Another photo from our archives that’s no longer part of our design site since we phased out the photography section of our portfolio. This one’s a shot we took of a daylily back in Brooklyn.

When I was younger, we always (incorrectly) called these tiger lilies. As an instructor at a wilderness camp, I told our students that they were edible. Which is slightly confusing, because these more common daylilies—hemerocallis fulva (pictured above)—are edible and really pretty tasty. Whereas proper lilies like the Easter lily and actual tiger lilies can be toxic if ingested by animals and not so great for humans either. So…sorry for the confusion, kids!  Hope you’re still alive!

Here’s a pretty interesting article from someone who’s way into edible daylilies for anyone interested.

Posting just a couple photos of last week’s retreat up to Big Sur + Carmel up the California coast.

You can see a ton more via our Instagram feeds—ravenandcrow + katiefrichtel. Also, expect a lot of photos of our cat + dog—Allister + Owen, respectively—and food we’re about to eat.

Click the panorama below of the view from the precipice on Ewoldsen Trail at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park to see a larger version. Note the single bird trailing multiple times across the same shot.

A quick shout-out today to laser craft company JCR Workshop.

I know little to nothing about the company other than they create pretty rad laser-cut artwork. On their Facebook page, JCR describes them-/him- self as “one man and one laser working together in the name of human/machine harmony. BIRDS, BATS, WHALES AND SHARKS.” Which, yeah, about covers it.

Our friend Kristen gave us this laser cut wooden card of a grackle recently. For anyone not already familiar, grackles are passerine birds common to North + South America that, though they’re members of icterid family, do resemble in form + nature corvids (crows, ravens, et cetera). Plus, we’re kinda fans of most things avian.

JCR also does laser cut bird, bat, whale, and shark mobiles, like the ones here, our grackle friend, the elf owl (cool), and blue whale. Check them out when you get a chance—they make great gifts.

Caw!

Last fall, when we left New York and came out to Los Angeles for our ‘trial run’ to see how the shoe fit, we were excited to see that we hadn’t yet missed LA’s rendition of Fashion Week, a longtime personal favorite time of ours in NYC. But we were a bit crestfallen when we actually looked into the events and public reception of Fashion Week LA. What’s become a boisterous, massive, citywide street-walking affair in New York, with everyone from tiny boutiques to mainstream retailers participating seemed, in Los Angeles, to be spotty at best, kind of sadly, haughtily copycat-ish at worst. As we’ve found in other instances though, it was more a case of us attempting to draw nonexistent parallels between New York + Los Angeles, two cities that each shine all the brighter for their differences rather than in spite of them.

But, that said, this experience did lead to us discovering some Los Angeles-based talent in the fashion field, most notably, womenswear brand Wren and the company’s founder + creative director, Melissa Coker. With its casual, whimsically elegant attitude, her label’s quickly become one of our favorites (you can see Katie sporting her Kimono Dress here + in our recent write-up on our outdoor studio setup).

We took some time to chat with Coker about the inspiration behind Wren, the secret of asking, and her award-winning, insanely viral campaign video, “First Kiss” (below), in which filmmaker Tatia Pilieva capture the oft awkwardly beautiful moments of 20 strangers kissing for the first time. Cutest fashion campaign promo ever. Watch + read on.

raven + crow: So, first off, how + when did Wren get its start?

Melissa Coker: Wren was founded in 2007 in Los Angeles.

Succinct and too the point. I like it. You were in the fashion magazine world previously though, right? Did Wren’s creation coincide with that massive shift the publishing industry experienced in the mid- to late-2000s at all? Or were you just ready to leave that line of work?

I got an unexpected call from a head hunter inquiring if I would be interested in becoming a trend forecaster. It was a fortuitous, unexpected, and totally wonderful shift to the apparel side of the fashion business.

Is it as dramatically cut-throat as The Devil Wears Prada would have us believe?

I think it depends on what title you were at, but at Vogue there usually was someone crying in the bathroom!

Damn! Have you always had an interest in fashion and design then?

Even as a kid I was interested in fashion and interior design magazines—I used to make collages of the things I found that were inspiring to me.

Proto-vision boards! And the company name—where does that come from? Fellow bird-lover? Or is it more a link between the movement of flight and elegant forms in the designs?

It is based on a character from a Charles Dicken’s novel—Jenny Wren. I believe Paul McCartney also wrote a song about this character.

So the internet tells me. It also tells me Jenny Wren was a dolls’ dressmaker and a lover of “flowers, bird song, numbers of blessed, white-clad children”. Pretty cool namesake.

Now, I know you’ve done a lot of collaborations over the years. What do you like about bringing your work together with other designers and existing brands?

I love exploring other categories that are outside of our wheelhouse—whether that be shoes or bags or jewelry or what have you. It’s also an interesting way to test what our customers think about us offering something to them that we haven’t before. Our latest collaboration is a little different—we teamed up with Langley Fox to create a graphic tee to benefit No Kill Los Angeles animal shelters (right). They have received a great response and are available in our store now. 

