the drive back were throwing around ideas of things we should do -- get into printing, make cards, something with textiles? It took a while to figure out what made sense.

F: What made you land on soap?

N: I had some experience with soap making and we had already been enraptured by the smells of Portland for some time. They were so distinctly different from Arizona -- there were smells everywhere, they smelled good, and it wasn’t just pollution and dry cactus. We knew how to make soap, and wanted to use the things around us -- there’s so much local flora and fauna at our disposal here. So we just started tinkering with that. We started steam distilling essential oils, we built a steam distiller and made our house reek of lavender for three days and yielded a quarter ounce of essential oils. We found essential oils work really well in soap, and started messing around with the idea in our basement. We started getting to know local brands in the meantime, and saw Portland as a really fertile land for entrepreneurs. Shortly after that we got into Beam and Anchor.

F: How did you guys end up at there?

N: Its weird looking back on it now, Portland seems so small. We knew Matt just a bit from his launch of Wood & Faulk -- he had people wear test his belts and give him feedback, and Taylor got a prototype. Then when he started the Portland Bazaar he invited us to be vendors, and the after party was at Beam & Anchor, where his studio was. He tipped us off that there was still one spot left next to his shop, we took a peak, and we're eager to meet Robert & Jocelyn. It was the perfect space for us -- around other small brands, cool people, and just a beautiful space in general. Robert & Joc were a little skeptical because they didn't want us to stink up the building, but with a little proof that we weren't the next Yankee Candle factory, it was a go. It was a great fit, we got really lucky.

F: What was one of the pinnacle moments for the company?

N: The first point where we like “Yeah, we can do this!” was our first wholesale account. We met our friend Bob Davis who curated Lizard Lounge, and he was just really supportive and into what we were doing. It was the first major signal that we were on a pretty good track. It was also the start to finding a really good community of people here. 

F: Where are your products currently being sold?

N: We sell nationwide, stocked in a lot of fashion-oriented and lifestyle shops, and internationally pretty strong in Japan and a few other countries. 

F: What was/is the philosophy behind Maak Lab?

N:  We really try to go at things with an experimental viewpoint, not just “this is how soap has always been made, and this is how we have to do it too." Yea, they made soap 300 years ago from the ashes of their fireplace and the lard from the pig butchered for dinner, and we can follow tradition but it's been more interesting to revive it with something more interesting. With cooler design, with natural ingredients, with things that are from here, and with ingredients that you normally use. We've thrown tobacco in soap, used gin berries that gin we made from, just different things. We’ve also made soap from the lard of a fat pig just to see how to do it (the process reeks of bacon, FYI). We’ve found our niche in more unisex to masculine scents, natural ingredients, things we like ourselves. 

The other side of our philosophy is we want our products to be for the habit. Everything we make is for some aspect of your daily routine. So if you’re washing your armpits, lighting your candle to freshen the bathroom, reading a magazine in bed -- we’re  targeting things that are habitual, things that you’re going to do over and over again, making those habits a bit more pleasant. 

F: I’ve always loved your soap, but now I know you have a few more products, what’s in the current line?

N: Our current product line is soap, candles and salve. We’re on the cusp of doing liquid soap too. We’ve got a lot more in the works for the year too, trying to roll into all the habits.

F: I noticed the new bottles for the liquid soap, and was really intrigued by the names of the new product. Can you tell us a little about that?

N: since we moved to our new shop there’s just been a ton of work that’s gone into it, so for a while we were just dealing with the skeletons of the shop, stripping it down to the bare bones and then refinishing everything. While we were doing that we were thinking about the development of the actual product line that'd  be in the shop. The wet soap just kind of developed around the shop, reflective of the smells inside and outside our new space downtown.  Streetside is our wet soap based off the street in front of our shop. Right before walking in you'll smell the asphalt, crack weeds, wet cement, and just a touch of green plant life. Labside is the wet soap based on smells and common ingredients inside the shop -- white cedar, balsam, tree saps magazines, wifi. Rooftop  is the third wet soap based on the roof of our building, notes of ozone, a little citrus, and solar panels.

