Hasta La Ideas

Jeans made from recycled brown beer bottles in NYC

As the name implies, I AM NOT A VIRGIN uses recycled—non virgin—materials to produce their jeans and T-shirts. Now nearly four years into the business, founder Peter Heron is reaching out to his audience with a Kickstarter to keep the NYC-based label alive.

As with many entrepreneurial ventures, IANAV has diverged from its original path over time. Heron began by making prototype jeans from fabric scraps collected at various Chinese manufacturing mills with the goal to reduce factory waste, but it didn’t seem to be working. Spurred on by a friendly tip in early 2011 Heron started experimenting with a new American-made fabric of 75% cotton and 25% recycled synthetics, including brown beer bottles collected from recycling factories. Although the recycled percentage doesn’t seem like much, Heron explains it’s actually more stable this way. “You need a certain amount of virgin cotton for durability,” he says. “It’s the same as if you were making denim from scraps, the right balance of polyester and cotton will give you a long-lasting jean.”

The process of breaking down the beer bottles to a thread-like material is just about as complicated as one would imagine. Once collected in a recycling facility, the bottles are sorted and ground, labels, caps and all into small chips. The chips are then placed in a water bath where the paper and scraps float to the top and the usable chips sink. From here the usable chips are ground down even further into a fine particle, which is actually the same compound found in polyester. The particle is then melted and squeezed through a high-pressure nozzle, creating a continuous strand of loose material ready to be twisted into yarn, and subsequently blended with virgin cotton and woven into denim.

To show the unique properties of this particle, IANAV has created a limited run of 400 brown beer bottle jeans, stitched inside out to reveal the unique weave. Heron says these fit more like a comfortable straight leg trouser than a jean, as they’ve been washed without dye. The standard IANAV men’s jeans, on the other hand, are dyed a dark indigo and left raw, while the washed women’s jean is woven with 1% elasticity for stretch.

Armed with the knowledge he’s gained, Heron has brought on a partner—Walt Connelly, former executive creative director at JWT and Ogilvy—to keep the creative train moving. Once funded the two have big plans for the company. “We will eventually have different lines of jeans made from green soda bottles, blue water bottles, and my original idea of using fabric scraps collected at the manufacturing mills,” says Heron. “We’re also making T-shirts that are made with recycled food tray (tri-blend black color), clear water bottles (white color), discarded x-ray film (light gray color) and in the future empty yogurt cartons. The T-shirts are super soft and feel great.”

To help support Heron and I AM NOT A VIRGIN make a pledge at their Kickstarter page. For $55 you’ll get a limited edition T-shirt made from recycled food trays or water bottles, for $100 or more you’ll be rewarded with a pair of indigo jeans and so on depending on amount of pledge. For those feeling particularly philanthropic, a pledge of $5000 earns you a pair of limited edition brown beer bottle jeans along with whole slew of goodies like t shirts, VIP acess to future parties and a heads up on to-be-released jeans. While you’re there you’ll notice Heron’s other crusade—keeping the rights to his tongue-in-cheek brand name, which is being disputed by Virgin (they suggest slightly less captivating names like I AM NOT CHASTE or I AM NOT PURE). There’s a petition in IANAV’s favor if you’re so inclined.

For a more detailed look at I AM NOT A VIRGIN jeans see the slideshow.

Discover the “Storyverse” of real world places, music and movies from your favorite book

Taking an ambitious approach to filtering information online, Small Demons is a new site dedicated to opening up the worlds inside of books. Not just another search engine for what’s inside your favorite novel, Small Demons collects and catalogs the millions of references to real-world and fictional music, movies, people, and objects that are found in literature. Your new favorite restaurant could be on the next page of the book you’re reading, and Small Demons hopes to provide a place where you can draw meaningful connections between stories and everyday life.

The site uses both algorithms and human touch to make these links and open up what Small Demons calls a “Storyverse,” or the expanse of details that support a good story. “A computer can tell us how many times a song appears in a book. But it can’t tell us that it is the song that the couple dances to at the wedding reception or the song the jilted lover plays after being dumped. It can’t tell you the emotional resonance of it. So we are going to be relying on librarians and authors and gifted amateurs to come in and help us fix and add and weight and evaluate all the data we are generating,” says Richard Nash, the start-up’s VP of Community and Content.

Founded by former Yahoo Product VPs Valla Vakili and Tony Amidei, the original idea for Small Demons came to Vakili while on a trip to Madrid and Paris. He also happened to be reading Jean-Claude Izzo’s celebrated Mediterranean noir novel Total Chaos, the first book in the French author’s well-known Marseilles Trilogy. Vakili changed the Paris leg of his trip and headed to Marseilles, finding himself enchanted by the fact that he was enjoying the same scotch and walking down the same streets as the protagonist in Izzo’s book. The story in Total Chaos had a life beyond the page, and Vakili realized that many more books had the same experiences to offer.

Small Demons is currently in beta, and you can apply for an invite here.

A modular cabinet from the budding Italian furniture-maker Homecode

The young Treviso, Italy-based company Homecode puts a twist on traditional design with its latest project, Hollo. The basic solid cabinets feature removable modular front doors that come in a wide variety of designs. Simply pop them off their hinges with a handful of screws, and use the piece of furniture as a blank canvas to change the mood of a room.