Yeah, totally love those. Kitty Stardust for president.

So, this is something that took some effort to grasp when we came out form New York, but how would you describe Los Angeles fashion?

I think it is certainly more casual overall. More effortless at best and more tragic at worst.

Hah. Well put. How does the fashion scene differ from NYC’s, in your view?

NYC’s is more pervasive—New York is almost like a two industry town with fashion and finance. Whereas LA is really all about film, and fashion as a scene is so much more focused and more interconnected.

I was going to ask ‘Do you ever miss New York’, but I think everyone’s who’s spent any time there misses it eventually, regardless of how they feel about the city as a whole now. So, what do you miss about New York then?

I miss the feel of a city—Los Angeles doesn’t feel like one most of the time.

Totally get that. In good ways and bad. What would you say inspires your designs, in general or with some specific examples?

I’m mostly inspired by friends and girls I see on the street. Wren collaborates with many of the girls I find most inspiring from Langley to Alexa Chung to Tennessee Thomas to Tavi and the like.

You keep good company.

We’ve talked to a lot of independent designers who were really hurt by the economic downturn and resulting shift in the economic landscape for them, from Wendy Mullin of Built by Wendy to the gals at Curator up in SF to all our friends who used to have shops or lines in New York but had to call it quits for one reason or another. How did you get your business on the other side of that?

Wren was founded right in the midst of the recession. It was a weird blessing in a way. From day one we had to be lean and efficient.

And how did you grow it from a one-person show…to a company that teams up with the likes of Target?

I think the best advice I ever got was the simplest—just ask. You’ll be surprised how often people say yes. That’s really been a cornerstone of the success of our outside projects and growth,

We saw you just won the Grand Clio for your Fall 2014 campaign film, “First Kiss” (above), and you hit something like 70 million hits in two weeks with it on YouTube. Congratulations—that is truly kinda insane! Really really cute video too and…kinda just hard to turn away from. Where did the concept come from for that?

We’ve always made videos that aim to be cool and content-driven rather than feel like a commercial without artistic merit that is a hard sell—buy-me-now type thing. “First Kiss” was a bit different in that we wanted to make something that was shareable that was driven by connection and emotional and engaging content.

Well fucking well-done. Looking through your other films, we saw another you did with Joanna Newsome. We absolutely love her music. How did you line that up?

I met her through a friend and asked if she wanted to work together on a project together—happily, she said yes.

Again with the just ask. And obviously not into the run-of-the-mill, models standing around and walking catwalks in your designs campaign films. What are the origins of this more cinematic, creative take on showing off your designs.

I just don’t get why there are hundreds of people doing the same thing at the same time. We are all competing for the very limited attention of a very limited group of people, whether they are our consumers or members of the media, etc. When you are small and don’t have well-padded marketing budgets, I think one does themselves a disservice if they don’t aim to do things outside of the box, in a new and interesting sort of way.

Totally agree. Not to trend negative, but Los Angeles has often been classified as an artless place void of any significant culture, especially in years past. What’s made you start Wren here and have it remain LA-based?

LA has a wonderful production center in downtown Los Angeles. It’s alive and well and thriving and I have always felt so grateful to work with the amazingly talented sewers and craftsmen that I have had the good fortune to meet.

What’s you favorite thing about Los Angeles then?

The diversity, professionally, of the people that I am happy to call my friends. It seems that all my friends in NY are either involved in art or fashion.

Right—those boring professions. More importantly though—best tacos in LA?

Yucca!

Whoa—I don’t know how much I’d find as a vegan at a place described on Google Maps as a “tiny taco stand known for Mexican meats” but I admire both your outta left-field-ness and your gusto. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us!

Check out Wren’s online shop + sign up for Melissa’s newsletters to keep up with sales and other events.

We completed these projects a while back but are just now making time to share them.

As we’ve mentioned on these pages in the past, we’ve worked with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) for a while now—since 2007, actually—helping them brand their office’s publications, Web products, and overall public impression as they work to organize communication between the many on-the-ground actions of various UN offices and outside aid organizations.

A longtime project—the office’s print annual report—collects data + information on the office’s many coordinated support efforts to address chronic issues around the world as well all too common national + regional emergencies. These reports are then shared with OCHA’s public audience as well as their worldwide supporters, reporting exactly how their financial aid is being put to use each year.

In recent years, we planned and designed a template to create Web-based annual reports to compliment the print versions, providing both duplicative information for audiences able to more easily digest it online and provide added content that can sometimes be difficult to effectively capture in print (most often, exhaustive financial data and data on regional + country office staffing).

This most recent print publication was large enough to require perfect binding (as opposed to saddle-stitch/staple binding) and brought in a whole new design template we developed hand-in-hand with OCHA. The cover features a full bleed photo that wraps around publication back + front. The Web version continues to employ the template we developed in 2011 for the office, evolving to incorporate both new formats of content and changing aesthetics in Web design.

