THE NEXT CHAPTER OF STORY MFG
Fashion consumers are dramatically changing the way they decide what to buy.
In a recent study, researchers found that consumers expect brands to take social responsibility for their production process. People believe that brands need to pay their workers fairly, care for their health, reduce the negative impact on the environment and practice social consciousness. Brands are being pressured into social responsibility; the spotlight is on social and environmental impact now more than ever. The implications for an industry that has been driven by the motto “faster, higher, cheaper,” are drastic.
Story Mfg. is a brand by Saeed and Katy Al Rubeyi that has applied significant pressure to the conversation surrounding sustainability in fashion. The brand started to produce clothing in an existing dyehouse in India that houses years of knowledge and craftsmanship. By defying the ever-faster-and-bigger growing consumption concept, Story Mfg. has kept their manifesto as a fundamental part of their production: always have the least negative impact on the planet.
Back in 2020, when travelling to Japan was still possible, we met with Saeed for the first time in Tokyo to talk about founding a brand out of the desire to change and disrupt the status quo. He told us how the story began and how they slowly grew from making a few hand dyed denim pants to having a worldwide stockist list of 50 stores. At the time, Story Mfg. was an insider’s tip but still niche.
“Story Mfg. has come along at a very good time. There isn’t a lot of interesting new stuff out right now. Whether people think we’re good or not, we stick out.”
More and more big corporations aim to cut down waste or CO2 impact. Some do so convincingly, but others still focus more on putting a green tag on their logo rather than effectively changing their process for the better.
With the spotlight on sustainability and planet centered brands, the story of Saeed and Katy's brand grew organically - if slowly- over this past year. Nevertheless, the brand has established itself in the industry through its unique visual aesthetic and approach to fashion and production, showing the world that Story Mfg. is pushing the boundaries between fashion and environmental sustainability. Story’s methods have taken years to develop but are still progressing since Story is a brand that continually strives to do better. Their innovative designs have proven that a more sustainable approach to fashion is possible.
As Story has gotten more traction, the list of retailers has grown globally. Story Mfg. is no longer exclusively an insider’s tip. Stars like Ariana Grande and other celebrities, that even Story Mfg. doesn’t have on the radar, are wearing crochet hats and hand dyed shirts.
Their success has gained the attention of a handful of big corporations. Despite it being “fucking hard” to collaborate with brands that don’t share mutual ethics as Saeed said in our last conversation, they have joined forces with Reebok on two shoes. The collaboration was a major success which has helped draw even more attention to Story Mfg. and its values.
“Last year we thought: ‘if we don’t open up to some imperfectness, then we’re not being helpful’. So, when we’re looking for someone to collaborate with, we look for who is willing to make change. It’s all about pushing the needle.”
Story Mfg. does not look left or right and does not adapt to others. They stay pioneers in the field of what they do, always a foot ahead of the rest, and even themselves.
Over a year later, we met again via video call. Saeed and Katy greeted us from their home in Brighton. We spoke with them about the development of Story Mfg. over the last year, how the industry has changed, how it still has to change, what doors and collaborations opened for them, how different the brand is perceived now compared to its beginning and where the story is heading.
For those who didn’t read the first chapter, could you introduce yourself and Story Mfg. briefly to the Sabukaru audience?
Saeed: I'm Saeed Al Rubeyi. I'm one of the directors and founders of Story Mfg. alongside Katy. Story Mfg. is a fashion brand founded in 2013. Our main aesthetic and approach is just sort of interpreting clothing with a focus on a craft-based solution. So, when we see a fabric we are like, ‘maybe it can be handwoven.’ If we’re using embroidery: ‘could it be hand embroidery?’ If we do anything that can be done by hand, we try to do it. Try to reintroduce some humanity, texture, interest and uniqueness to stuff.
Most of the stuff is made in India but we also work in other places like Thailand, Turkey or the UK. Almost everything is naturally dyed with plants, everything is made with very old-world methods. Where a lot of brands work with fabric places to research future technology, we're kind of researching ancient, lost technologies. Because they‘re also neat and noble. We also have a manifesto on our website which lays out the core values that we keep in mind whenever we're doing something.
For example, making sure people get paid well, making sure we don't use any animal products, making things up from materials that aren’t harmful to the planet, trying to be not only low impact or no impact, but trying to have a positive impact when we make stuff.
Our last title “THE SLOW AND STEADY HUSTLE: THE STORY OF STORY MFG.” seems a bit outdated. Things have been happening rapidly for you over the last year. Please, take us with you on the journey. How was the last year for you guys?