My favorite is Rooftop because it’s a very different smell than we’ve done before, in a really good way. The combo of essential oils is almost effervescent and intensely fresh.

F: Do you a have any other favorites?

N: Another favorite is our Wax Bar, if we’re talking about soap, because it has my favorite scent which is the Port Orford cedar. It’s one of the scents that people don’t often have access too because the stock of trees only grows in Port Orford, Oregon and a tiny bit of California. The tree usually gets shipped over to Japan, but we  get a small stock of as much as we can to keep this really unique scent around. It’s a gingery cedar that has the same kick as horseradish but in not such a spicy gross way-- it rounds out to be a sweet, creamy, musky cedar smell. Its great, but most people haven’t smelled before so it's fun to give that experience here.

F: Where do you get the inspiration for all your delicious smells?

N: All over, a lot of its based on exploring and seeking out new scents. For instance we're testing out a curry leaf essential oil the other day, and it smells kind of awful, but kind of awesome. Anything we come across now that we're not familiar with we have to swoop it up so we can learn its intricacies and have it in hand in our scent library. Lots of the time something is in the library for months before we can find the best use for it. 

The scent library portion of our shop is really important for inspiration, and to bounce ideas off people and get their take on smells. It's really fun showing people smells here, because most people don’t have a place to go to learn them. So when people come in here and say “it smells so good in here” we can show them what it is. They may think that they really like eucalyptus or hate patchouli (which truly smells like fresh dirt and is awesome, not at all like a dirty hippie) and we can say here is what the tree leaf smells like, in the form of essential oil. It's a fun way to re-experience the learning with people.

F: This store is honestly one of my favorite places in Portland right now, how do you like it so far?

N: It’s been a really good spot for us, very vibrant -- it feels like the heart of the city. And a ton of awesome shops have gone into of our building, like West End Select, Adam & Ollman Gallery, and North of West.  Inside the shop has been a great experience as well, designing the space, figuring out the new ebb and flow, and just having our own corner of the world to share with people. 

F: What made you decide to open up a storefront?

N: We wanted to bring the smells to the streets of Portland and have a fun place to make our stuff. It also serves as a great testing ground for new product, smells, project ideas, collaborations -- it's lead to a lot of growth and change.

F: The design of this place is just fantastic, what was your process for making this a unique space?

N: We wanted to create a space that would reflect us, and would be functional, utility-based and modular, so it can grow and change as we do.  Since we're doing production alongside our retail, it had to flow together and fulfill both sides of the business too. So we started with industrial pallet racking, cut it up and kept modifying from there. The whole process was a lot of testing, thinking, waking up with a way smarter idea than you went to bed with, just the usual creative process. Eventually it all came together and worked out as we planned. 

F: What’s on the horizon for the store in 2015?

N: We’re starting to bring in other brands into our shop, not a lot, but we want to bring in things that we like, use, and accentuate what we already do. Also, continuing with our own brand development. We have a lot of new projects in the works, from private label, to new products just for the shop. 

F: Any free time coming up?

N: No. We’re here all the time. We’re usually here all hours of the day & night toiling away at something or another, but it’s a good way of living so far. Sometimes overwhelming, but mostly really satisfying. Free time isn’t  there a lot, but this is what I want to be doing so it doesn't matter.

F: Do you find it’s a fair trade off, the work for the free time?

N: The last jobs I was working, I'd come home and feel tired, exhausted, yet stone how restless. It would take all night to recoup from it in our free time. Now we work most hours of the day, there's little free time, but it doesn't matter we're surrounded by a great community and do things We want to do everyday, which is pretty special.

F: So would you say you’re happy?

N: Happy? Yes,  more stressed, but in all the right ways. My goal now is not to be happy, but to be satisfied. I could be happy eating  chocolate and watching reruns of Frasier all day but right now I'd rather work towards that feeling of satisfaction. Wether it's  nailing down a new scent or getting the accounting done for the week, it can be stupid mundane stuff but it's satisfying. Things that can get checked off a list and show progress towards what we're aiming for. So yea, I go for satisfaction over happiness. 


