Fabrice Frere:
Beating Out the Big Dogs
Frere also uses the web to push — bigtime — the content envelope.
When creative director and designer Phil Nutley approached “CITY” with the idea of an international design challenge, Frere immediately saw the opportunity.
See Un_fold entries and assembly.
Together, they launched Un_fold, challenging nine designers from nine cities around the world to design and build a chair in less than 90 days. The chair had to support 200 pounds of human weight. And it had to fit in a FedEx box.
The project was so successful that, in less than two weeks 80,000 people hit the “CITY” website to watch Un_Fold…well, unfold on video. If you Googled ‘FedEx’ shortly after Un_fold went live, Google listed Un_fold ahead of FedEx itself.
Shining a Spotlight
“Here was an instance,” Frere says, “where we used Macs, iMovie and Garage Band to showcase a project where inexpensive materials could be used to create high-design collapsible furniture.”
“Every box contained a feeling of the country it had come from. A big pouffy thing that looked like a hairdo gone wild came out of one box. I thought ‘Now, what is this?’”
Participants included British-born lead designer Phil Nutley; Mark Hales, a top designer for Terence Conran; Prachi Mishra, a 21-year-old, New Delhi-born textile designer; and Brazilian-born Fabio Righetto, who created an accordion-style paper stool that proved the easiest to assemble: simply unfold.
Sponsored by Diesel Jeans, the project was supposed to unfold at an event in its New York store during a major New York furniture fair.
“But the day before the event,” Frere recalls, “all of the seats were still in the FedEx boxes, and we didn’t know what we’d find. I turned to Nutley and said, ‘Maybe we want to look at these. Maybe there’s nothing in these boxes.’ We’d be dead in the water, man.”
Hairdo Gone Wild
Frere carried the FedEx boxes downstairs to a small room at the back of the bar. “I set my Canon XL camera on a tripod to get one steady shot, and videotaped ourselves opening the boxes.
“Every box contained a feeling of the country it had come from. A big pouffy thing that looked like a hairdo gone wild came out of one box. I thought ‘Now, what is this?’
“But it makes perfect sense. It’s Icelandic, very warm, and something you could wrap around yourself.”
Overnight Video Production
“With the power of this technology,” says Frere, “we could open all these boxes and videotape the whole kit and caboodle in one afternoon, take the video home that night, edit it in iMovie, and compose the soundtrack in Garage Band. By four in the morning I was pretty happy with what I had.
“That morning I showed the video to my publishing partner, John McDonald, and to some of our employees. After two viewings, we handed the video to Hamish Robertson, our interactive media editor, and a half hour later it was up on the web.
“Ten years ago you couldn’t do this, even if you felt you were the next Stanley Kubrick.”