Saeed: That’s pretty interesting. I think that when you're working inside of a system, you’re kind of ahead where everybody sees you now. So we sort of know where we're going to be next year. When I was talking to you the last time, I fully knew that it was going to be the way that it is now. It's always interesting to see that people are like ‘wow you've grown so quickly,’ but for us, it has been so slow. I think I said that last time and I don't think that it has changed. Even though it seems like a massive doubling in growth, it's just been the same level of growth over the last year. I think it seems bigger because we went from being in 50 stores to being in 70 now. We had a collaboration with Reebok which was already in the cards when I spoke to you, it just takes such a long time. People are kind of coming around to the brand and understanding it.
I think the biggest thing that has happened since we spoke is that the brand seems less crazy and more normal. The kind of clothes that we make have been more normalised. I think because everyone was shut in the last year, we and other people that we know had such a huge growth period online. I feel like more people were looking on Instagram shopping and therefore more people found us last year than they have in previous years. We invested a lot more in our web shop since the beginning of COVID. We had to. Right at the start of COVID, stores went bust, didn’t take the stock, people were cancelling their orders they'd already made. We had a website, but it was really small. We only had me, Katy and one part-time staff member helping us.
Katy: When we were stuck with all of this cancelled stock, we had to put it online. It sold so well; we never had the money to buy our own stock. When we were stuck with their stock, we were forced to do it. The website from which we were making like £2000 to £4000 worth of stuff a month, suddenly was like £30,000, £40,000, £50,000, £60,000. That made us grow because people were having more direct interactions with us. Because of that, we've been able to invest in a whole new website as well which hopefully makes buying online easier.
Saeed: During the lockdown, there's been a lot of learning happening. For some reason, people are suddenly seriously talking about sustainability. Even now, it feels like a lot is already forgotten again. We've got a lot of interest and love and of course, Reebok opened up quite a lot of doors for us. More than I thought. We've got probably like 50 or 60 stores trying to buy from us that we can't sell to because we can't grow that quickly. Most of them found us through Reebok.
Recently you also moved into a new warehouse in the UK?
Saeed: Yeah that's also just another hustle move. When all the cancelled stock came back to us, it was in our house in Brighton and we were just like ‘this is this is fine, we just have to deal with it.’ But the neighbours started to complain because parcels were coming to their doors. We decided to take a storage unit. As we were spending a lot of money on it, we started looking for premises and then we got this retail space here in Brighton where we live. Hopefully, we will be open in August or September. Who knows with the pandemic.
What are the things that you're most proud of achieving over the last year?
Saeed: Seems a bit corny, but I think both of us just are most proud that we managed to keep work for everybody we work with because they are not in a space where if they didn't get work from us, there’d be other work, or they would get help from the state. Everybody's grown with us; the dye houses have grown massively to accommodate Story’s business.
Katy: Also, because we weren’t able to travel we've kind of really missed out on having that interaction with them face to face. It hasn’t been very inspiring. We hunted and dug deep into designing each collection. We're so lucky that we have a close connection with the guys in India because we can ask them to try out experiments and stuff and then they send us pictures over slack, so we kind of develop the new collections over slack. In the new collections, they ended up being more involved which is actually really nice, isn't it?
How are you able to continue maintaining your values and executing the same level of quality control as you did when you were much smaller?
Saeed: I don’t want to take too much credit for that because it’s not really our doing. We work with our partners, we make samples, we sell those samples and then we do another step that I don’t think a lot of other brands do, which is discussing with all of our partners what the buyers want and if they can do it. Nobody’s ever said no before, but there’s sometimes a chance of them saying “we can make half of this'' or “we can do it in the future.” If they can’t do it at that particular time, they go and train more people. We’re doing a lot of knitwear now, which meant that our knitwear partner in India needed to train a lot more people. It’s the same thing with crocheting and dyeing.
Speaking on their behalf, I think it’s really difficult because not many young people are looking at entering this kind of work. I think they’d rather work in cities on computers. The people that we work with are in remote locations and it’s kind of hard to get them to relocate. The labor is also pretty hard, sewing is quite difficult, dyeing is really manual, and sometimes the generation of people who are really good at all of these skills kind of gatekeep it in order to keep their place at the top of the pack. The one benefit to us that’s terrible for other people is that so many other factories have closed down. This means that now there’s a bigger pool of people looking for places to work. One of our partners was able to take on thirty new people since a factory nearby them had closed down.
