 making materials matter. Tick will share some of her work with us in a presentation followed by a conversation with Susan Brown, Cooper Hewitt's acting head of textiles and associate curator of textiles. Susan manages a collection of over 27,000 textile objects that stretch over 23 centuries. As creative director of Loom Textiles, Tick combines a cutting edge approach to technology with industry leading materials, development, recycling, and reuse with the goal of empowering designers and end users to make the most sustainable choices whenever possible. In addition to her work in the contract fabric market, Tick creates woven art from repurposed materials, including mylar, balloons scavenged from area beaches. And her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Cooper Hewitt, the Museum of Arts and Design, Art Basel, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. And as a special treat for National Design Week, Suzanne has brought a number of her incredible textiles for us to see and handle, which we will do at the conclusion of the program today. This program is inspired by the exhibition currently on view upstairs, a dark, a light, a bright, the designs of Dorothy Liebes, which Susan and I curated together. When Susan and I were first working on the exhibition, we saw a strong through line between Tick's work and Liebes' experimental approach to design her daring use of unconventional materials and the way she shaped the American textile industry through her many partnerships with industry. Suzanne's textile designs, her relentless push to make textiles sustainable and her thrilling reuse of materials have likewise had an outsize and very positive inspiring influence on contemporary textiles. Thank you to IBM and eBay for making this program possible and please welcome Suzanne Tick. Thanks, Alexa. Thanks, Susan, for having me. Wow, I wasn't nervous until now. So the talk that I'm gonna give is really an overarching concept and theme that I have within the studio because everything makes a difference, everything matters, everything that we touch, everything we do actually makes a difference. And I grew up as an artist. I'm a textile designer, product development person. My whole team wave your hands but they're all here way back in the back as well. And I'm also a Vedic meditation teacher and I brought, that's my latest thing that I brought into the studio. I just, there was a little kink in my life which was like everybody would say, oh, you've been so successful. Everything seems so great. Aren't you so happy? And I was like, oh, happy? I don't know if I'm happy. I'm like driven but I don't know if that was a word that I would use to describe myself. So they're like, you should meditate. And I'm like, yeah, I should meditate. And so six years later, I'm a teacher and I'm so excited about that and working with all kinds of artists and designers and architects in relaxing their nervous system so they can find happiness in their life. Anyway, can you hear me? Am I talking too low? All right, so I've developed textiles and in this building in the East Village and it's a four story building. Studio Underground has a loom down there. First floor is where my team comes. Second floor is where it turns from public to private where I live that I also work and I have another loom, a private loom there and then top floor bedrooms and stuff like that. And the roof back is sometimes where we go and meditate. We all meditate together in the afternoons and really enjoy that. So let me kind of take you through how we work and the whole operation of what we do. We operate out of this three story building in the townhouse in the East Village. It was known for the Hell's Angels block. That's when I've been there a little over 20 years and we've developed a business model that doesn't really exist in the contract textile industry where usually the creative director is in-house and working with the staff in-house and I found over the first seven years or eight years of my career that I am not a great employee because I get way too involved in the wrong things and I try to fix everything. I'm kind of a fixer and I see if the sample department's not running properly. I want to get involved in that and do that and so I created my own business model that's really based on a retainer and a royalty based development schedule and I have my own team which is fantastic. Everyone's a weaver and so we all build our materials from there. So just recently we came up with this and so there's all different looms in our space. This is our team actually working on a charrette that everyone's way ahead of me. We have our charrette which is a meeting that everyone's been preparing for. I've been traveling, they're all ready for this meeting. I'm not quite ready. It's gonna happen on Wednesday. We're building the product plan and direction for 2025 now for the loom brand and so we all do a lot of research on what's happening around the world in all the museums and who the artists are and what the emerging trends in 2024 are gonna be when we can decipher from the museum outlines of who's gonna be showing. So we do research on that way. We do research on architects and new buildings that are going up and what those structures look like because of the exterior of a building is always on the interior when it comes to our textiles. We look at that, we create textiles that emulate that and stuff like that and we all look at our favorite textile people. So I look forward to that you guys. I got a lot of homework to do tonight tomorrow to catch up with y'all. For my portion, we all present. It's kind of nervous, it just kind of makes us nervous or at least it makes me nervous still. So this is the thing that we found out recently. It was about four or five years ago actually. I went to a Klaus Oldenburg show on Second Street. The Second Street storehouse showed