We’re going to Cleveland next weekend and we want you to go too! Yep, that’s right, we’re giving away one set of sold out three day passes for the entire weekend of WMC Fest. WMC is being held Friday through Sunday, August 7-9 at the beautiful Allen Theatre in downtown Cleveland. It’s our first time attending WMC Fest and we thought we should bring along a friend. Jay & Nate will be speaking on Sunday (you know you want to hear them debate about starting an online business) and Sara will be repping Cotton Bureau in the Vendor Village. Come hang out with us, listen to a great line-up of speakers, and meet a bunch of new friends!
So, what do you have to do? It’s pretty simple; all you have to do is comment on this blog post. We’ll randomly draw one lucky winner from all the comments Friday, July 31st around 2pm EST.
Fine print: you must provide all of your own accommodations in Cleveland and be able to get yourself there and back. What’s that mean? If you live in LA and you want to go to WMC Fest on our free set of passes, you gotta fly yourself out here and you gotta book your own hotel room. If you live in Akron, well, lucky you, you can probably just drive over to the venue each day and sleep at home! The winner will need to meet us either at the opening party Friday evening or at our hotel to collect their tickets. US residents only, as international contest laws are a pain.
UPDATE: Thanks to everybody who threw their hat(s) in the ring for this opening. The response was honestly overwhelming. We not only found one new Design Coordinator...we found two! More soon once they've been properly brainwashed.
If you’ve ever posted a design on Cotton Bureau, chances are you’ve made friends with Laura Hersh, our Design Coordinator. Laura started with us as an intern way back in summer 2013 and has been holding down her current gig since early 2014. Well, Laura recently relocated from Pennsylvania to Texas, and she’s movin' on down the design road (btw: if you're looking for a young, eager, talented designer, hire her!). That means we need to replace her, and while we’ll never replace replace Laura, we’re hoping to find someone we love just as much. Here’s what we’re looking for in our next Design Coordinator...
Your job is to walk all Cotton Bureau designers through the process of getting their shirts from “accepted design submission” to “live and for sale on the website.” You'll be guiding them through shirt colors and fabrics, ink types, pricing strategy, profile completion, and scheduling. You'll also be creating all the product images that go along with each shirt. This is perfect for design students with a light course load, recent grads, freelancers, stay-at-home mommies/daddies, or anyone looking for a consistent, design-related part-time job that isn’t super-stressful.
Here's what you get...
You can work whenever you want. Do you like to work early in the morning? Late at night? Middle of the day, like a normal person? You make your own schedule, as long as the work gets done.
You can work wherever you want. We think Pittsburgh is the best city on the planet, but if you happen to live in a lesser city, that’s why Slack exists. However, if you live near us, you can come to the office and hang out.
You get to work with us. We think we’re a pretty, uh, dope squad, or whatever the kids say nowadays. Hopefully you agree.
Make new friends. In this role, you get to meet and form relationships with a lot of your favorite people in design and tech. To many of our designers, the person in the Design Coordinator role is Cotton Bureau.
The pay is fair and the hours are consistent. We'll be totally upfront about this...we're thinking $20/hr.
Here's what we need you to have...
20–30 hours free every week. This job is part-time-plus, especially when you're first getting your feet wet. The Cotton Bureau Express only keeps chugging when we launch new shirts, and your job is to keep the engines burning hot.
Rock-solid interpersonal and communication skills. You’re gonna be dealing with all types of designers, largely via email. That takes patience, empathy, and keen writing skills.
A design eye. You don't need a degree from RISD, just a sense of good taste and an awareness of modern design trends.
Attention to detail. You're the last line of defense before shirts go live on the site, and "good enough" isn't good enough. We're sticklers and we expect you to be one too.
Photoshop, Illustrator, and a computer. Preferably one with enough horsepower to deal with large files.
A working understanding of screen-printing. OK, this is more like a nice-to-have. We can coach you up if you’ve never pulled a squeegee.
You're in the good ol' U.S. of A. Nothin' against you, Canada, but international taxes are complicated.
Last Wednesday was Amazon.com’s 20th anniversary, which they celebrated with a membership-drive-slash-Black-Friday-in-July event known as Prime Day. We respect Amazon and how far they’ve come—how many other 20-year-old websites can you think of?—but (and this is just, like, our opinion) we happen to think that bigger maaaybe isn’t always better.
If you know anything about Cotton Bureau, you probably know we’re small business to the marrow. Early in the day on Wednesday we came up with the idea of running our own counter-campaign, something along the lines of Small Business Saturday. A movement encouraging people to share the small or local businesses they love and support, and to help get the word out about some of our own favorites. A rising tide to raise all boats.