Has your idea of what Story Mfg. is and what its main purpose is, changed over time?
Saeed: No, not at all. Just recently the Wall Street Journal did a piece about us and they asked for some information about the first things that we did. I went back and found a post that I made on a forum a few days before we first went to India. It was a plan of what we were trying to do and it’s exactly the same as what we’re doing today. It’s not by design. It’s not an idea or a trend, it’s just the business that we want to build and there’s no need to change it. Story is based on basic human kindness, being a good person to work with, and making interesting stuff that looks cool and that we’d want to wear. It’s really easy to do that, you just check whether you like something or not, you treat people with kindness and respect, and you pay people fairly.
Katy: Also, we want to have fun with it and live balanced lives. We don’t want our people working seven days a week in an office. We don’t want to be stuck on the computer doing research about what other brands are doing. We want to have a really nice life where we get to travel a bit, make friends, do stuff that’s never been done before, and have the people we work with to have that same experience.
Saeed: As far as I understand, it’s kind of similar to what you guys have got going on at Sabukaru. You guys write stories that are of interest to you, which means those stories are also probably interesting to other people. You’re building and growing your own niche of people. I highly doubt that you’re looking at HYPEBEAST for ideas, which is what a lot of other publications do. It’s that journalism thing where if one magazine writes about it, everyone has to as well. You’re speaking to your own niche. It’s an easy and natural thing to do.
Speaking from your perspective, how do you look at sustainability in the fashion industry at the moment?
Saeed: I don’t really know, to be honest. I don’t have the expertise to tell when people or brands are being genuine or not. I’ve been disillusioned by the whole thing because it’s less about doing something useful and more about testing each other's purity. When you’re in the west especially, you get a very narrow view of what sustainability is. It’s these big global things where brands like Adidas are turning plastic straws into shoes or so-and-so is turning ocean waste into bucket caps. When you go to places that are mostly affected by climate change, none of that stuff feels relevant! None of it makes sense. They’ve got toxic waste leach from nearby factories to deal with. They have arid land from overfarming. Sustainability is such a complicated multi-layered issue and whenever I see a brand saying “this is a sustainable bag,” I just want to be like “no it fucking isn’t!” However, at the same time, I’m glad that they’re doing something. A big brand doing something small is more powerful than a small brand doing something big. All of the work we do would be dwarfed if Coca Cola found a way to be more sustainable.
In short I’m glad everybody’s talking about it but I also think that we haven’t really found our groove. A lot of the talk is focused on what the west thinks is the right idea. All of these small solutions that are a lot more local aren’t important to them and aren’t looked at. Our guys in India do so much good and powerful work. They’re always looking for old solutions to new problems. They have all of these really specific solutions that are fantastic, but aren’t relevant to other places. The solutions they have wouldn’t be applicable in a place like Germany. It’s vice versa too. All of these solutions that the west comes up with aren’t applicable in places like rural India. If we’re working with a big global brand, they sometimes say stuff like, “we want to be more sustainable, so all the materials have to be recycled.” That’s actually not totally helpful. For us to do a project with recycled materials, we would have to buy plastic and introduce it into our work and find ways to recycle it in a way that’s usable. But yeah, whenever there’s sustainability discussions I’m backing out of them now because it’s a very hostile environment, for good reason. I think people with the loudest voices seem to know the least. The people that are actually doing work are very quiet.
Katy: On a positive note, I do feel like there’s always been people doing positive stuff towards sustainability. Small brands now are able to have more of a platform. For example, one of our partners named Nishanth has a company called Oshadi which has been getting a lot of good press because he’s doing such amazing things. That’s definitely a positive thing. People like him have always been around, they’re just a lot quieter.
Saeed: The main issue is that there’s really low education on not just sustainability, but also the basics of fashion. There are so many designers that don’t know what a cotton plant looks like or what hemp looks like. They don’t know how things are processed or made. Imagine if chefs didn’t know what a red pepper looked like. These are the people in charge of changing things. People that have a low education but are successful and work in high-up positions at places like TopShop, age out of being cool enough to work there and suddenly become sustainability “consultants” in order to stay relevant. They end up on sustainability boards while still not knowing fucking anything. They’re driving the discussion and it’s really bad. If we have a discussion with them, they have a lot more power than us even though we might know much more. People read the information they spew online or on social media and then it becomes gospel, even when it’s incorrect. The main thing that needs to change is giving people a much better education on this subject.