it. Anybody see that at moment? Second Street storefront. And I was looking at all the monoprints on the outside of the show and it was like 44 East Third Street and I thought, well, that's my building and it said December 20th, 2021 and 22. I'm like, that's my son's birthday. And it was 1959. I'm like, that's the birth year that I was born. Things come in threes and I'm like, what's going on here? It's like brought all of this to my attention. And so I contacted a gallery owner and he said, let me do some research. So it turns out that my building was the Rubin Gallery, which is where the happenings, one of the happenings situations where all the happenings started. So I always knew that everything matters, coming back to matters. Everything, there's this energy in the house when people come in and they're like, what is this place? And there is a specific energy. So Simone Forte was the first dance performer that performed in our building, Klaus Holdenberg, Alan Capro. I mean, there's a whole list of people that performed in our space. And the space definitely has some energy. Since MoMA bought the rights to the happenings, they asked if they could have a four night performance in my building with one caveat that we started in the lower level in the studio underground and I was weaving in the dark except for one light. And then the dancer, Aiko, would pop up and she would make her way, meander her way through the building. And so that's what this is a picture of. I had no idea where she was. And so I was down there weaving for 10 minutes as people started congregating. And I'm like, where is she? Anyway, it was definitely a happening. So she's making her way up through and everybody followed her through the building. It was quite fun. You never know. This is about paying attention to everything. It's like being present. Those moments when you feel like you don't wanna go to a museum, just another museum show, go to the show. Go, make yourself go. That's what this, we're here to enjoy our lives and really experience it to the fullest. So this is Tick Studio and work. This is one of our charrettes, of course. I showed you that before. What we do is we start by creating fiber and we work with a lot of fiber manufacturers, different mills around the industry and we create different techniques and fibers and really push the manufacturers so that we can create something new. And so that's how we start. We start with fiber. Then we do pattern structures. That's what the image on the left is. And then we start building our products. So it starts from a small sample to large production pieces. Those production pieces have to be tested and trialed and they have to go through a whole flurry of tests, including upholstery testing. And then we determine what's gonna go in the line. It's kind of like rubbing your head and your stomach at the same time. Three different collections going through three times a year for products each. So we're manufacturing a lot of different essences as we're moving along in our process. We also then, oh, did I skip one? Oh no, yeah. We also, in this research that we do, we start researching these merging artists and to understand what's gonna populate Pinterest boards and everyone's minds in terms of color and color reference. People are always like, what? These colors are so beautiful, where do they come from? We, you know, the thing that I think about fabrics is we can apply a color to a fabric, but if the fabric does not wanna receive that color, it will not accept it. It'll make the fabric look really inexpensive. So what we do is we start with a broad palette and we are looking, one fabric in each collection of usually four or five fabrics becomes the lead color and then we try to emulate those colors around it in creating collections because our collections are very elaborate collections and we offer these color boards to all architects and designers because everyone needs to tell a story and when they're trying to build their direction for their clients, a lot of the clients says, where did this color direction come from? So we're always offering all of this, we're always kind of trying to mentor and teach where colors and things are coming from. So this is one of the, I think this is one of our really core strong suits. Don't you guys think? It's like, we love this. It's because they're artists that we've never heard of or seen before and then we do all this research on them and they're like, wow, they are really interesting in color and so it's really good for all of us, the vital quality of understanding. I always think that looking at what the art world is doing because artists really make decisions from their heart. They don't make decisions from their intellect. It's really dangerous to make decisions, as we know as meditators that the intellect can be very mistaken and navigating you in the wrong direction, really go trust your gut. This is trust your heart and trust your gut and decisions, not your intelligence, it's very overrated. Oh, believe me, I truly believe that. You know, don't let it make those, don't get into those situations where you're like, well, this is on the pro list and this is on the calm list. If you wanna do something, do it, just do it. We always kind of build our models from that, so. So one of the things that our studio does once or twice a year is we hold weaving workshops and I heard you guys have had a really successful weaving workshop here, which is fantastic. So this was a couple weeks ago, it was during New York Textile Month and so we keep doing this. We actually do about two or three a year. We're gonna do another one in LA in a couple weeks and it really brings the community together and we all are working on every floor of our building and really creating a community activity. I think it's really important to give back always to always be working with other people and