redstr/collective is the collective effort of Alex Valich and Christine Warren. A step ahead of most designers, rather than just talking about the things they don't like in the world around them, they design responses. And their actions speak much, much louder than words. www.redstrcollective.com



I read your philosophy on your website, and it mentioned how you see yourselves as "DJs of design, sampling, mixing and spinning together from different sources to create something entirely unique." I think that's a fantastic analogy. Could you talk a little about that?

Christine: Well it kind of goes back to, there aren't any new ideas. You can't be truly original. Everything is built upon something that came before. So you have to take that into consideration when you're creating something. Why start from scratch? Find a couple of things that are doing something well and bring them together and mix them up. Musicians sample sounds. We sample form, or color, or texture.

Alex: But it's like the difference between a late-'90s Puff Daddy song and a really good Chemical Brothers song. We'll take stuff, and sample it, and abstract it, rather than just sample the exact thing. We won't take what we call the "Cast This" route, which is just taking something you find and casting it. That's the Puff Daddy version.



In my opinion, in order for sampling to work well you have to go the "idea" route. If you're going to copy something that already exists in the world, it can be really cool, but there has to be a conceptual reason behind it. Your version has to illuminate some deeper meaning in that common object.

Alex: I also think part of it is that casting is a very simple manufacturing method. For example, when you first learn to slip-cast porcelain, the first couple molds you're going to make will be of something you have in your house. You'll cast a tabasco bottle or something. And it will look pretty cool. But you shouldn't think it's anything more than that.

Christine: It's an easy trap to fall into. An important part of "sampling" is "editing". That's what makes a great designer - someone who can really edit.

That's where having two people helps.

Christine: Exactly.

Alex: And that's another reason why it's great to collaborate with other people. Say it's the two of us collaborating with two others. It really makes it even better. You come up with some really good stuff together. I always enjoy it. We're going to be collaborating with Scrapile on a furniture line for ICFF this year.

Christine: With the right people, you can get better, cooperative work.

Alex: The one person design "star", or whatever the fuck they want to call it, pretty much puts out the same shit over and over again. Their stuff all looks the same.

Christine: And that's definitely not what our work is about. We're always thinking what would be most appropriate.

You started redstr/collective in 2003. What gave you the confidence to strike out on your own?

Christine: I don't even know if it was confidence. We were just jobless, and we had nothing else to do, so we were like, "Might as well make our own stuff."

Alex: I always tell people the same thing. Sheer stupidity. I really go with that. The other thing, too, is that we were given a good opportunity. At the time we were both freelancing for random people. Christine was working for Boym Patners, where she worked for 8 years or so.

Christine: I kind of knew the inside of the business, from them. They didn't make any money on product design. They'd get $8 royalty checks. That doesn't pay any bills. So they did all this exhibition design work. But it was interesting, they started doing the monuments and stuff then, and so it was like actually you could make a product, and sell it to a small base, and actually make some money. So it was like, well if they can do it... That kind of showed me that you can do your own stuff and make money. If you're smart about it.

Alex: And after that, we met with Dave Alhadeff from The Future Perfect, just when he was starting his store. He had like one piece of furniture in there.

Christine: He wasn't even open. Basically he needed to find people with stuff. Which was really key for us and for a lot of designers, because it brought a lot of people together. It was the right thing at the right time, and it just was great.

Alex: We didn't even have anything produced, yet. We just had ideas and random prototypes and we didn't know what we were going to do with it. We met with him, and he was like, "OK, I want this many of this product and this many of this product in 2 months." And then, fuck, we had to make them.

Christine: It was a good problem to have.

Alex: We had the ambition, we had the background to do it, and then we were given an opportunity. Those three things, I think, were vital to how we started.

Christine: One of our first products was the barf bags. We went to ICFF one year, maybe 2002, and it was just really horrible. It made us kind of ill, and we wanted to make a statement about it.



Wow. I love that product, and it makes it even better to know that it was a reaction to ICFF.

Christine: Yeah. We just had to do something to respond to it.

Alex: Our attitude is, if we see something we don't like, it's better to not just talk shit about it but actually design something as a response.

Christine: All designers can talk shit. It's easy to say, "That sucks," or "I had that idea last year."

I think that's a great way to turn a negative into something positive - to actively respond. And then, once you guys were making things, how did you get the word out about your work?

Alex: A lot of us who were connected through The Future Perfect - Jason Miller, Tobias Wong, Scrapile, and others - started doing group shows together. And that was really important, because it drove people to see the work. And off of that was the press vehicle.

Christine: People were dying to see something new and interesting, so I like to think a lot of it happened because the work was just good. But at the same time, you have to know how to get it out there.

Alex: I think we all had the feeling, at that point, that it was a lot better to get attention for us collectively as a community or a movement. And then the work on its own, each individual piece and person, kind of stands out.



Do you think this community/group of designers you've been talking about still exists?

Alex: Some of the people are still around, and some of them have splintered off. I think the nature of the design business was a certain way between 2003 and 2006, and after 2006, the things going on in the economy have kind of caused people to go their own ways. There aren't so many of these group shows. There aren't so many of the sponsors that want to pay for these group shows. Everyone started struggling more just to pay rent, and that kind of put a damper on it.

It's great that you brought up sponsors. Independent designers have to know how to approach that world and make them care about design. How did you guys get sponsors for your shows?

Alex: Sometimes we reached out, and sometimes people would come to us. A lot of times with the group shows, because they were done either through The Future Perfect or curated by Tobias Wong, there'd be a sponsor already in place.

Christine: Well anytime you're throwing a party, you've gotta have liquor, and you don't want to pay for it. Alcohol sponsors are so easy to get. They're whores.

Alex: A lot of times you can get the liquor sponsors not just to give you the free liquor but to pay for the invites, and staff, and bartenders and stuff.

Christine: And we've done some eco-products with sponsors that gave us new materials and asked us to do something with them. That's always fun.

Alex: Getting sponsored isn't just about having someone write you a check. Like Christine was saying, materials sponsors or vendors can pay for the production of things. We've done shows with Bettencourt Green Building Supplies, where they supplied all the materials. That helps the designers out a lot.



What do you consider to be your biggest success so far?

Christine: For me, probably the American Dollhouse show. We had a good body of work and it was a vision that we presented. I'm really proud of that. And also the cups, because we've gotten to sell them!

Alex: The cups have done really well. They've been in a lot of publications and magazines. The fact that the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA picked them up kind of made me the happiest. I think the cups combine everything we've learned both creatively and in terms of running a business.