People not only need to know where things come from and what stuff looks like, but they also need to know the specific nitty gritty knowledge. It’s really scientific. You need to really know your stuff to be able to speak on the matter. It’s not as simple as “recycling is good.” There’s many types of plastic! Some of them are harmful to your health, some of them aren’t harmful to your health, some of them biodegrade, some of them don’t biodegrade, some of them you can recycle, some of them you can’t recycle, some of them are made from plants, some of them are made from crude oil even though they say it’s from natural sources because technically crude oil is natural. It’s a very complicated thing. These plastics also have lots of different names that are just letters like HDPE or BPA. You have to know your shit to be able to discuss it. Most people don’t. The people who do know tend to alienate everybody else because nobody understands them. We’ve got this really messed up structure.
When we talk about sustainability we mostly focus on materials and production. Brands recently announced that they would change their business structure to a less profit orientated one. How much of an impact do you think economical structure has on the fight for a healthier fashion industry?
Saeed: It’s good to focus on materials and people’s welfare, but there needs to be a change in economical structure. The current system that we have only values monetary gain. I don’t remember who said it but I heard a quote that said, “under capitalism, the only value of a forest is the dollar value of the wood” but to humans, the value of the forest is the carbon dioxide it pulls out of the air, the amount of nutrients put into the soil, the habitat for the animals and all of the other invisible things that it does for the earth. I think a fundamental shift in the economic system as well as in values will make a huge impact. We understand that as a business, we have to invest in people and in the earth for our own benefit. I don’t think that’s valued elsewhere. When people ask us to make cheaper clothes, they ask reductive questions. The reductive answer back would be that if we made our clothes cheaper, the people paying for that discount would be our workers and also the planet.
You mentioned before that Story inspired a new wave of brands. Do you view them as competition? How do you feel about them?
Katy: One of the things that we’ve seemed to notice is that people are “inspired” by the look but not by our values. For example, some of them are very “inspired” by the Polite Pullover and will take the crochet idea, but not go through the steps of making sure that everyone is paid fairly and making sure that the process is sustainable. They just make cheap knockoff versions of what we’re doing rather than ensuring that everything is made correctly. It’s a bit disappointing.
Saeed: Yeah. It’s really easy to copy the look of something. The hard work is the process of making the clothes. I don’t think we have any real competition if you take into account our whole recipe - our look and outlook. I mean, I guess we’re happy that there’s more people trying to be more conscious and nice because this industry can be a really hostile place. People just don’t want to do the work. It’s taken us eight years to get here. Every week we’re pushing things forward. I don’t think anyone can catch up to the way we’re doing things. Some do try to take a shortcut though, by researching who we work with, where we sell and how we talk about things in an effort to be us without the hard work. It’s not that hard to try because we’re open about everything and everyone we work with.
Of course our manufacturers are like, “this looks a lot like Story, we can’t copy them - that would damage their business and ours.” Our agent’s like, “it sounds like you’re trying to copy Story… we already have this brand.” Of all the parts of the company this is the worst and most cringy. We had two people this year reach out to everyone in our network to work with them on brands that were basically Story (some even with similar names) and I had to answer so many emails to confused people who thought because it was so similar it was actually us working on another project. Ugh I hate it. Then you have the big brands that don’t even go to the trouble of working with the same people.
You spoke about the Reebok collaboration earlier, what are your motivations behind doing collaborations with bigger companies?
Saeed: Around four years ago, we started getting approached by big companies and we were just saying no. With Story, we like to be in full control of everything. Although I think that was good, I think another huge part of Story is checking in with ourselves and making sure we’re on the right path. Sometimes we’ve had to change things. I guess it was a bit of an ego check. We had to realize that by not working with other people, we’re damaging the growth of our brand but we’re also not really making much progress in the creative space and sustainability space.
That small project with Reebok introduced so many more people to our brand and to our way of thinking. This was way more powerful than us sticking around the same way we have been for another five years or so. We always talk about how powerful big brands doing stuff is, and how we want that to happen more. Usually we just say, “yeah, but we’re not going to do it though.” However, Reebok approached us. We really like the guy that’s in charge there so we decided to do it. It was quite a challenge because when people do collaborations, you pick a fabric and you pick a style and the company handles the rest of the development. With us, we always want to know what’s going on. It’s not as simple as, “oh we want this to be canvas.” There are so many types of canvas. We have to know where the fabric’s coming from, we have to talk about the trims, we have to put our minds in a different place which is why the project took so long. That Reebok project took so long. I couldn’t believe it. It was a normal amount of time for them. But yeah, I couldn’t believe how long it took.