Maak Lab is located at 916 W Burnside. You can visit Nori & Taylor Tuesday through Sunday from 11am-6pm. 

Friday, January 30, 2015

Fridays with Foz: Maya of Lowell

Today I had the pleasure of sitting down with the beautiful and talented Maya co-owner of Lowell, one of my favorite spots. (Dino, Maya's other half, was unfortunately out of the shop today) As we sipped coffee, Maya told me all about growing up in Arizona, how she and Dino ended up in Portland and how she has always had a knack for sales. 

Fozzie: Tell me a little about you and Dino, pre-Lowell.

Maya: I grew up in Arizona and my parents were archeologists who had moved to Arizona for an archeology dig and ended up never leaving. They had to figure out what they were going to do next, because it was the late 70’s early 80’s and  archeology was at the tale end of the boom, I think. There just weren’t that many jobs left, and so they ended up opening up a shop when my mom was pregnant with me in 1987. They had a store for about 25 years, and I kind of grew up in a Native American art and hand made things, zone.  After working in my parents store for a long time, and in a variety of retail places, bar tending, was a personal chef, I ended up managing a Native American Art Gallery for a few years before we moved to Portland. Dino’s background is almost exclusively in the culinary world. He’s always made art at home, painted, drawn and done ceramics. We took a weaving class together but he’s always worked in kitchens to make a living. He’s a career cook.

F: So why did you decide to move to Portland?

M: Mostly for Dino, it was the culinary scene. He was really excited for all the ingredients. For me, since I was little, we wrote essays in the school that I went to, and had to write a mission statement, which was the mission for our future. I think from age 12, or whenever you’re in six grade, onward and through high school, we had to write them every year. Out of the six or seven that I wrote only one didn’t involve moving to the Pacific North West. It was this weird plan in my brain since I was a little kid. We did a big road trip from Arizona and we visited California with plans to visit Seattle and go up to Vancouver BC, checking out all the different areas. We had both lived in New York before, and I kind of didn’t want to live that lifestyle again. So we ended up in Portland and just decided not to keep driving and ended up staying for 10 days, and hustling back on our road trip. Then a year later after planning and saving we ended up moving here in 2010.

F: What made you decide to open up your store?

M: Ever since I was very young, I’ve been very entrepreneurial. I had a lot of faux stores where I would sell my friends my  stuff when I was little.  I would famously save all the Halloween candy that wasn’t chocolate and sell it 3 months after Halloween. So, I've always had this entrepreneurial spirit and I definitely have always wanted to open my own store. I had a pretty good vision of how I wanted it to be, this weird niche market of people who like what I like. Dino was excited about that as a prospect, but he was really passionate about cooking. He had also never worked in retail so he was very much “let’s think about that when we’re in our 40’s”. Something shifted at some point, and I think he realized he enjoyed working in kitchens but he liked cooking at home more. He liked having more say in what he was doing and not having to worry about cooking for hundreds of people.  

F: Where does "Lowell" come from?

M: The name is my grandfathers name and I think it was a name among a list of names that we threw around. A lot of the ideas we had, we would google it and some cool shop would already have it. It just kept coming back to Lowell. The day we had our business cards designed, and we had to settle on a name, we had to get our business license sent, we said lets just go for Lowell. That night we watched “The Fighter” which we had no idea was centered in Lowell, MA and that just kind of reinforced it, having this grimy ideology associated with it. Then we realized theres a Lowell in Oregon. There’s a ghost city in Arizona called Lowell, so there’s a city in every place we lived. So the incorporation of that, and it being my grandfathers name, made it a cool name. It is hard to say “Hello Lowell” when you answer the phone though.

F: How did you find this location?

