Jackie Dettmar
Vice President of Design and Product Development , Mohawk Group
Jackie is a Textile Industry veteran with almost three decades of diverse experience in the flooring industry. She leads the Design and Product Development Studios based at Mohawk’s recently renovated Design Center Light Lab in Dalton Georgia. The Light Lab received Petal Certification through the Living Building Challenge and was the first such project in the southeast.
She has designed flooring solutions ranging from Luxury High End wool product for Ralph Lauren to Corporate tile products for Google and Amazon to Historic Woven Renovation products. One of her latest endeavors was launching Mohawk Commercial’s new resilient hard surface line.
With a B.S. in Textile Science and a MBA, Jackie considers herself a creative scientist. She believes that design impacts all aspects of business and that creative thinkers can change the world.
Web: mowhakgroup.com
Paul Makovsky
Editorial & Brand Director, Metropolis Magazine
Paul Makovsky is editorial director of Metropolis. He is a former managing editor of 2wice, and he held a Smithsonian Fellowship at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, where he worked on the exhibition and catalog Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture. He has also served as a cocurator of the exhibition Knoll Textiles: 1945–2010 at Bard Graduate Center and contributed to the accompanying catalog (Yale University Press, 2011).
Web: metropolismag.com
Twitter: @paulmakovsky
Instagram: @paulmakovskyf
Cary Vaughan & Jenna Wilson
Co-founders, Ace & Jig
Cary and Jenna pair exclusive artisanal textile stories with effortless silhouettes to reinvent the notion of cool, season-less fashion inspired by a shared passion: antique fabrics and colored stripes of heritage cloth. Each fabric in the collection is custom designed with a keen eye on color, motif, and texture, then yarn-dyed and woven on looms in India, where they travel yearly to work with textile experts and artisans to perfect their designs. ace&jig has generated a cult following and can be found at select retailers globally including Liberty of London, Beams Japan, Barneys, ABC Home and Oroboro.
Web: aceandjig.com
Instagram: @aceandjig
Deborah Palmer Keiser
VP of Supply Chain, Sundance Catalog
Deborah is a talented senior executive with global supply chain and operations management experience in retail, apparel, accessories and home products. She has in depth knowledge about vertical retailing, manufacturing, sourcing and distribution and her experience includes leading global teams and mentoring their development. She is also a raw materials expert with manufacturing and technology experience.
Web: sundancecatalog.com
Twitter: @d2pk
Kourtney Morgan
Senior Designer, Patagonia
Kourtney has worked at Patagonia as Senior Designer for over seventeen years, working on a diverse range of styles and categories. Her passion includes the company’s heritage with the need for modern lifestyle collections. One of her chief responsibilities is ensuring every new piece of clothing is a meaningful, viable Patagonia product considering the environment and upholding the company’s ethical values.
She is influenced by Patagonia’s history of simple, functional designs. “Clothes should be practical, useful and beautiful. Details should serve a purpose”.
Working closely with Patagonia’s ambassadors, like the Malloy Brothers and Kate Rutherford and the outdoor enthusiasts of the world, gives her in depth understanding of her designs and their use from the very people who wear them the most.
Her background as a sample maker has given her an instinctual, robust understanding of clothing constructions, pattern making and textiles. She draws her inspiration from working with her hands.
Instagram: @garmentfarmer and @patagonia
Web: patagonia.com
Nellie Cohen
Worn Wear Program Manager, Patagonia
Nellie Cohen oversees Patagonia’s Worn Wear program. The purpose of Worn Wear is to reduce the environmental impacts of Patagonia clothing by helping people extend the life of garments through repair, reuse and responsible recycling options. Worn Wear creates interactive engagement opportunities for people to celebrate product quality and durability through stories of the journeys taken in their gear – hopefully inspiring us to change our relationship with stuff from a cycle of rapid consumption and disposal to a circular model based on buying less and keeping things in use longer. Nellie is also a lecturer in the Environmental Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a MS in Oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Nellie lives in Ojai, California with her husband, dog and chickens.
Web: Patagonia Worn Wear
Pamela Kelly
VP of Licensing & Brand Management, Museum of New Mexico Foundation
Utilizing her broad business and product development experience with several key lifestyle retailers, and her deep understanding of Santa Fe’s four state-run museums, Pamela created the licensing program for the Museum of New Mexico.
Web: mnmlicensing.org
Joe Schroeder & Lora Smith
Big Switch Farm
Joe Schroeder & Lora Smith, Big Switch Farm
Joe and Lora are farmers growing hemp, organic vegetables and two children in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains at Big Switch Farm. Big Switch was one of the first farms to hold a hemp permit in Kentucky and the couple has grown several varieties of hemp over the last two years. In 2015, they worked on a project in collaboration with Kentucky farmers and Patagonia to produce a domestically grown American flag that incorporated hemp broken on their farm. They are currently pursuing growing and testing different hemp varieties for fiber applications and are engaged with the artist Adele Stafford of Voices of Industry on a sustainable hemp textile project to develop and produce a line of home goods.
The Agricultural Act of 2014 allowed certain states to start farming hemp again after a ban of almost 60 years. One Southern state has already established a lead in the race: Kentucky. It will be years before we know if hemp can replace a significant portion of the income lost with the disappearance of tobacco and coal revenue, but that isn’t stopping a diverse gang of Kentuckian entrepreneurs, farmers and manufacturers from staking their futures on it.
Instagram: @bigswitchfarm
Adele Stafford
Voices of Industry
Voices of Industry is an ongoing investigation of fiber and agriculture, of craft and contextual concern. The garments we produce are embodied objects, vernacular meditations on a particular piece of land and the stewards who reside there. Our work is modeled after longitudinal study, revisiting a set of landscapes each year to observe and document the evolution of land and fiber. Weaving, then, becomes an act of synthesis; cloth as a poetic messenger, coded and complete.
Adele Stafford began this project in 2013 after fifteen years of working in a business strategy role for numerous creative organizations including frog design and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Adele holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Business Administration from Simmons College.
Web: voicesofindustry.com