showing them how this works, kind of hoarding data and information and how you do things is very distasteful so we really want to show, that's why we brought all of this stuff and we'll pass it around because you can weave with anything, it's so exciting. So let's talk about sustainability and this was a real pivot for me actually when I was with Noel Textiles. I came in as an outside designer and did my first collection. I had this instinct that I had left a job and I was a mom, single mom and I wanted to raise my son and be home and not be in a full-time job and so I started working on a textile collection and it actually kind of looked like Noel and I called Noel and I said, maybe I think you might want to see this collection they're like, you know Suzanne, we're not looking at collections right now and I'm like, okay. And then you know, I waited for a couple months and I called back and I said, I actually really think you should see this collection. It really, I really do think you should see it and they're like, oh my god, okay come in and then the creative director saw it and she's like, this does look like us. We should do this and I'm like, yeah, I do think we, so I did my first collection, it was called a New Day and then they asked me after I finished that if I would work on the first sustainable product in our industry, this was in the 90s and what was in the industry at that time was like burlap-y looking fiber, really crunchy recycled, really not beautiful materials at all, very coarse and I thought, you know, if we could use a method that would not allow water or dye stuffs to go into the water stream and extrude the fiber as a solution dyed fiber, then that would be a really clean green story. The problem is you'd have to extrude a larger quantity than a normal fiber batch so nobody in our industry would touch this product and I needed to really find a manufacturer so I had to go outside of our industry, the regular architecture and design textile mills that supplied to us and I found a company that was actually kind of having a teetering on the brink of do they stay in business or not, they did all the draperies for JC Pennies and it was one of those things. I ran into this designer who I had known from years before and I asked her what she was doing and I go, how's it going? And she goes, I can't tell how it's going. It's like we're kind of, you know, we're not sure and I said, well, how wide are the looms that you work on? And she goes, they're drapery width and I'm like, oh my God, I gotta talk to you. So I immediately went there and Nature will organize for those that look to do things and I met the president and she had 20 years before I worked for Noel, no lie and she was like, you wanna do this with Noel? We will definitely do this. This actually paved the way for all the work that I did then after that because we sold over a million yards in the first year. It was like nobody could get enough of it and are there Noel people here? Anybody from Noel? Do you remember those days? Like it was, we couldn't keep anything in stock. It was like people were going crazy and then all the textile mills after that called me and said, why didn't you give this to us? And I said, you turned this down. Well, we didn't know it was gonna be successful like this and I'm like, well, you were offered this. You know, like I went to everyone in our industry first because that made sense and so that's what happened after that, you know, it was like the sky was the limit. All the mills would work with us. So fast forward to this last five years. We've been working with different fiber manufacturers than textile mills and worked with them on pushing them to get into biodegradable fibers because if we could now get into biodegradable fibers, any of those fabrics that were polyester or recycled content would now disappear in the landfill rather than going into the landfill and, you know, 55 million pounds of textiles go in the landfill every day around the United States. And so what do we do? Our job as textile designers is to work on materials that will biodegrade after three and a half years. That's exactly the same time it takes for wool to biodegrade. So we wanted to show the cross section of the biodegradable, which is here on your right and what wool, the cross section of wool looks like. So we worked with a chemist and so we're working on now our fifth biodegradable product. So if we could, all of our products in the plastic category, in that petroleum category would be biodegradable and they won't be around in five years after the lifespan of the product. So that's one of the first areas that we've really focused on. And then the second area that we focused on, and this was also this wish. You know that thing that happens when you're like, you think of a person and that person calls you and you haven't seen that person in 10 years? So we're sitting around and we're like, why can't we find a mill that takes garment waste and turns it into fiber and we can weave with it? And not two weeks later we get a call from this woman, oh, run mill in Europe. And she's like, I was told I should call you. And it was like, nature's out there playing with us. And she said, I go, and who are you? And she's like, well, I run a mill in Italy and we work with a fiber manufacturer that's been recycling garment waste for 200 years. And I said to the team, like, oh my God, they're on the phone, we've got this, we've got them. We're now on our fifth product with this mill. So whenever you have an inkling for something that you want, go for it. Just go for it, no matter what. Just think about it, because energy, your energy can create an energy that will come back to you. And this is exactly what happens. So we're working with a lot. This is our fifth fabric now with this mill. And this is what some of the garment waste looks like. They get it in, they divide