Meeting LU+RU
Few days ago I got the chance to meet two wonderful young ladies living in SH and creating beautiful and simple products using blue Nankeen cloth.
These two American girls just started their business with a fresh collection of pillows, napkins, dish clothes, all using a traditional hand-made Chinese fabric that follows a 3000-year-old technique.
If you want to have a look to what they're doing, go to http://luruhome.com/
These two American girls just started their business with a fresh collection of pillows, napkins, dish clothes, all using a traditional hand-made Chinese fabric that follows a 3000-year-old technique.
If you want to have a look to what they're doing, go to http://luruhome.com/
How did everything start?
When we came to live here we started decorating our apartment, while doing it we chanced upon this fabric and kind of fell for it! It's similar to a lot of the colors that happen in design in the East Cost of America, lot of blue, very Nordic. It was kind of familiar foreign thing, familiar in the color palette, familiar in the feeling, plain cotton, very simple and we were really impressed with the range of patterns. It was very authentic! Moreover we were having this experience in China and trying to live it to its fullness so why not doing something for our apartment using this very unique Chinese cloth!? We started to do that and then one thing led to another and the friends would be: “oh! Can you make me something?” (we were sewing everything on our own!) and then we started being more serious about it! How did you eventually developed it into a real business? We started with a network of friends and family, everybody know somebody and so pretty soon we had e-mails and Skype-dates going on back and forth with anybody who could advise us about the best way to start a company that manufactures in China and wholesales to places outside of China, because that's were we saw an instant opportunity to sell. Chinese folks are a lot more familiar with the fabrics and therefor it's not that exciting to them, so we saw this great opportunity to sell outside of China to people who would have found it new and interesting and really special. In America specifically there's a lot of global trending happening, people are interested in getting products with a story that came from somewhere else in their home. We'd seen a lot of stuff from India, but there was not Nankeen in the market place yet! When people started realizing that we were taking it seriously, that it was no longer a hobby and we wanted to make it a career if you will, they started to help! How long did it take from when you started everything to get to the point of having an actual demand, an actual business? We started playing around with the fabric November of 2010 and it was probably last spring when people saw how seriously we were taking it. We officially launched in the US in January and it was really successful, however we still have a long way to go to make it stable! We are going to launch an online store soon so people will be able to see every product. Where did you get this kind of cloth? There are several little small shops around Shanghai, really tiny places where you can either buy ready-made products or just the plain fabric, anyway now we work directly with the artisans in their workshops outside the city. We don't buy anything more in here, some of the shops have actually run out of business since we've started and that's pretty tricky. How did you get in touch with the artisans? We came across this fabric, we met this man who deals with it and we tried to understand a bit more about it, we started educating ourselves, doing some research on the web and then we met a sourcing agent who was able to link us to one of the artisan families. From what we gathered there are six families who still make it the right way in China! None of them actually inside Shanghai because it's just way too expensive to set up a shop with enough space in here. |
We now have connection to two families, one specifically that we really like to work with who's been doing it for a really long time. When we started, that was the biggest piece of the puzzle, now we know is not that hard to do things here as it initially seems, it's just a matter of being very patient, diligent and keep on asking until you find an answer. It's been fun, some people are really interested in being a craft and in being so rare, but unfortunately some others don't care at all!
So tell me, how do they make this Nankeen cloth? It's very cool! The artisan cuts a very big stencil from thick oiled paper, then they lay the stencil down on the fabric and scrape a thick thick layer of soybean paste. They let it dry for 10 days and then it forms such a hard shell that when they dip it into the indigo dye, the dye can't pass through the soybean paste so the fabric underneath is protected and remains white, whereas the rest of it takes the indigo color. Once the soybean paste is washed away the pattern comes out! What about the patterns that you're using? Are they classical Nankeen or you asked the artisans to make some of your own design? For the first line, which was the Spring-Summer 2012, we used only things that artisans were already making, more traditional patterns, because we wanted to see if there was an interest in the market in the first place. But our goal has been all along to design our own patterns, so for the Fall-Winter 2012 we are adding maybe two or three that we designed ourselves and then eventually we want to get to a place where we're designing them all! Do you show your customers the process behind what could seem such a simple product? The artisans are very very concerned about keeping it theirs, in the same way we are concerned in keeping our contemporary design ours! So they get very uncomfortable when you take a lot of pictures. We really wanted to make a video to just show quickly how is done so that people could connect a little bit more with what they were buying and how it's made, but unfortunately they didn't let us do it. We also deal with privacy concerns on our hand so we understand them! We understand they make a life out of it and they've had problems when foreign people have come in, photographed, taken videos and then a year later there's a new factory on the road! And on your side you don't show them the final product, do you? It would be really fun to show the artisans the final product, but at the same time it's our intellectual property. What you can find locally are very traditional Chinese products, classical pillows, stuffed animals, pieces of clothing, whereas we bring it to a contemporary edge, making something a more international cosmopolitan community wants to buy. So it's something we have to think about, they could easily copy it and make a taobao shop and the funny thing is that the industry is already set up like that: nobody expects to see the final product. When we start having our patterns made by them, at that point we will be willing to show the artisans what we're doing, because we will have protection over our own designs! A HUGE AND WARM THANK YOU TO LIZA AND CLAIRE FOR THEIR TIME! |