You can see a few more images of the annual reports below, but take a look in our portfolio to see more about the Web + print publications.

We’re up in Big Sur for the rest of the week/end celebrating our eleven year anniversary. I know. Crazy.

All my love to you, Katie. I still want to grow feeble and old with you; I still want to sit under the stars and watch the constellations change with you, more now than ever before.

For anyone interested, you can see really old photos from our wedding here. And yes, I had pink eye.

PS—robbers + thieves, totally disregard this post. We’re 100% home, just being super-quiet.

PPS—David, our contractor at MooShoes Los Angeles, also disregard this post. We’ll be right over, so that space better be done, man!

I pass these plants across the street from us many times every day and have meant to photograph them for a while now. I love how the impressions of outer spiked leaves from the plant growing out from a tightly wound center remain on the surfaces as the leaves begin to unfold.

Were I a more sappy, emotive type, I’d say something about our early experiences pressing into our psyches and influencing our lives from that point on until our deaths. But I’m not, right?

It certainly looks cool though.

When we picked up roots and moved our studio from its home in Brooklyn, New York to the relative wilds of Beachwood Canyon in Los Angeles, California, we had a pretty high bar set in terms of expectations. Our studio space in Brooklyn was great—a third floor walkup in a historic, former pre-prohibition brewery with tall ceilings, gigantic northeastern-facing windows, and excellent light for photo shoots and general good moods (you can see pictures of the space throughout  older posts in this journal, like this one on the desks we made with Katie’s dad back in 2010).

But, even if we hadn’t moved to the west coast, that area—Boerum Hill—was rapidly changing and rents were starting to skyrocket, so we likely would have moved even if we had remained a Brooklyn-based company.

So when we finally made the decision to head westward, we sought out a different work atmosphere that reflected our desired change in lifestyle, but still met certain requirements, awesome light included.

Making the choice to combine home + office (at least initially), we situated ourselves in Beachwood Canyon, just up the street from where we originally staged our four month trial period last fall. For anyone not already familiar with the area, Beachwood’s the canyon directly below the Hollywood sign where the original Hollywoodland development was built (read more about this history of the area at beachwoodcanyon.org). Though it’s technically part of Hollywood, the neighborhood feels a million miles aways from the Times-Square-esque tourist hub down the hill and abuts Griffith Park, the nation’s largest urban park and a big draw for us. Our home + office is nestled at the foot of a woodsy hill with (no joke) a pack of coyotes living at its peak and the whole neighborhood gives off a surprisingly small town feel, with a small strip of businesses just up the street from us.

Every morning except for those two or three it rains (I wish that were less of a hyperbole), we set up our design studio on our the patio right next to our house. There are a few negatives to doing this—on some days, our wi-fi signal can get a little weak and, yes, we are sometimes startled by falling tree debris—but, most days, it’s akin to working in the midst of a tranquil little forest.

We ordered one of the few solid wood outdoor tables we can find to serve as our daytime work table/nighttime dining and hang-out area. The table’s topped slotted pieces of wood that make it easy to run our power adaptor and a FireWire cable to connect our two computers for a faster tie-in than wi-fi would provide. We moved from two large desktop screens to two 15″ MacBook Pros, which took a little adjusting and can be somewhat limiting with large publication work, but we have a backup gigantic iMac in our indoor office + guest room to use as needed.

In Brooklyn, we employed a realtively large, 1 terabyte (one trillion bytes) G-Drive to house all of our design projects externally, but, when we moved to the more mobile, outdoor office, we purchased a much smaller G-Drive Mobile with a dual USB data + power connector so we could both transport the drive more easily and wouldn’t require a totally separate power source, as with the previous drive.

In terms of overall power source for the laptops, we ran a series of lines of outdoor lights from the utility outlet, through the tree in our yard, across the dividing fence and under the table.

At the end of the day, we pack up shop and return the patio to recreational mode.

Who knows if we’ll keep this setup in the longterm or move to separate home + office again down the road, but, for the time being, we’re enjoying designing in the wilds of Hollywood.

Below, power + data connections to our computers and G-Drive; our decorative-meets-utilitarian power source; straight-up decorative semaphore flag (F for Farmer AND Frichtel, bike-planter, and HAPPY pennants to remind us why we do all this (partial hold-over from Katie’s birthday); nothing says ‘happy’ like fresh flowers from the farmers market!; ditto that for homemade cold brew coffee most days; Allister + Owen posing regally; and Katie, looking cutely studious, along with Owen, in his usual stop directly below my chair.

Pretty excited about this design collaboration we’re working on with MooShoes. More on that later when we open the store out here in Los Angeles, just wanted to give a quick glimpse of the work, which we’re hoping to apply to a few different projects.

Go vegan, ya’ll!

Happy Labor Day, all.