M: We started looking at spaces and got really discouraged because we couldn’t find any places we liked that didn’t need a whole bunch of work. Dino was skateboarding home from work, when he worked at Lovely’s 50/50, and went down this hill on Mississippi and lost his balance and hit his head. He went to the emergency room and I had to pick him up at 2 am. They asked him to come back the next day to make sure his concussion was ok. For whatever reason, he went down Russell and noticed this space. We had never driven down this street before. He told me about it and I came the next day and the landlord was inside doing something. I struck up a conversation with him, and he wasn’t even planning on renting the space. He had been in a transitory stage with the building, having tried to sell it before, then deciding to take it off the market. He hadn’t done anything with the building for 4 or 5 years. He said “I like you guys and I think I should give you a chance, because if no one had ever given me a chance I wouldn’t be where I am today.” Which is just such a Portland landlord story. We started renting it within a month of talking to him.

F: How long did it take to open?

M: It took maybe 2 or 3 months, but it seemed like it took a really long time. We had a contractor and a few different people, electricians and such. Visually, we knew what we wanted pretty much, and the only major changes were building out the bar (front counter) and putting in electrical. There were only fluorescent school lights, so we changed those out and added the pocket door. I had quit both my jobs, I had two at the time, so I was down here painting until 2 o’clock in the morning until Dino was finishing up at the restaurant. We opened in early December of 2011.

F: It's such a beautiful space and so very well curated, how did you decide how to style it, what was your inspiration?

M: It’s interesting because before Dino and I met we definitely both had a very similar aesthetic.  For me going back to my parents house and spending time with them, and for Dino getting to know them you can definitely see that some of my taste comes from growing up around old things and appreciating them. They (my parents) definitely have different taste in things, so I’m not sure if its being interested in textiles or being around lots of art. For Dino, he grew up in Havasu City the hub of all hot death traps and there was no art or culture there at all. I don’t know where he, I think he was really into punk culture and that opened his eyes to the horizon. He moved to New York as soon as he graduated from high school. It is kind of... we’re not sure where our aesthetic comes from, we just know we share a lot of the same aesthetic.  It works out really well.

F: I love the mixture of both old and contemporary items. How do you decide what to show, do you prefer one over the other (old vs. contemporary)

M: We like both. I don’t think I could choose between the two. We like the same qualities in both. Things that are handmade and took a lot of time and consideration.  It might vary on the object. Ceramics are one that I’m a 100% divided on. Textiles, I feel like there are some really cool new progressions going on with people weaving, but the amount of care gathering materials, spinning yarn and dyeing your own wool is not really being put into contemporary textiles. I would say for some things I like older things and some I like new. I'm torn between the two of them.

F: Besides running an incredible store, what are some of your other interest?

M: We cook a lot. Dino makes ceramics and does all of our design work for our cards and a our signs, and all of our clay shop figures. He's gotten more of an art opportunity through the shop and been commissioned for other peoples companies. He has a pretty distinctive aesthetic, so when people respond to it, they want him to do it. I make clothing, and I prefer to make one of a kind pieces for the store. Similarly for Dino with the ceramics. We kind of divide our time between creative pursuits, cooking and running the store. We try to go outside, but we are not so good about that, especially during the winter. We watch a lot of old films, and we try to read.

F: What are some of your plans for 2015?

M: We are trying really hard to expand our online presence. We do have a lot of people contacting us via Instagram, but we aren’t really into marketing ourselves on that platform. We think it should be a visual platform and not a commerce one. We would like to have an online store for people who want it, but we don’t want to push ourselves on anyone. We do have an online store now, but it is sorely in need of an update. That’s our goal, better e-commerce for people who want it.


F: Ok, one last question, is there anything you would want to change this year?

M: No matter what I always want more time, there never seems to be enough time to do all the things we want to do.  We did throw around the ideas of having someone work here one day a week, so we could have one day and night where we could do something other than store related things. But I think so much of what makes this store what it is, is who we are.

It's always such a pleasure getting to hang out at their wonderful shop! You can visit Maya & Dino at Lowell Wednesday- Sunday 12-7pm or follow them on Instagram @lowellshopgallery