Janet Jay started Pearl+ Luxury Soaps as a hobby. The former head of marketing for Diane von Furstenberg and Estee Lauder in New York—and one-half of the creative partnership behind Portland-based Studio J, with her husband John Jay, the global creative director at advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy—she thought that it…
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By Elissa Hall Taking into account the lack of space in most urban dwellings, designer Marco Murillo of The Good Flock developed the brand’s first home product to be both elegant and functional. The minimal Aurora Lamp, which launches as a Kickstarter project today, is crafted from one exquisite piece…
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As strong believers in quality over quantity, the emerging craftspeople behind The Good Flock have recently released their latest batch of limited-run bags and accoutrements as part of the Fall/Winter collection. When we last caught up with the Portland-based brand they were finishing up a collaboration tote with Parisian…
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Mr. Kiji returns to gallery walls with a solo show of design prowess
Not long after Mr. Kiji removed his paintings from the walls of NYC’s Mallick Williams Gallery in April last year, he was struck by a car while riding his bike around his Brooklyn neighborhood. The hit rendered Mr. Kiji with a hand lacking feeling and he was unable to…
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Portland gets a high-design shop with an editorial bent
Table of Contents, a recently-opened concept shop in Portland, Oregon, is a quiet refuge within the bustling Old Town neighborhood. Located just off Burnside Street in Chinatown, Shu Hung and Joseph Magliaro’s new venture is a welcome departure from the eclectic mix of dive bars, arcades, Internet cafes and…
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Eight young photographers share analog images of adventure and exploration
After debuting an experimental one-off issue in 2009, founder Justin Parkhurst has resurrected his publication, “Punch The Camera,” as a bi-annual photography zine. Expanding on the themes of travel and expedition that inspired the original, the revamped “Punch The Camera” is about “uniting known and unknown photographers with stories…
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Our interview with the proprietors of Portland’s first pop-up shop and gallery space highlighting Maine-made goods
A hybrid between a retail and gallery space, Seawall is home to Portland, Maine’s first pop-up shop and also its newest clothing line. Founders Daniel Pepice, Sara Lemieux, Thom Rhoads and Brook Delorme opened Seawall this spring with the hope to open people’s eyes to talented Maine designers. Housed…
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An androgynous jewelry line from Portland, Oregon’s NW neighborhood
Betsy & Iya, the eponymous jewelry line of Portland, Oregon-based designer Betsy Cross, has always been marked by a certain sweetness and androgyny. Her pieces are sentimental, but working the metal by hand gives them a few rough edges that look appropriate on both men and women. In June…
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Make a myriad of your own musical instruments
Resembling more of a genius child’s wind-up toy than a musical instrument, Travis Feldman’s open source Molecule Synth combines rearrangeable hexagonal pieces to create an unconventional version of the traditional keyboard synthesizer. Each modular node represents an element of the synth—a speaker and amp, a sound generator and a…
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Our interview with Jordan Hufnagel on building camping supplies and the story behind his new brand
There comes a time in many peoples’ lives when things just seem to be moving too fast, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get it all done. This overwhelmed feeling spurred Portland-based bicycle builder Jordan Hufnagel and motorcycle maker James Crowe to start the adventure outfitter brand West America. A passion project for the two, West America makes handmade camping supplies and apparel capturing the free spirit that brought the brand to life.
While the product line itself is fairly basic, the story behind West America is a rich one filled with countless stories of friendship and travel with a genuine, pioneering spirit. To learn more about the young brand, we recently caught up with Hufnagel before his upcoming motorcycle trip for which the brand was formed.
West America is about that constant evolution that we all go through, and being true to ourselves. It’s about not being scared of the changes you want in your life and working hard to make them happen. A couple years ago James and I found ourselves buried in a mountain of work that only seemed to keep growing, while not getting us any closer to the lives we really wanted. After some big challenges were overcome and some rough conversations between the two of us, we committed to making those changes and somewhere along the line we thought up West America.
West America makes whatever James and I are stoked on at the time—currently that means a small line of camping gear, and paraphernalia—while simultaneously creating an outlet for James and me to document our work, good times and travels.
We both make the camping gear. James and I really yin each other’s yang here in the shop, so working together designing and making things works out great.
It all happens very naturally around here. Having a full metal shop, we have the privilege to make the things we want exactly how we want them. We are going to be on the road a long time, camping most of the nights. So we wanted gear that was going to pack easy in our limited space, but also create comfort. After bouncing around some ideas of what we wanted to make, we landed on these items to start.
At this point we’re just scratching some sketches out as ideas pop in our heads and showing them to each other to get feedback and make refinements to the plan. Then one of us will make a prototype that we can beat up and get a feel for. Sometimes one prototype is all that happens and the product gets dumped. But, if we’re happy with what we’ve come up with we’ll make some final repeatable plans, order materials and will work together producing a limited run.
We started planning this motorcycle trip to South America a couple years ago when we made that commitment to change and started thinking up West America. Like I said earlier, we had found ourselves buried in work. Me with bicycle orders and James with three different and very important full-time gigs. I was spending every waking hour at the shop and going a little crazy. I felt like I’d been stripped of the privilege to act on my spontaneous nature, and also had this huge drive to be doing more than one thing with my life. At the same time, James was being pulled in every direction too. Between our shop, a hot rod shop he worked at that was sponsoring his green card application, and having to be in school full time to maintain a visa here in the US (he’s Canadian) he had no time to do anything besides work. Only sleeping a couple hours a night, things came to a tipping point.
At the time, I wanted to move away from Portland. The only thing keeping me here was sharing a shop with James. He’s my best friend and ultimate shop partner. But life here was beating him down pretty hard and it looked like a move back to Canada was just around the corner, so I also felt like there was no reason to stay. It honestly was a pretty crazy emotional time. Then real late one night at the shop, we just broke it all down and committed to making this trip happen. Leaving all the stress behind and going off to have the awesome journey. You know, just hit the reset button and find out who we really are with out all the expectations and stress again. Now here we are a couple months from going. It’s a crazy feeling, knowing that it’s happening so soon.
Totally. For the trip south our only plan is going, and letting the rest just take shape on its own. West America is the same. We just want it to be whatever we are into at that time, or whatever we want to make. Right now, it’s camping and motorcycles. At some point we both want to build homes and I can totally see us making house wares as we want them, or bike stuff, or backpacking gear. You know, whatever is rocking us at the time. Also, I think it’s important to keep in mind here that destinations are just a part of a journey, not the reason for them.
We have a few other things in the works, but we also have tons of work to finish up before we take off so we’ll see what happens!
Keep an eye on West America to stay up with the product development and the eventual documentation of Hufnagel and Crowe’s South American adventure.
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