We called it #buysmall, and we’re thrilled with how it turned out. After spreading the word on social media we saw nearly 900 responses across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and the hashtag even ended up trending on Twitter in the Pittsburgh area. Not too shabby for a last-minute idea with a couple hours of preparation.
But what we loved most of all was the depth and variety of businesses that were shared with us. You showed us the stores you shop at, the artwork that decorates your wall, the bags you carry and the pins you pin on them. Where you buy your makeup, your candles, your coffee and cider and whisky. So many incredible businesses, in fact, that we don’t have room to share them all here.
Sara Cousins let us know about this Ohio-based maker of Stand-Up Longboards. We would have expected to see an outfit like this on the west coast, but in the midwest? Quite the pleasant surprise.
"Project 908 is dedicated to sourcing our manufacturing materials domestically and when possible from within Ohio. We do not pretend to manufacture, we are the manufacturers! That’s right, we do it all ourselves, from design, to machining, shaping or fiberglassing."
This Nashville, TN store, owned by Courtney Webb, sells everything from ceramics, to apothecary goods, to flowers through a CSA in collaboration with nearby (link: text: Humble Flowers Farm).
"Most of the makers in my shop and most of your favorite local craftsmen have been in business 4 years or less. We all jumped off a cliff together and you caught us, even in a bad economy."
Mixing the past with the future, this solar powered company out of Cape Cod, MA makes leather goods like wallets, belts, bags, and more, all by hand using traditional methods. "[N]ot a single press has a power cord running to it." Tipster Ben Markowitz summed it up nicely: everyone needs a bottle hook.
How many of you know about this Amazon Prime Day situation? Pardon us if you do, but for those who don’t, Amazon is trying to invent their own Black Friday-in-July by dropping prices all over the place. Wanna help us mess it up (and support some awesome small/independent businesses in the process)? Here’s what we want you to do: hop on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook and post the handle or URL of your favorite small brand, along with the hashtag #buysmall. Encourage all your favorite small brands to do the same. If you run your own small brand, we’d love for you to help out too. A few of our favorite small brands are already on board with us, and we’ll be giving away free t-shirts all day on Twitter at random to anyone who spreads the #buysmall gospel.
Together, we can break Prime Day. (Of course, you’re welcome to do your shopping right here on Cotton Bureau.)
Jen Mussari is a lettering artist, designer, and illustrator who currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. We asked the coolest gal around to chat with us about her background and how she made the transition to full-time creative work. Read on for the full interview.
CB: Give us some history, did you go to college? What did you study? How did you get into lettering?
JM: I grew up in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia going to car shows with my dad and listening to punk music alone. I got really into doodling band logos on my notebooks and just…never stopped! When I got to high school I started putting my (really bad) art on the Internet, and found a community of people from all across the world who encouraged me to keep working and get better. This is where I learned that there are entire colleges just for art, just about lost my young mind, and focused on building a portfolio. I got into MICA in Baltimore, and had complete culture shock when I moved there. I learned so much about how to see and think. I know that sounds kind of weird, but I really do credit my art school education with the way that I arrive at visual solutions to problems. When I was attending art school, I was making fine art almost exclusively, even though I never stopped drawing letters. I snuck into an Illustration class that I didn’t have the prerequisites for that was taught by Joel Holland. When I saw the work that Joel was doing, something clicked for me: I realized that I could have a career exclusively drawing letterforms. Whitney Sherman then waived all of the credits that I didn’t have so that in my second semester of my senior year I could change my major from Fine Arts to Illustration and still graduate on time. These two saw something in me and I couldn’t be more grateful that they led me in this direction. I took off running and haven’t stopped since.
CB: That’s awesome that someone saw your talent and helped put you on a path to developing it. Right now you’re a freelance illustrator, what did you do right after graduating?
JM: Right after I graduated I moved to San Francisco to try and continue growing my freelance business off of the momentum I garnered in school. Things didn’t go so well there, actually. I never felt like I fit in that city, and also needed to work a retail job part-time in order to afford to live there. Now, I actually really value the things that I learned while working retail; and I also believe that if you’ve had a really crummy job at some point you are going to be better off for it. I learned so much about how to deal with entitled people, how to talk people down from irrational anger, and how to manage client relationships from being an in-store personal shopper at a women’s clothing store (believe it or not!) My peers who have also had jobs in retail, restaurants, call centers, etc. are noticeably better freelancers because of it.