it by fiber type and then by color. And I had to send, I sent Carol from my office. I'm like, you have to go and like stay there and video everything. And if you get pushed back on video and you're coming back, but you have to make sure this is the real deal. I don't want to put loom through a process if it's not a really, really clear perspective on how they make their yarns and stuff. So they created a yarn pallet for us. And it's just been blue sky ever since then where it's really, really happy with this mill. These are some of the other projects that I've worked on. Again, it's all about sustainability and green. We were asked when Apple was doing the new Cupertino building to do the floor covering because I've worked in the floor covering industry for about 20 years. And how could we make this sustainable? So instead of the carpet tiles, we made 20 foot, four foot slabs. And the backing of the material was made out of polyvinyl butyrol, which is the inner lining of windshields, which is a whole other thing. It's like all this research that was done prior to us doing this at a carpet mill called Tarkat. And so we got that project. And in the meantime, they were like, well, could you do our textile? And I'm like, okay, we'll do your textiles too. What's the, like, tell me the design brief while I'm doing the carpet and the textile. And, you know, Johnny, I was handed over the design brief to this guy. And he said, this is what Johnny wants the carpet and the textile to look like. And he just handed me a computer. And I was like, that's the design brief. He's like, everything about this. And you all have, those of you that have an Apple computer, though they have a subtle iridescence and a subtle look and they have a certain kind of luster and non-luster at the same time, so we had to create delustered fibers and do all of this stuff. So that was a huge project and a fun one to go into. So my art practice, I'm just sliding through my life with you guys right now. This is my dad. I grew up in the Midwest. He was a third generation recycling guy. We had a scrap metal yard in Bloomington, Illinois. And I would go and work there and on the weekends and stuff. And my dad was like always so generous to all the artists and they could come and take whatever they wanted and make art out of it. And so he became sick a little while ago in like 2010. And he came and I wanted him to see my doctor. So while he was here, I was like, why do I have metal in my house that I could weave a little weaving from my dad? And he loved it. Well, that little weaving turned into a huge commission. So this commission, and this was my son, who didn't have a job his senior year of high school and thought I was just gonna let him slide by with that. I said, no, I have a job for you. And he's like, what is it? And I'm like, you're gonna cut 5,000 dry cleaning hangers. And so I thought it was gonna be so great because I'd be down on the loom weaving and he'd be cutting and I'd come down and he'd put his headsets on. He didn't want to talk to me at all. It was a disaster for me. Anyway, so this is what the piece ended up looking like. So that's 5,000 dry cleaning hangers. And we brought a piece of this to pass around so you can feel the weight of it and the heft of it and stuff like that. And then some other materials. I started collecting, as Alexis said, balloons on the beach. And this is a, I've been collecting, I've got about 1,000 or more of mylar balloons. These are deadly, these pieces, I have to say. They never biodegrade at all. I got a call from a temple, the art consultant for a temple in Dallas, the temple of Manuel. And they wanted for me to create an arc cover. But when they found out my materials like mylar balloons are like, I did shred my divorce documents and made big weavings out of those. And then wire hangers, the congregation was like dead against me being the weaver for there. And I'm like, seriously? And they said, could you just do it out of wool or something nice? And I'm like, well, no, like who would want a weaving out of wool, something nice? I'm like, there's so much stuff that we can weave with. And so I said, can I fly down there? I actually really want to see the famous Annie Albers. It's in the main sanctuary. It's worth a trip to see that. Well, like that was the most incredible thing. I mean, my knees buckled when I saw that. And so I met with the consultant and the whole team and I brought down a bunch of materials and then the rabbi shows up. And then I said, rabbi, what do you think your ultimate goal is in your life as a rabbi? And he's like, well, I like to inspire people. And I go, yeah, don't you like to transform them? Like, like transforming, like taking a Mylar balloon and transforming it into something beautiful. And the architect looked over at me and just smiled. And he was like, keep going, keep going. So they excused me. And then I came back in. So what they got was a picture of every balloon that was woven into the arc. Oh, into the arc cover. And so that they could, this is like nine feet tall and about three and a half feet wide each door. So that the kids could see that you could just take anything and turn something, you know, like transform. And I made the rabbi come and weave on the loom. He was in New York. He came up and I said, come over and you'll weave with us. And so he came over and got on the loom with me. So the, this is one of the largest commissions that I've had. This was a mock up for it, actually. I was asked to work in a, with a large marketing branding company that had all these, you know, free to lay and all of these food categories and stuff like that. And they didn't, they originally wanted textiles. And I said, no, I think it needs to be light. It was also in Dallas. I don't know, I had this whole Dallas thing going. And so we matched the colors of their marketing and I created a two story