My sister was born an artist. She was raised in Lagos, passed through the USA, and settled in Barcelona, Spain.
At Tade Nursery School in those days, her favourite subject was PATTERNS. She loved art throughout school (St. Mary's Private; Queen's College), and at home, she loved cutting and tearing, then stitching and glueing and just making things.
Many years later, Kunmi attended the real HU, graduating summa cum laude in Computer Science in 2005. She was a programmer and usability engineer and design fanatic who got
to intern at Goldman Sachs and FAST (Microsoft), edit a magazine, see Europe,
present research, learn languages, design corporate websites, and earn a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction from Virginia Tech, ...before making a return to creating objects, products, and culture via Minku, her bespoke leather goods company.
For my second-ever UpNaira interview (see the first), I thought to ask minku to share some of that magical ability to be authentic, brilliant, creative, distinctive, eloquent, fashionistique...ok, I'm getting carried away here. Let's go...
What do you love about working with leather and fabrics?
minku: I
generally enjoy doing fun things with colour and texture: this
exploration is the one thing that is consistently evident in the bags I
make. When I was in art school here in Barcelona, I did not really care
which media I used for my projects, as long as the colours and textures I
was conveying felt right to me. So working with leather, which comes in
so many colours and textures, is for me like being a child that can eat
all the candy she wants.
Is minku loved by all, and if not, describe the typical minku loyalist.
minku: Ahh, loved by all ;-P
The
typical Minku loyalist gets a kick out of knowing that hours of skilled
blood sweat and tears went into making something, of which there is
probably only one in the world. Maybe this makes them art collector-type
people. They may not care much for Campbell soupcans arranged in a
certain order, but they will spend hours lost in the intricate
brushstrokes of Yayoi Kusama's
White Infinity Nets, for example.
The typical Minku loyalist has a strong ability to respond emotionally
to everyday objects made in an unusual way.
What is the financial potential for a company like yours?
minku: I
ask myself this daily :-) Oh man. Considering that Louis Vuitton
started similarly to me (as a malletier, making travel trunks for
wealthy people on a one-on-one basis) and is now worth about $25.9bn, I
think there is hope. It would take time though, years and years of
building a base of trusting customers. But I am fine with this
consistent-climb approach.
For me, part of the reason I love
doing this is that I dream of a day that more sub-Saharan leather goods
makers, with their heritage of excellent craftsmanship, would be as
renowned as Hermes Paris, Prada Milan or Loewe Madrid.
Why did you study Computer Science in uni if you knew you were going to end up in design?
minku: I
think that even though I used to make things by hand when I was
younger, I did not know the word 'design' as it exists now. Fashion
design seemed like something tailors or Paris Fashion Week designers
did, and both seemed distant from my reality. Yet what I do now is
somewhere between product design and fashion design. I did not know such
a realm existed until during/after my masters studies at Virginia Tech.
My
journey to design has been an interesting one, and I think my work is
all the more interesting because I haven't been so schooled in design
and materials use, so for example I don't care if a certain type of
leather should only be used for shoes, or if
aso oke should only be worn on heads and waists -- if I conceive a bag I can make with it, I will just follow through.
Actually
part of the motivation for starting Minku was that I finally, for the
first time in my academic life, got accepted into a design program -
Stanford's mechanical engineering masters with the product design
option. This was in April 2010. By this time, I was just loving
Barcelona life and not sure I wanted to leave (the folks at Stanford
were very understanding and let me defer for a year). During the year, I
got to experiment answers to the question: "can I build a
product-design project that would be on a similar level to if I were a
Stanford graduate?" I had Virginia Tech's human-computer interaction
masters and a handful of art courses under my belt by this time, and I
managed to convince myself that though Stanford would be a super cool
place to be, my combined educational and travel experiences had already
given me a great foundation for what I wanted to become.
Having
said these, computer science has been good to me, even as a designer.
Knowing how to create the precise brand identity I want online, and how
to modify my site and e-store without having to rely on someone else's
timelines, have made my life easier.
What will your next collection be about?minku: My
next collection will be about
rebels. A working quote is "She wore her
crown as an eyepatch and declared mutiny on the land."
I came up with
it, if you were wondering, a few days after reading some Yalla poems on
your site... you awakened my poetic side :-)
We did a preliminary
photoshoot for the collection last month, and it is about subtle
subversions of authority through dress.
Earlier this year, I attended a
job interview wearing an afro. And that got me thinking: I had to wear
my hair that way because the resources for the management of 2-inch long
African hair in Barcelona are quite scarce. But in wearing an afro to
an interview, something unexpected happened -- I felt cool, powerful
almost, in being so "rebellious", considering how university career
services counselors used to advise that we wear our hair for interviews.
For
the collection, I am also creating a limited line of menswear and
womenswear to help convey the theme. The bags would still play the
prominent role of course.
You live in Barcelona but grew up in Lagos. Which is the more exciting city?
minku: Both
are exciting for different reasons.
Barcelona has metro, Lagos has
traffic. Exciting life can be witnessed while traversing the city in
both...
minku's Twitter, Blog, Shop, Facebook