It didn’t take long for me to get restless in California. After a year and a half, my apartments rent was about to be raised by $800 a month and I got the hell out of there. Brooklyn bound, I had no idea what was ahead. But I was very ready for it.
CB: People tend to look down on retail workers, thinking they don’t need skills to do the job, but I believe every person would be better at interpersonal relationships if they had to work some sort of retail/service industry job in their early life. So, how did you find your footing in Brooklyn? You seem to be surrounded by a great community of people!
JM: I found my community of friends in Brooklyn largely through the internet. My husband and I were staying in an Airbnb rental in Cobble Hill in 2012 to check out the neighborhood, and he tweeted about it. This guy that he had chatted with via Twitter before invited us out to dinner with his friends. That guy was Cameron Koczon, and we became instant buds. When we moved in, Cameron introduced me to all of his pals, who quickly invited me into their lives. New Yorkers have been nothing but inviting and kind to me since the day I got off the plane from SF. Three years later, my community feels like family and about 20 of us share a five-floor townhouse in Gowanus as our workspace (formerly Studiomates in DUMBO). Most of us are freelancers, some of us work for companies remotely, and some of us are small self-started companies. We have in common an appreciation for hard work and a love of rooting for each other. I’ve been invited onto some of my favorite projects because of the people that surround me, and that is how I came to be a part of the lovely freelancer family Ghostly Ferns!
Throughout all of the adventures I’ve had in Brooklyn, I really feel that my most wonderful real-life friends have also been internet pals. Sometimes New York City can be exhaustingly social, and the internet gives us an outlet for social expression that is safer for introverts. I have friends that I talk to daily on Twitter that I haven’t seen in years. Yet they still feel close to me because we share things with each other regularly.
CB: The internet can be such a positive force in finding new friends and creating a sense of community when you first move somewhere. I used twitter the same way as your husband when I moved to Pittsburgh and now those same people are my core group of friends. It’s because of one of them that I work for CB! How has your career as a freelancer evolved over time? I know when we first met you, you had a part-time gig working for Tina Roth Eisenberg. How’d you make the leap to full-time freelancing?
JM: Having a part-time job allowed me to take certain risks with my freelance career as it was starting out, which is generally the hardest time to take risks. Since I had another source of income, I could be selective about the clients that I worked with and build a portfolio that I was really proud of. My part-time job working for Tina mostly included managing Studiomates, a co-working space that she operated in part with the amazing folks at Workshop. It was a great job because I got to maintain a feeling of community amongst really wonderful people who I admired and respected, who then in turn came to respect the work I was doing as a freelance illustrator. But it was tough, at times, scheduling both a part time job and a budding freelance career. I knew that my goal was to become a full-time freelancer, and I went for it in March of 2014 when I was confident in my clientele and the monetary savings I had accrued. They say you should have at least three months’ rent in your bank account before you make drastic decisions! I wanted to be prepared and do it the right way, and I’m glad that I did. Work has been consistent since then and I am feeling very good about where I am today!
CB: You were so smart to save up before going out on your own! A lot of people forget that step and then end up having to take on work they don’t love just to put food on the table, so to speak. How’s the future looking? Is there anything you’re doing now that you’d like to do more of? Any new skills you want to learn?
JM: Ironically my future is full of studying the past! I am currently doing lots of research into the history of Lettering as an industry to figure out more how it informs where we are today. Lately we’ve been seeing a massive resurgence of designers and artists who specialize only in hand lettering (instead of generalizing in type design, lettering, graphic design, and illustration, for instance), and I have been doing careful study into what this means for the future of my industry. I would love to live in a world where lettering will continue to be as popular as it is today. So I am trying to get back to the roots, reading the words of and studying the works of masters like Doyald Young, Robert Bringhurst, Herb Lubalin, etc. This really helps me to gather meaningful context to where we are in the history of the industry of design. As for a less literary future, I'm getting back to my roots with drawing as a medium and am focusing on experimenting with mark-making on some personal work. I find that keeping my drafting brain challenged makes for better work that I actually put out into the world; even if it doesn’t see the light of day! Art History is definitely my comfort zone, so I try to keep in practice by drawing from the Masters when I can. My favorite draftspeople from the past to study are Kathe Kollwitz, Edward Hopper, and Henri Matisse.
CB: You can’t move forward without looking back occasionally, right? Thanks for chatting Jen!
If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard of Jen Mussari before, you can follow her on twitter, instagram, dribbble and check out her amazing Squarespace website here.