atrium of woven neon for them, matching the neon to what their companies were. So this is, it's the image, I actually have a small scale one in my studio in New York. You have to see it. It's very, very dimensional. This, these images aren't the best to show. And this actually came, the image before, which is the mock up. I was asked by the, the Biennale in Venice to show a mock up of my, of this neon work because I use so much neon in Venice. That's what, that's what that was for. So, and the neon, because it's glass, it's a very green material. It's woven with silicone warp and silicone is one of the cleanest materials that we can weave with. We do a lot of coated materials with silicone and then aluminum frames and stuff like that. So that's, that's fell within the category of creating a green material. So the last is we kind of work up our way through the, my logo. It's kind of strange that I, the logo of my building had five floors and we don't really have five floors. And so when, but the logo had five and I'm like, well, that'll be the name of my meditation. I'm no wonder we did five floors on this. And so it turned into fifth floor meditation. So this is really something that I feel very strongly about that there's so much mental health and so much anxiety going around for everybody that it's turned into a wonderful, it's like the best habit ever, meditating twice a day every day and de-exciting your nervous system that will allow your creative intelligence to really kind of come up and really expand so that you aren't afraid to make choices. And you know, you don't have to, everything doesn't have to have a reason. You'll figure that out as you go. As long as everything's in a flow, as long as it feels good, again, we're meant to be living our lives having on earth here. So that's what I think. So we do group meditations once a month. I do a Sunday morning group. There's other initiators out here. Waves your hand, Chris. Here's another teacher here. Thank you for coming. So it's an amazing group of meditators in New York. And if anybody wants any information, you can reach out. And did I do it within the right timeframe? Okay. All right. Okay, good. All right, so this is me. If you wanna follow us, we'll all get back to you. And we're gonna, after we talk, we're gonna pass a bunch of our products around so you can see it will turn the lights on and, yeah. Ready? Is that right? Yeah. That was amazing. You've talked a little bit at the end there about wellness and how you build a healthy, balanced environment at your own studio for your own practice. But I'm kind of curious about the environments that your fabrics go into. So there's so much performance testing for contract fabrics. It's insane. Are there comparable testing for the healthfulness of materials? Yeah, there is, I'm gonna get my notes because there's so many organizations and operations. My team is like, you're not gonna get that granule, or are you? We actually talked about this. But yeah, I mean, there is a lot going on. There's, to me, because 65% of what's being used in the world today is plastic, and it's not biodegradable. It's a lot of plastic going into the landfill that's gonna take forever. And even feeling going into a workspace, feeling all this plastic, you can tell the difference. It's the same thing as wearing a lot of polyester versus cotton and natural fibers. So for us, for wellness, we just did for the first time a collection called Supernatural. First time in my career that the company allowed me to do all natural fibers. And that's really a need in the marketplace. When I started, it was wolves and cottons and viscoses and linens. In the contract market, they passed 30,000 double rubs. There's no problem with that. We don't put stain resistance on it because that's a chemical. We don't put FR treatments on our products because that's a chemical. So we wanna have clean materials, but the architects and interior designers that want to have a wellness factor, they will not allow FR chemicals to be on their material. Finally, I just recently down in Houston, say, fire, yeah, sorry about that, yeah, fire resistant. I heard for the first time that they're no longer gonna be using vinyl. Vinyl is not good either with all the fluoride and stuff and those chemistries and stuff like that. So, yeah. Did I answer your question? Kinda? Yes, I think so. Well, I guess the question really was, is there testing about healthfulness? There is testing. Or movement in the- Peth regulation industry. Yeah. Or not requiring the PFOA and PFSA free. Is that, am I saying it right? What's PFOA? Yeah, free. The healthcare without harm. There's so many different components and everyone's trying to go there. The fashion industry has been very harmful for our industry because there's also issues with child labor and all. I mean, there's just so many things. It's not just, it's like making materials matter. It's like making everything matter and making an important decision on what you use. Urethane over vinyl, silicone over urethane over vinyl, all of these things. And it's being tested and it's being proven that the cleaner the material, the better for the environment. I don't know. Carol, what would you say? Other tests? She's a bank testing gal right there. Clear air testing, yeah. Yeah. So no off-gassing. California and Maine are really leading the FR chemical and phthalate free movement and they started all the legislation and research on that. Yeah. So environmental and human impact standards and tests, lead is only, and that's lead is only about environmental testing. Yeah, so that was another question that I had. Like you have done so much to push the contract market towards sustainable materials, from your first project at Null to the biodegradable polyester. So how do you get traction on those initiatives? Yeah, it's so interesting. I grew up with it. When I came