Unspun / Creative Editor
“The future of fashion manufacturing.” —Unspun
Led creative direction for the Unspun brand narrative and voice across all platforms: web, product, sustainability, social, blogs, newsletters, and retail. Collaborated on creative concepts for quarterly campaigns and served as the creative lead and intermediary between Unspun and the agency Oui Will during web re-design. Led press efforts and secured publications in Vogue, WWD, TIME, Sourcing Journal, and more. Applied for national awards and won TIME Best Invention 2019 and The SF Design Week Award. Established a 200-person ambassador and influencer partnership program. Alongside the Sustainability Specialist, I wrote a Climate Report to support our B-Corp certification and achieve a “great” rating on the site Good On You. Acted as a brand evangelist, creative lead, and moderator during events and photoshoots.
Press
British Vogue
Could Having To Try On Jeans Become A Thing Of The Past?
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WWD
H&M’s Weekday Denim to Sell ‘Size-Free’ Jeans in 2020
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Sourcing Journal
Denim Unspun Wants to Make Perfectly Fitted Jeans With Zero Waste
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Insider Trends
Is Unspun’s Regenerative Model the Future of Fashion?
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Unspun Blog
Is Denim Sustainable?
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Great Rating, Good On You +
TIME Best Inventions +
SF Design Week Award +
Fast Company's World Changing Ideas +
Great Rating, Good On You + TIME Best Inventions + SF Design Week Award + Fast Company's World Changing Ideas +
Creative Direction
Buckman / Publicist, Editor
“Buckman Journal is an unorthodox operation that continues the daredevil tradition of literature. We print a biannual literary journal and books of all genres.” —Buckman
RolesEdit forthcoming journals and books
Editorial lead for This Is Portland on Substack
Lead publicity on all publications
Scout writers for publication
Support event programming
Example ProjectsAnnihilation for Beginners by Charlie J. Stephens
Buckman Journal: Cluster
Choice Cuts by Corbin C.
Buckman Journal: Trance
Buckman Journal: Cluster — Editing
Annihilation for Beginners by Charlie J. Stephens — Editing and Publicity
“Charlie J. Stephens is a bard of the Oregon coast, the Willamette River, the people left behind and the people doing the leaving, the transplants to the city’s edges, the birds and deer and trees, the broken link between human and humane. This is a book about queer solitude and dreaming, the potential of friendship, the persistence of childhood longing, and what it means to grow. Each story stands on its own, while together they build up to a crescendo of conflicting feelings, ‘the momentum underneath everything.’”
—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Terry Dactyl
“Charlie J. Stephens’s stories move deftly through Oregon’s varied landscapes—coastal fog, high desert, ancient groves—where the natural world offers something like kinship to those navigating loss and its long tail. These are characters raising reptiles, getting strange in cemeteries, asking themselves why they're still here and finding the answer in unexpected anchors: a child, a snake, a stranger's kindness. Stephens writes with wry philosophical weight and a dark wit, turning the dread we all carry into something oddly beautiful and life-affirming."
—Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe
“Charlie Stephens’s people are precisely the people we need right now—complex, compassionate, queer, courageous, and just a little bit sick of the way people focus on what is entirely beside the point. They have what the wise old woman who raised me would have called gumption. I would follow this writer into any dark woods.”
—Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country
Fonograf Editions / Assistant Editor
“Fonograf Editions exists to take risks that push the boundaries of sound, text, and genre. We value the interdisciplinary, experimental, and unclassifiable, and strive to bring to life works that resist, bend, and break expectations.” —Fonograf Editions
Role: Assistant Editor / Bird Watching by Eileen Myles
“Has our species ever been more in need of new ways of thinking through our relation to the real, to the simulated, to each other? With a visionary attention to the lived sensorium of the present and its historical givens, The Thomas Salto reveals a brilliantly nuanced view of individual agency in the age of falling empires. If the future is survivable, this is what its poetry sounds like.”—Elizabeth Willis
Role: Editor / Traceable Relation by Kimberly Alidio
“An exquisitely sculpted living-thinking-breathing work. Whenever I put it down I immediately want to pick it back up. Traceable Relation is everything I want to read.” —Renee Gladman, author of My Lesbian Novel
Role: Interviewer for Chicago Review / The Thomas Salto by Timmy Straw
“Has our species ever been more in need of new ways of thinking through our relation to the real, to the simulated, to each other? With a visionary attention to the lived sensorium of the present and its historical givens, The Thomas Salto reveals a brilliantly nuanced view of individual agency in the age of falling empires. If the future is survivable, this is what its poetry sounds like.”—Elizabeth Willis
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Role: Assistant Editor / If Only for a Moment (I’ll Never Be Young Again) by Jaime Gil Biedma trans. by James Nolan
“In this brilliant bilingual edition, Jaime Gil de Biedma (and translator James Nolan) stage suits of poems committed to beauty and resistance, weaving together a politics filled with erotic charges, fierce candor, and a lilting descent into the past. Forfeiting nostalgia for a fierce look at the way personal and cultural histories collide, his collection remains true to de Biedma’s desire, as he says in his introduction, “be the poem” rather than the poet, this much overdo collection gives us a glimpse into the aftermath of both violence and love.” —Alexis Almeida
Wardrobe Theory Project / Writer
The Kajola Shoe by Yussef Agbo-Ola & Olaniyi Studio
From A Feeling of Symbiosis: “What Agbo-Ola is doing disturbs our perception for its lack of familiarity. The shoes are devoid of hard lines and edges, fluorescent colors and symmetrical patterning—marks common in modernity. In contrast, they’re unshapely, rotten, and patched. They look like what humans would wear if they were mirroring the landscape. But since we don’t, instead they conceptually point to the distance between us and the earth surrounding.”
RoleI wrote the cover story for WTP’s second issue, titled A Feeling of Symbiosis.
FocusThe artist Yussef Agbo-Ola
Textile symbiosis
Circular manufacturing models
Affective attachments to garments
Research & Inspiration
“Wardrobe Theory Project is a biannual print magazine that explores how we consume, curate, and create. They’re at the intersection of how fashion makes us feel while understanding its impact on the environment.” —Wardrobe Theory Project
What are the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach, especially in light of the different political, social, economic, and ecological implications of design in this time of climate crisis?
When we segregate expertise, research, belief systems, and ideas into sub-divided categories of intellectual supremacy, the vicissitudes between us becomes our current reality. It is not that we need to all be jacks of all trades but rather, we need an attitude of openness adopted by designers and all the supporting fields. My life’s work will be to continue to grow and lead a studio that is full of non-designers, non-architects, non-intellectuals, a studio where all fields are fused together. Ecologists, healers, farmers, anthropologists, etc. all conversing and experimenting with one another. Design for me has never been an act of simply producing a product or artefact but involves the act of designing environments and systems of relations that bring people together to rethink how their expertise can create a new reality for the whole.
→ Read more of Agbo-Ola’s interview with Pin-Up Magazine
Interact Brands / Creative Director, Copy
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In collaboration with the CD of Design, we strategized and concepted the fundamental creative vision for clients like Hot Pockets, MadeGood, and Lean Cuisine, including brand guidelines, tone of voice, naming systems, and visual identity.
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Utilizing cultural analysis, market and brand research, we established brand strategies and directions that best positioned Interact’s clients.
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Wrote copy across outlets including product, billboard, packaging, and internal identity tools, sometimes based on tone of voice definitions we established.
