What
is Factory Handbook?
Factory
Handbook is the company that I started with my husband Mike Newsome
when we moved to Louisville in 2010, after almost ten years in
Brooklyn. It primarily includes (1) a vintage clothing shop, which we
run through our Etsy storefront at www.etsy.com/shop/factoryhandbook,
(2) a conceptual line of lighting designs made with artisanal
woodworking methods, and (3) a lifestyle collection of items using
exclusively vintage and/or re-use textiles.
What
made you want to start a vintage shop?
This
is a long answer! I’ve been shopping at thrift stores and wearing
vintage as a primary staple of my wardrobe since I was around 12
years old. One of my first jobs during high school was at a Goodwill
store, and some of the first sewing projects I undertook were
alterations to vintage garments under the helpful guidance of my mom
(a fantastic sewing resource who empowered me with the needle at
quite a young age). My initial interest in clothing design stems
largely from those early explorations, and the way I first started to
understand garment construction goes directly back to all the
garments I seam-ripped apart before putting them back together again.
While I was in school at F.I.T. earning my degree in Fashion Design,
I worked at an incredibly special boutique called ‘Eva Gentry
Consignment’, where I was surrounded by designer vintage from
Miyake to McQueen and Lacroix to Laurent. It was hugely inspirational
to me, and left strong impressions of quality, taste, merchandising
aesthetic and customer service that made me feel intrigued by the
idea of operating my own store. Later, when I decided to leave my job
as an Assistant Designer at Helmut Lang in order to relocate to
Louisville with Mike, we already knew that our dream was to build a
business together. Starting Factory Handbook also meant becoming a
team, both creatively and professionally, so we ended up assessing
our strengths, skills, knowledge, and interests to find the ‘sweet
spots’ where our abilities overlapped. The Etsy store felt like one
place where my education and experience in the fashion industry, not
to mention my passion for vintage clothing, intersected beautifully
with Mike’s talent as a photographer.
How
long has Factory Handbook been operating?
The
Etsy shop has been up and running since April of this year, the
prototyping process for the lighting series has finally come to its
final stages(!!), and the lifestyle collection is currently in
development - with prototype designs + a killer vintage fabric stash
ready to roll as soon as our schedule allows.
What
makes you D.I.Y.?
That’s
a hard one. I think that I'm D.I.Y. because I’m very specific in my
style preferences. For me, clothing has always held a lure and
intrigued me in a way that relates very closely to my creative
instincts. I mean that both in terms of getting dressed in the
morning and the many ways I perceive art in the process of design or
the tiny details of a garment. Even as a pre-teen, I wasn’t finding
any sparks of inspiration in the clothes I saw at stores so I started
to seek those intuitive connections within the world of vintage. When
I started to de/re-construct or alter the pieces I found in order to
make them work for me, it became a sort of ‘gateway drug’ to
developing a deeper and deeper interest. That same passion eventually
led me to publish a book called ‘Fashion DIY: 30 Ways to Craft Your
Own Style’ before ultimately going on to pursue my design degree.
Everything seemed to snowball out of that original desire to seek out
clothing that inspired me. I had started to enter adolescence and
look for ways to nourish my creative spirit, and that was simply what
felt right to me at the time.
How
does what you do impact Louisville?
We
occasionally participate in local events as vendors. Sometimes you’ll
see us selling vintage, like we did at the recently inaugurated Salvo
flea market. At other venues, you might never know we hoc vintage
because we’re representing Mike’s paintings, my illustrations, or
screen-printed t-shirts. We try to engage every audience with
whatever aspect of our creative output we think will interest them
most. For example, at this year’s Unfair our stall was filled with
visual art from Mike’s side of the studio, along with an Old
Louisville t-shirt that we designed in collaboration with our
neighbor and friend, local artist Mason Maxey. The shirt was just
something fun we had decided to create after chatting about it one
day, and there is a good chance we’ll do similar designs for other
Louisville neighborhoods because of the great response it received.
There are so many sources of inspiration in Louisville. I think that
we’re still new enough to living here that we’ve only started to
scratch the surface and find ways to incorporate those inspirations
into our work.
What
are you currently working on?