here from the Midwest, I had a place for my newspapers and my cans and plastics and I said to the landlord, what do you do with all this? And they're like, where are you from? They don't do this here. I just didn't realize that. And so it's the same thing. I mean, somebody's gotta be pushing it and pushing it. And so we push our manufacturers when we first started working with, we did biodegradable wasn't even thought of 10 years ago when we were starting the loom brand or 13 years ago when we were starting the loom brand. So we started with manufacturers the same way we did the resolution fabric. And we just said we need not just recycled but beautifully spun recycled materials. This is what we need. And they're like, well, what about this? It's really inexpensive. And I'm like, well, that's not what we want. We want it to look like a natural fiber. We want it to behave like a natural fiber and we want heather effects and all of these things. And so we had to push, we pushed the manufacturers to go in a certain area. They make it for us and then we position it in the marketplace. And once you can position that need in the marketplace then everybody starts recognizing that they need that. They're not necessarily asking for it. There are large architecture and design firms that are making the stand that by 2025 everything needs to be carbon neutral. Well, the impact of that, I mean, it's just gonna be virtually impossible. You're gonna have to be buying, what is it buying? Offsets to be carbon neutral because the manufacturing of all the things that we're making, it just doesn't make sense. And now they've kind of changed those stories. But with the biodegradable, even in Texas, because it's all about petroleum there, I was like, well, how important is this for you? And they're like, it's extremely important. We want you to keep doing this and so we're gonna keep doing it. I mean, if all of our plastics could turn into biodegradable, I would do it. We just can't get each fiber because it's very, every fiber has its own little unique texture and extrusion and stuff like that. So, just being, we're very careful now. We're working on the looms right now with brand new biodegradable fibers. And we just talked about, let's just make sure, if we do this, we're gonna be able to get this and keep getting it. And we can build a whole new story around this new biodegradable. So, yeah. So, to that point, Dorothy Liebes started consulting for DuPont 70 years ago and Polyester has dominated the market ever since. And I feel like there's universal agreement that we need another option, but I don't see anybody with the resources of a DuPont really pushing that forward. It seems like smaller companies or academic research groups that are pushing that conversation forward. Yeah. Is there anybody that you have your eye on that you think might lead the way? You know, there's a lot of them. There's a lot of them and there's a lot of different names of them. There's Sequel and there's Sequel and there's all of these different companies that are making, some of them are making biodegradable fibers. Sequel is making ocean taking plastics from, you know, materials that are gonna go into the ocean and creating the recycle content material from them. The interesting thing in our industry is not everybody is marketing. This is a big marketing thing. Like, I'm not sure, like the DuPonts of the world, those large fiber manufacturers one of our major suppliers, which didn't even have a name like a DuPont, was basically a fiber manufacturer went out of business and really tops, you know, everything just went sideways in our industry because more plastic is being used now for plastic bottles, recycled plastic bottles and they are for fibers. And so we've had a lot of kind of turmoil over who's gonna do what. There's four or five companies that are out there vying for that realm. And I don't know what the right thing to do is whether we market it or not, you know. You're paying for marketing, which is the name and stuff like that. But you're not even seeing the manufacturers, the fiber manufacturers or the mills, you're not even seeing them market it with that name. So it's like, where do you get the value? DuPont has always had a great name. I don't know if you guys remember Monsanto, God. They did that S-E-F fiber, self-extinguished fiber. There was like, and then that was like so short lived. So I think it's, you know, we just don't know what's gonna happen. Right. And I would prefer, frankly, to use natural fibers actually do as much with natural fibers and renewable resources and different companies that are actually doing the recycled fashion waste and stuff like that. That is a business. Any businessman out there, or woman out there, I can't believe I said business, any business person out there that wants to start a business, it would be recycling garment waste and having enough space. There's enough malls out there that are sitting empty to put all of this material in and then start cutting it up and making it into fiber. I swear, that's a job, that would be an amazing job for somebody, business, yeah, yeah. I guess that's what I was looking for was a material that's not petroleum based. Yeah, that's what I would recommend to, you know, if I could find that in the United States, it would be great. I mean, we have a great partner in Europe, but then you're paying for it to come over here, so the U.S. would be perfect and keep all that garment. We use, what is the name of the company? We use our bags, we put all of our fabric in. Fab scrap, if anybody has leftover fabrics or whatever they want to get rid of. Fab scrap's a great organization, but like working with fab scrap and then finding somebody that would take the garment waste and do the same thing that they do in Europe, it would be phenomenal if they could do that. Does this company that you're working for, do they have to be all wool garments? No, no, it's interesting. So they categorize them by wool and cotton and viscose, but by color, you know, in color. And there's actually 9%, in our products, there's about 9% different percentages of virgin wool so that if they don't have that specific color to force it in the direction so that you have a perfect match, we could do that. But yeah, no, it's a mixture of materials. Yeah, it's fascinating. I know, because I know that the inclusion of Lycra spandex, which is in everything now is really, can cause a lot of problems in trying to recycle fabrics. There's nothing we can do about that at this point. That ship is sailed. That ship is sailed. No, we do biodegradable materials. I mean, the Lycra stuff, you can't separate it from the natural fiber. