I recently got a chance to catch up with Matt Tomasulo, founder and designer at CityFabric. He’s been busy in New York with a recently successful show, but his heart is always in Raleigh. You may have caught a glimpse of CityFabric earlier this May at their first exhibition at Stitch—Holly Aiken’s brick and mortar shop in downtown Raleigh. (photo credits)
But do you know about CityFabric and how they go started? Why Raleigh was their first design? How you can help get this business jump started?
Check out our interview with Matt and learn more about the entrepreneurial spirit that’s woven into CityFabric.
Tell our readers about City CityFabric and why they should be interested.
CityFabric is a young start-up whose core focus is to engage people in conversations about their cities.
- Design: we use figureground maps (which show building footprints of the city)
- Products: t-shirts, totes, pillows, prints, canvases
- Exhibitions: We have had 2 so far. We make canvases at the same scale (1”=300’, 1”=500’) with interactive cut outs of iconic public spaces (ie. central park, the boston commons, the mall) to then compare to the other canvases
- Kickstarter: to launch “Wear You Live,” my design + apparel line for an initial 13 cities
What motivated you to start CityFabric?
CityFabric started after I successfully used figureground maps to talk about urban design and development issues with my parents. In April of 2010, I was part of winning team at NC State for a national urban design and development competition which provided some seed money to curate the idea of integrating figureground maps on shirts.
Why Raleigh, and specifically, why the Creative District?
We made Raleigh because its our hometown. We zoomed in on downtown for our first shirt because that’s where we were selling it and where there are the most buldings. Our most recent Raleigh shirt has zoomed out enough to include 5 points, Cameraon Village and some of NCSU. (Raleigh is difficult to include a lot of the city because its not very dense, meaning there are a lot of small builds spaced out from each other.) Other cities have a much larger building mass to print, even when zooming out. Simple issues like this bring up interesting conversations about the size, density and condition of a city’s built environment.
You’ve got a Kickstarter campaign going until August 31st, tell us more.
Kickstarter is a platform that allows a grass-roots idea/project to crowdsource funds over a certain timeframe in order to development a product or fund a project that they would otherwise not have the money to do so. In the case with Wear You Live, our project is intended to launch our initial design and apparel line of tees/totes for 13 cities. It cost a lot of money to create an inventory of products (especially for 13 cities) and Kickstarter allows us to basically take pre-orders for the products so that we can accumulate enough orders to allow us to purchase the resources we need. The other added bonus of Kickstarter is that the pre-ordered goods or “rewards” are typically unique to the project. In our case, all Wear You Live tees will be printed on royal blue tees. We will never print on royal blue again, making the shirts a limited-edition run, unique to our backers.
Raleigh seems to have a great entrepreneurial spirit like yours. Why do you think that is?
There are a lot of young and interesting people in the triangle. The med/tech/edu companies and institutions are brining a lot of new people the Triangle. The size of Raleigh and the Triangle allows anyone with an idea to talk to people who are experienced, connected, and successful. Many of the connections I have made over the past year might have been much more difficult to forge if in a much larger city. Rich local resources, coupled with the insecurity of a traditional job encourages anyone with an idea to curate it.
Thanks Matt, best of luck with the business and the Kickstarter campaign. By this time you read this post, I will have already contributed.