Q & A Interview
Interview by Gillian Drummond
October 2, 2007
ARE YOU VY OR ELLE? Here’s a tip—say it quick!
Designer, artist and Vy&Elle owner Nicola Freegard says environmental consciousness is in her blood. Here, she talks about how she went from designing luxury home goods to rescuing vinyl billboards.
Have you always been eco-conscious?
Yes, but it seemed I was ahead of the curve. I’m from London, England where recycling was a natural part of our every day life when I was growing up in the 1960’s. Back in 1995 I had this vision for the perfect environmentally-conscious company, providing soft home furnishings, accessories and bedding. I used things like hemp and cruelty free silks from Tibet and Nepal. Earthworks was a great little company. I was selling around the world to the likes of Ralph Lauren and to boutique hotels. We created pieces that lasted a lifetime, but they were very expensive. Now, of course, everyone’s into recycling and eco-conscious materials, which makes me very happy.
So explain the move from designing home goods to billboards.
While I was running Earthworks, I met a couple who ran a recycled furniture business. They’d seen bags made out of track tarps in Europe and they had a similar material sitting in their salvage yard—vinyl billboards that would otherwise go straight to the landfill sites. They approached me with the idea of creating a small line of billboard bags.
We started off with five bags showing at a trade show in New York. Almost immediately, the orders started coming in.
You’d hit a unique concept.
Well, not quite. The first person to walk into that booth was carrying their own billboard bag! Turns out there was a couple of mom and pop businesses in the States already doing this.
But that just made me more determined. What I was seeing was just an OK product, not well-designed or well-finished. With my experience in design and production, I knew I could do something better.
Tell us about the recycling process.
At first I was buying the billboards from billboard companies one at a time. Within the first two years we had recycled 30 tons, and I said “This is crazy.” So I put the word out to the outdoor companies and billboard printers that we were looking for a joint solution. It was a winning situation for us all. Now we have an exclusive supply of billboards that are delivered to us at no cost in return for promoting the billboard companies green efforts. We also get a large amount of donations, and we also recycle billboards for corporations wanting to take part in our program.
The billboards are stocked in our warehouse in Wisconsin, cut up and shipped to our manufacturers in China, which assembles the bags according to my designs. It’s a factory that’s audited regularly and visited. I’m very conscious of the need to regulate and monitor every factory we work with. It is important that we ensure we are using factories that do not abuse human rights issues, and ensure the workers receive good compensation etc.
And our product is 100% recycled. What doesn’t go into making our bags is recycled wherever we can. Our billboard supplier has partnerships with other companies recycling the materials into garden hoses and flooring.
Why not manufacture right here in the US?
Up until now, our manufacturers in China have delivered the best quality product at a somewhat reasonable price. But manufacturing costs have come down enough stateside that I’m currently looking at a U.S. based manufacturer to carry some of our production. We hope to have this in place early 2008. It’s all about creating a quality product that falls within an affordable price point. We already have the added costs of our recycling the billboards, so we have to be careful how we price our items to make them affordable to everyone.
That way your get your message to more people.
Exactly. We’ve recycled over 100 tons of billboard to date, but each year there are roughly 600,000 tons of billboards produced in the U.S. alone.
Vy&Elle is all about recycling as much as we can, and about spreading the recycling message to others. We go into classrooms to talk to children about it, and we donate a lot of product towards causes we really care about such as AIDS, children’s education, and cancer research projects.
And by the way, our company is a team effort. I have a handful of staff working with me at our base in Tucson, Arizona. Plus my friends who came up with the original brainwave are my business partners in this project. They run a very large salvage company out of Menasha, Wisconsin and Jeff Janson handles all the billboard recycling and pre-production preparation at this facility, while Robin Janson acts as my consultant/advisor/shoulder to lean on. This doesn’t include the slew of sales teams we have helping us spread the Vy &Elle word as well as the European distribution teams we have in place. It is a collective effort and we have a lot of fun doing it and seeing it grow.
Who are your Clients?
We supply to everyone from boutiques and museum gift stores to chain stores, here in the U.S. and also Europe, Japan and Australia. They include Whole Foods, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Virgin Megastores. We also have corporate contracts; we produce custom bags and items for the likes of Sundance Film Festival, Lexus, Coca Cola, Cirque Du Soleil, and I’ve just launched a line exclusively for Target.com.
What’s next for Vy&Elle?
I’m designing a line for Barnes & Noble for Spring 2008 of book bags, book covers, journals etc.,I’ve also teamed up recently with Todd Oldham to launch an exclusive line of bags for next years Sundance Film Festival, made from billboards he produced for last years festival. We are also now recycling Coca Cola billboards and they are sponsoring the upcoming Olympics in Beijing—we are currently reviewing how we can help here.
Lastly, who came up with the clever name?
We wanted a name with a twist that said something about our cause. Some people still don’t get it—they call me up and say “are you Vy or Elle?” Here’s a tip—say it quick!