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that can't, huh? It is. It is. It is. I know you can't separate it so you're never gonna be able to fix that one. That's just gonna have to go, yeah. It's like, this is why, you know, I always say to young designers that are, you know, architects and interior designers that are standing around and I said, when you buy clothes, buy them for your whole life. You know, like, it's not about fast fashion because so much gets thrown away. Like, make good decisions on everything. Everything matters. Everything that you purchase makes a difference. Everything that you live around makes a difference, you know, compost. We compost. Everybody, we should compost. We should, you know, weave with wacky materials that you have laying around the house. All right, I think it's time to take questions from the audience. This program is being live streamed so I would ask that you wait for the microphone before you ask your question. Thank you so much. Hello, you mentioned using silicon as a weft. I was curious to hear more about that. So I, on Canal Street, you can buy silicon, like, cords of silicon. It's pretty thick. I needed something that was gonna, for the neon weaving, I needed something that was gonna hold the neon and ground the neon in a frame because it was gonna be hanging two stories high and I started with a more rigid fiber and, you know, working with neon, it is, there's a strength and a delicacy to it and so I needed something more, something that was very clean and something that was pliable that would work around it and so that's what I came up with and it had to be a clean material and silicon's really a clean material. It's extruded really clean and it's turned out beautiful. It's kind, it's a wonderful material to weave with but it's heavy. It couldn't get it any finer than what I got and it was about a quarter of an inch in diameter. Yeah, it's like a rope. Yeah, yeah. You get like the spool, you know, the top and the bottom of the spool was like that size. So, you know, to carry it in, you know, even get it delivered is like this huge laborious thing and to warp it, the, yeah. It was one of those things that you're like three stories up in the air on a scaffolding, warping these frames and just hoping you can handle it, you know, like I'm like, why did I do this? What did I do? You know, because I'm, you couldn't, you couldn't ship it woven. I had to weave it on site, but yeah. Yeah, these materials are really trying to, I'll try anything. I don't know if I would do another three story, like two stories up in the air, one of those again, that was, or nor would my installer, he's like, are you gonna do one of those again? It's okay. We do it once. So good news, separate from my question is that by the end of 2024, all of New York City's five boroughs will be required to compost. Yeah. Just FYI. That's great. I've been composting for 30 years, nevertheless. So the question I had was, you were talking about working with a company in Italy. Do you talk about who that is? And I'm just fascinated by the fact that they have for 200 years and using recycled fibers. So I was just interested in learning more about who they were and how you found them. Yeah, those are trade secrets that we would have to kill you, but no, you can come up and talk to me afterwards. Ben, I'm happy to talk to you about it, but yeah. No, I didn't mean that really. But yeah, no, finding suppliers that is like the trickiest and the most, it's just the hardest thing to do. And the fact that we had all been looking for this and looking for this and thinking about it and putting that energy out there and like, how are we gonna find this and have them call and work with us was really great. And little did we know until Carol went and really went through the fiber manufacturers plant that we could really do what we did, what we did. But yeah, we can talk about it. I don't think so. I don't know. I don't know. If you go stand in the street corner in Italy anywhere and say, who makes fiber for every cycle concept, you'll find out probably. Or talk to the fashion industry, they'll know. I mean, it's the fashion capital of the world and so all of this fabric goes back there and goes back there, but yeah, I don't really share that. Sorry. Yeah? I hope it's not taking you too far afield, but I'm just curious about your thoughts on vegan leather. So vegan leather, we've been, my son's best friend, Bryce, was making leather out of, actually, Lori's here, making leather for the fashion industry out of kind of the mutation of creating leather. I don't know if I'm saying that right, Lori, but yeah. Yeah, and so, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, that's how it started using the tissue. And growing it, and growing it. And the thing about that, and I was so into it because, of course, it was close to the family, and the thing is, in our industry, in the architecture and design industry, you need wits and wits and lengths of it and they could only make it specific. It would take forever and the cost of it would be outrageous. We