We’ve gotten into another collaboration now which I think is going to take like two years on top of what I thought it was going to be. If we just effortlessly picked the fabrics we could’ve had two collaborations out right now. The motivation is to elevate our brand and to show the world that there is space in the industry for a sustainable brand to do a cool collaboration that is coveted, doesn’t look shit, and keeps to the ethics. I was worried that even though we did so much work for the Reebok collaboration, a lot of people would be calling us sellouts. I wouldn’t really care honestly but we didn’t get any of that. Everybody was really happy for us. That makes me feel really good because we’ve got other work coming out with other people. It was a really big success. It was quite an interesting journey for us. It also showed us that we haven’t really done footwear before and that there is a desire for Story footwear. It was a good bit of market research so now we’re developing our own footwear in house which is one-hundred percent by us.
Another new type of product that you’ve been developing is the homeware that you’ve introduced this past year! What were your intentions behind making it?
Saeed: The place where our dyeing mostly happens is a small town where many other craftspeople live including ceramic artists. We used to bring back the cups and stuff that they made back home and people really liked them. On a real level, the homeware stuff is probably the worst thing we make for our business. They are so hard to ship, so expensive to make, and don’t sell that well. We really like them though. I think deep down everyone wants their own lifestyle brand. They want to see their product on a certain type of person living a certain type of lifestyle.
We’re just building out the Story world. This shop that we’re doing is hopefully going to pull back the curtain a little bit more on who we are. We moved to Brighton two years ago and we didn’t have any cutlery or cups or plates. We didn’t really have anything apart from a bed. When we went out to look for all of that stuff, we couldn’t find any really good homeware. There were a few homeware brands that had really expensive stuff but we couldn’t really tell if it was good or just expensive. We didn’t really like a lot of it either. It’s really hard and we’re not really there yet, but we want to have bedding, flatware, and all kinds of other stuff because I just don’t feel like there’s much going on there. Goodhood in London is the only store that seems to do homeware nicely. To be frank, most of what they sell isn’t for us but at least they’re doing something that’s different. We still only own two plates in the entire house because we don’t want to commit to buying plates! There aren’t enough plates that we like. We’ve got like four sets of cutlery, a few bowls because we make them, we’ve got mugs because we make the mugs.
Luckily we see an end of the pandemic ahead, but this last year has seen many people stuck at home. People started to rediscover handicrafts like making candles, sewing or knitting. Do you feel an increase of interest in craftsmanship due to COVID?
Saeed: Definitely. But I don’t think it’s going to last. As soon as people are able to go out all of the knitting needles are going to drop and everyone’s going to go out drinking again. For younger people it could be longer lasting but I don’t believe it is. I already see it disappearing. My Instagram feed is starting to be less people doing crocheting at home and more people mixing cocktails and getting ready for the party.
Brexit really hit small brands the hardest. How has this political decision affected Story Mfg.?
Saeed: It’s so bad! For everybody! For us I think it’s least bad but it still is pretty bad. We don’t make anything in Europe so we don’t have anything coming in, but we do sell to stores in Europe so they’re paying much higher taxes. 35% of our website sales are from the UK, 35% are from The States, some portion of it is from Japan, and one of the smallest portions is Europe. We don’t directly sell that much to Europe. We’ve got stores in Europe but those customers are getting hit by massive taxes. In the beginning, we were getting so many angry emails. We did a ton of different things, we debated whether we should stop selling to Europe because the change is so drastic. From a business owner’s perspective, if we sell stuff to America and it’s under $800 they don’t pay any import fees. For people in America that’s great. It’s the same with Australia. If I send a pair of trousers to France that cost £200, on top of that customers are paying £180 on top of taxes.
It’s basically doubling the cost of everything. For us, this situation isn’t too bad because we didn’t get that much business in Europe but it will definitely stop our growth. The worst thing is it’s really bad for customer service. I used to do a lot of Story’s customer service before the baby. Now other people are doing it with us. A lot of the customer service needs are just answering angry people who have been given massive bills and they think it’s something to do with us. We post everywhere on our website that customers will pay tax. Please understand there’s going to be tax. We get a lot of returns and that kind of stuff. It’s bad. We’ve got a lot of friends that have businesses and their only solution is to open up warehouses in Europe. We can’t do that because we have to keep stock somewhere else and have staff somewhere else. We manage all of our own inventory. It really sucks. Luckily and unluckily for us, our smallest customer is Europe. I think it does drive sales for our European stores though. Mr. Porter has a European distribution center, our sales are doing really well there. In Germany there’s a store called The Wasted Hour and I think they’re benefitting from this. It only means that our stores in Europe are doing well which is still good for us.