At
the end of October we were awarded a grant through the Center For
Neighborhoods P.A.I.N.T. program to do a public art / documentary
film project focusing on the community that surrounds Churchill
Downs. We’re full-swing into execution of that project in addition
to creating the catalog and line sheet for the lighting series –
all on top of managing the vintage store and working on our own
individual artwork as usual.
What
are your long term goals for Factory Handbook?
Ultimately,
we’d like to continue improving the quality of our merchandise and
hope to begin compiling a reference archive of unusual,
first-quality, and high-end designer vintage. This kind of resource
will become more and more valuable to the fashion industry, as well
as collectors, museums, and academics, as these items continue to
become increasingly scarce with the passage of time. In the short
term, we’ll be happy to continue the very strong growth we’ve
seen in the store during the few short months we’ve been online.
With
the lighting series, our goal is to develop strong relationships with
decorators and interior designers in the Louisville/Lexington area so
that we can do custom creative work for a local clientele. We’re
very focused on the materials we use, and would love to do
site-specific designs allowing us to work with reclaimed wood, found
objects, and industrial remnants that move beyond lighting and into
custom furniture as well. You hear a lot about the ‘slow food’
and ‘slow fashion’ movements, and we’re basically looking to
apply these same grassroots, all-handmade, locally-oriented concepts
to our design process.
What
is your favorite thing about running your shop?
I
love working with vintage clothing because it fascinates and
genuinely excites me as a designer. I’m constantly presented with
the opportunity to get lost in an exquisite printed silk, to examine
some intricate dressmaker’s construction created with tiny hand
stitches, or to discover a bust dart angled in a way I’ve never
seen before.
What
is your favorite item in your shop right now?
I’m
a huge fan of vintage leather, so I’ve got a gigantic crush on the
weird Mod color-blocked leather tunic in red, white, blue and black.
I love things with a bit of a rock and roll edge in my own wardrobe,
and this is one of the most Woodstock-worthy 60s pieces I’ve ever
seen. You can almost hear the reverb…
I
imagine you do a lot of thrift shopping in your line of work, is
there one great piece that stands out in your mind that you passed up
and wish you hadn't?
That’s
a good question! I try to enforce amnesia on myself and live without
thrifting regret…but I’m still haunted by several exquisite 50s
party frocks that I passed over during my early teens. I was too punk
for pink! Now I wish I had made a little more room in my closet for
froufrou, especially when I worked at Goodwill and saw flirty
mid-century dresses all the time.
What
is the most challenging aspect of your work?
Our
schedule and budget don’t allow us to bring in models for the
store, so I’m stuck with the job by default. I’ll readily admit
that it doesn’t come naturally to me and continues to be a
challenge. I’ve gotten much better at wearing heels for long
periods of time, however, so my calf muscles are in better shape!
Do
you have any advice for other small business owners/D.I.Y.'ers?
My
first piece of advice is to focus on photography. The internet is
your way to reach a worldwide audience, and it is above all a visual
place. In order to do your products justice and compete in a largely
image-driven marketplace good photography has to act as your
salesperson, showroom, and PR/marketing director all at once. My
second, related piece of advice is to learn everything you can about
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and apply that knowledge to getting
information about your company in front of exactly the right eyes, as
often as possible, all over the world.
On
top of running an online vintage shop you also wrote a book on
D.I.Y., can you tell us some about that?
At
the time, I was working at an independent publishing company in New
York after graduating college with an English degree and moving to
Brooklyn to pursue a career in the industry. The company I worked for
specialized in knitting, sewing, and D.I.Y. books as well as crafting
magazines like Vogue Knitting. It was an inspiring place to work
where I was surrounded by creativity and the D.I.Y. spirit every day.
Altering vintage clothing was something that had become very ‘hot’
in the D.I.Y. scene at the time, with magazines like Bust regularly
running a project feature, ReadyMade introducing its inaugural
issues, and the first round of books on the subject starting to come
out from ‘cool’ companies like Chronicle. I had been doing these
kinds of projects on my own thrift store finds for so long that it
had become a way of life for me, and I was already taking on some
freelance writing jobs, so I decided I was in the right place at the
right time to write a book of my own. Soon afterward I decided to
challenge myself with the next level of knowledge by earning my
design degree at F.I.T. The book, like so many of the things I’ve
done over the years, really functioned as a kind of stepping stone to
lead me toward the next phase of my creative and professional life.