The customizable patterns come from an elite roster of international artists and designers including Gruppo 407, Julie Joliat, Matteo Cibic and more, all coordinated by art director Andrea Magnani. Their contributions elevate the level of design in a functional cabinet without the added price. Calling itself “the T-shirt of furnishings,” Hollo blends irony and style with easy-to-change convenience and affordability, not to mention the work of an actual T-shirt designer. In addition to graphic artists and illustrators, Hollo has worked with Abiscuit Accident on graphics applied to both furniture and shirts.

Made entirely in Italy, Hollo ships flat-packed to reduce waste during transit. Choose from the ever-growing range of designs at Hollo’s e-shop, where cabinets are available for €389 and sets of replacement doors for €199.

RCRD LBL’s creative director gives us some insight into the world of music and start-ups

An extensive collection of diverse artists combined with a huge assortment of free and legal downloads, RCRD LBL is the premiere site for discovering emerging artists. We recently had the opportunity to sit down with RCRD LBL’s Creative Director Elliot Aronow, who told us about music distribution, start-ups and the importance of sharing.

How do you describe RCRD LBL?

RCRD LBL is an editorially driven, free and legal music site focusing mostly on emergent talent. If I were talking to my aunt I’d call us a curated, cool, free iTunes.

For artists that are established, do you act more as a distribution platform?

Personally I always believed that the expiration date for records on the Internet was way too short. What we do is plan out our schedule 5-10 days in advance so we are able to offer a robust second wind to a label. The response from our audience has been remarkable, we get about 40,000 people downloading a record that has been “out” on the internet for a few days.

How would you, as the Creative Director, define your market?

I would say our market would be very well intentioned, passionate music fans that want to get put on to good stuff. It’s regular people who are interested in more left-field or independent music—a really refreshing audience to be communicating with. There are college kids and cool dads, and then there are the communities that we’re super meshed in with, DJs, producers, punk guys or Brooklyn and London kids.

Are you targeting your brand at any one group specifically?

My dream from a creative standpoint was to cross the brand over. I always looked at shows like “120 Minutes” and “Yo MTV Raps.” Thats how I got into PIL, Depeche Mode, Nirvana and all that kind of stuff. I knew that because of the level of taste we were always going to resonate with DJs and the music heads, but really for me it was more about breaking things to a more casual listener. That’s what I try to do, that’s why you can juxtapose Waka Flaka Flame with some super weird UK funky guy that’s put out his first 12-inch. You get people with the big hook and hopefully you keep them with the newer stuff that they haven’t heard before.

How has RCRD LBL evolved in relationship to the way people are accessing information?

We started right after the first wave of professional blogging. Initially we wanted to design something people could come check out everyday and there would always be cool new records. In the past couple years things have changed to where we are entering into much more interesting distribution agreements or using platforms that are super commonplace now. Rather than building the mountain and expecting people to come, we have decided that people want to engage with the material in a lot of different ways. They might follow us on Twitter, check in on Facebook, they might get it in their email or check it out via RSS—it’s just important to give people a lot of different ways to interact with the music rather than creating a very static one-dimensional relationship with them.

Is it more valuable to expose the artist to the public or the public to the artist?

It’s important to expose the artist to the public because people that are making compelling music, that know how to tie it together with good-looking album artwork and great live performances, I think they deserve to have a career that goes beyond the Internet. If we’re going to put MNDR in front of people I want them to listen to her record, enjoy it, and then hopefully be inspired to go check out a show or buy a t-shirt.The artist is always the centerpiece.

What are some creative decisions you’ve made to directly broaden RCRD LBL’s appeal?

When we started I was mostly working with groups that I knew, mostly from Brooklyn and a couple from L.A. My logic at the time was that if this band can sell 3,000 CDs then we can give away 40,000 free downloads. But then I realized that once you get out of major cities certain bands are a lot less exposed than you think. One of the decisions I made around two years ago was rather than being in a conversation with blogs, I was more interested in being in a conversation with our users and I think that decision has really paid off for us.

What differentiates RCRD LBL from other music sites?

We have an intentionally narrow focus. We don’t do interviews, we don’t do videos, we don’t do news—we serve up downloads everyday. I think its good for people to know that when they come to RCRD LBL there will a bunch of new stuff. We’re not music critics, I like to think of us more as authoritative, passionate fans. A lot of people like to interact with music from a trusted source, and they want a little “amuse-bouche” if you will. I think that we do something similar where if we are turning you on to a new band we’ll give you what we have decided is the best song, and if you are interested in digging a little bit deeper you can certainly go and do that. There’s always been a really rich history of DJs and journalists and people in the scene putting people on to other stuff, that’s where I’ve always drawn our editorial inspiration from.

Do you think your model has staying power as system for distribution and exposure online?

Well I’m a bit biased but I do think our model certainly has room to grow. Our audience has really pleasantly surprised me in the past few years. I think there are more and more people out there interested in the stuff we are excited about, and I think there is always an opportunity to reach them.

What’s the next step?

Without giving away any of the trade secrets that we keep in a small box under lock and key, I see us being able to offer more kinds of music to people. I think the format of a site that offers you free music with the artist’s and the label’s blessing is a good model. Personally, I would like to see some punk and hardcore in the mix—it’s really just about showing people that we can go from Passion Pit to abrasive, strange music to very beautiful stuff and it all makes sense.

Any advice for start-ups in the new year?

Strive for consistency and don’t take too much money up front because you’ll wind of spending it on bad things before you have any idea what you’re actually doing.