just couldn't get samples big enough for our industry to make it a viable material. Yeah, I was just, I just spoke in last year in Dubai at a sustainable conference and there was a guy that was making leather out of, and I loved it, out of eggplant. It was the skin of eight plants. Have you guys seen that? Oh, I mean, I'm just like, let me smell it. That's what you wanna do. I'm like, yeah, like, does it, you know, cause I thought, what's the smell like? Even if you're gonna wear it, what's the smell like? But it was beautiful, and it looked like leather. And I was like, how wide could you do it? And how, you know, how could you, how does that work, you know? But yeah, I have to look up my notes on this guy. It was, I mean, you could probably Google that, eggplant, leather, and stuff like that. But for our industry, it's really hard, but I'm all for it. I mean, it's usually used in accessories and things like that. Hi, my question is about low impact dye. You mentioned earlier that you were working on making sure the dyes are green and clean. What have you done, what's being done, and is there any testing going on to make sure that low impact dyes are going to be the trend in the future? Yeah, boy, the dye houses have gotten really slayed on that. So the, how do we test the, what's the terminology for the clean dye? In air testing, but for dyes, no, the codes that we go through to make sure that all of the dye stuffs are chemical. Oh, the chemical transparency, we use the declare label for that. Yeah, so have you heard of declare? A declare label, so all chemicals that are being used as dye stuff for our industry all have to go through a certain, you know, testing lab, which then declares them, they declare them to be clean for the water system. So our whole industry uses declare as the label, and so all of the factories have to go through that. Is that the best way to describe that? Garment, recycled garment waste uses no additional dye stuff, so that's even better. Yeah, yeah. And the extrusion that stuff that we did, which didn't put any dye effluents is solution dyed, but it is a chemical, you know, it's like you're extruding the chemical in color form. So it's actually extruding, but you're extruding such a large quantity of it, that's what solution dyed fibers are about. Now, you know, people aren't doing a lot of solution dyed, unless they're using black as an over dyed color, but solution dyed, unless you're doing it in the carpet industry, there's a lot of solution dyed carpet, which means it's bleach cleanable and all of that, all that stuff. Does that answer your question? Yeah, it's here. I like it, it's all technical. That's like, that's why I have a technical person over there. Hi, I'm wondering how the attempt to use more waste, what waste in quotes, wool would be versus finding, use garments and processing them and using them. Say it, ask it. So I'm talking about waste, the wool, you know, do sheep have to be sheared every year? The wool is not, they don't make a profit really on the wool. There's a lot of wool sitting around that's not used. I don't know this first hand, but from reading and talking to people. So why are we using that resource more? Oh, I think. Going out and seeking, you know, used garments and processing them. Well, that's what I'm saying. Why aren't, I mean, it takes a lot of manpower to take garments and first of all, you have to then get enough garments and then color grade these garments so that you're batching them by color and then shopping that up into, you know, a little short staple or long staple, which means, you know, you chop that all up and then you start spinning it. So you've got, you know, color grading, chopping, you know, well, combing it first and then spinning it and then, so the equipment involved in all of that is, you'd have to find a manufacturer and I think they're out there that have all of this equipment under one roof, but there's about, you know, it's gotta go in all the sequential orders to make it then into a fiber that then can be tested and go past 30,000 double rubs and it's a thing, it's a big, big thing. So it just doesn't, I don't think anybody's taken this on yet, but we work with a lot of wool suppliers in the United States that, you know, renewable resource, which we all call renewable resources, which is, you know, getting virgin wool and using it and having it spun and stuff like that. It's, there's just a missing link in the United States that nobody, in Europe, it's so much slower, you know, it's, everything manufacturing is much more slowed down there. Here it's just like more consumption, more consumption and the thrown away and more disposable and consumption and, you know, there's too much and there's way too much, but nobody's taking the time to use it. That's how I think about it, yeah. We have time for one more question. I have at the beach, yeah, yeah, I have. And cause it's like, it's so beautiful and I've made some pieces out of it, but you know, it's really hard to get the smell out of it, you know, you know, you have to weave it when it's wet and pliable. And I kept thinking, oh, it'll lose its smell. Doesn't really. And then it gets a little, it gets rigid and then it breaks, it gets brittle and then it breaks. So that's not a good material, sadly, but it's beautiful. The colors are all really, really beautiful, but yeah. I went through a whole phase when I was like, I'm gonna make fabric out of all the seaweed and algae and it's so beautiful. And then it's just like, ooh. Thanks very much, everyone. If we can have your patients for about one minute, we're gonna move the textile samples onto the platform so that we can welcome you up to explore them a little easier. Yeah, you can also pass them around. Are you like this a little bit? I won't try to control this. So do you want them to come up? Yeah, do you guys wanna come up and take a look?