How has the COVID situation in India impacted Story?
Saeed: It’s been bad. Every week we’ve had to speak to our manufacturers and their agents as well as our stores. The whole industry operates through these delivery windows and stuff just gets pushed back and forwards. For context, last Friday, we got a call from our main production partner and they told us that they are going into lockdown and won’t be able to work for two weeks. On Saturday, they said that they might be able to do a bit of work, and on Monday they were told that fifty percent of manufacturers could work and fifty percent of agriculture workers could work. It’s always a moving target and it’s a lot more complicated than it seems on the news.
Vaccines are really hard to come by. Some people are anti-vax. Everything I’m reading is saying that people in India are really trying to get the vaccine. I’m sure most people are, but when we donate to charities and stuff they’ve come back to us and said that they’re facing a lot of hardship in remote places that are anti-vax because of social media conspiracy theories.. At the moment, it’s the worst it’s ever been. Any day I’m expecting a call that someone in the dye-house or other production partners are feeling unwell. We’d have to cancel a whole season. We’re keeping money on hand in case something bad happens because we have to keep paying our workers.
We’re in a privileged position. If this happened five years ago we wouldn’t be able to support everyone. The industry forces people to work on a knife’s edge of money. When something like this comes along it just destroys you. We’re lucky that we one-hundred percent own the business, we support ourselves, all of our staff get paid a salary. Me and Katy are on a salary but we assess it almost on a monthly basis. We could go without a salary for a while but for our workers it’s much more complicated. If this business was owned by someone else it would be difficult, you can’t make those decisions fast enough. You don’t have any cash stockpiled and you don’t have direct communication. I don’t begrudge people who can’t be as helpful but I’m glad we’re able to support everyone.
What’s next for Story Mfg.?
Saeed: We’re working on footwear. We’ve got more collaborations on the way. We’ve got one with Merrell which I might have told you about the last time since it’s been in the making for a while. We’re doing a few collaborations that I don’t think I can talk about. We are working on Spring/Summer 2022 at the moment which we’ll show in a month or two.
This is kind of a difficult question because our growth is going to be slow and steady. I hope that next year we’re in the same position. We’re shooting for zero to twenty percent growth which in the industry is basically no growth. I just want everybody to be happy and safe and everything to be working. The only big new addition is the store space. Aside from that, we’re still going to be doing collaborations and putting out work. I don’t think anything is going to change. We’ve got a few secret projects, but we always do. None of them ever really happen.
We’ve just announced a second brand called Gentlefullness. It’s a little brand that sits sort of under Story Mfg. but isn’t Story Mfg. Story has a real strict manifesto which is focused on craft, natural dyes, natural materials among other things and those things give the brand a look and spirit which we love but we feel like there’s room for a brand that has none of those things but keeps the values of ethics, sustainability, etc. In short Gentlefullness is an exploration of the things and materials Story doesn’t use that have a lot to offer. It's the same team, same outlook but Dan Pacitti is more involved in the design and research process too (he works on various Story Mfg. projects too, hard to nail down a name for his role though). I’m really excited about it. It reminds me of hearing a story about the musical Nick Cave where he started another band and on day 1 he sat at the piano and started playing and everyone said it ended up sounding like his other work. They made a rule that the piano was off limits, and it immediately forced a new sound, using new tools that were very much him but a different dimension - I think that’s how Gentlefullness will be. It’ll be Story if we didn’t use natural dyes, embroidery etc. It's another dimension.
We’re still on a slow and steady hustle though. Like I said at the beginning, it seems like we’ve blown up but from the inside it hasn’t at all. I always remember when I was younger reading about the singer Cat Stevens converting to Islam and changing his name to Yusuf Islam. Everybody was so shocked! He was explaining that to us on the outside it seems like a sudden change, but to him it had been a gradual change ever since he was a teenager. He converted when he was in his thirties. But yeah, to us the changes happening are so slow and gradual.
Thank you for your time!
Interview by Peter Obradovic and Koko Bond-Razak
About the author:
Peter is a writer and editor who has devoted a lot of his activities to the Japanese culture. Partially located in Tokyo he academically studied many aspects of the Japanese society and culture to get a better understanding of Japan.
Koko is an eighteen-year-old creative based in Washington, DC. When he’s not working on schoolwork, he’s building his skills as a freelance writer and videographer.
