Bespoke suits and surface design: Nest in Berlin

February found the Nest team traveling to Germany to meet with talented craftspeople and makers who are pushing the envelope on handmade. At a time when mass produced items are flooding store floors, Berlin’s studios are studded with a vibrant collection of artists, designers, tailors, and artisans, who are eschewing the fast-paced world of quickly churned out, large batch production in favor of authenticity, mindfulness, and a definition of luxury that derives its value from one-of-a-kind qualities.

At AA Collected, radical transparency is the name game. The storefront-meets-studio is structured to be fully adjoining, so that shoppers can not only browse products, they can also head “behind the scenes” and meet the designers and craftspeople whose personal stories are embedded in the jewelry, fashion, and home design items on display. This is a world in which the boundaries between creator and consumer disintegrate and the act of shopping itself becomes a creative exchange.

At Egon Brandstetter, handmade is not to be taken lightly. In just one jacket, 12,000 hand stitches can be found. The team here estimated that 100 years ago, a bespoke suit maker could be found on any given corner in Berlin. But today, Egon Brandstter is  one of two shops in all of Berlin and one of just of a handful in all of Germany. As these renegades work to keep the art of custom bespoke suits alive and kicking, they recognize an unmet need to provide skill training to young people who have few options for learning their admirable art.

Elisa Stroyk blew us away with her fundamentally new approach to surface design. By experimenting and tinkering away, Elisa has created what is essentially her own material with highly unusual properties that engender limitless opportunity for transfiguring fashion, furniture, and art. By hand pasting laser cut wooden triangles atop textiles, Elisa achieves an architectural effect and a material whose properties are tricky for the eye to pin down.

Our time in Germany was completed as we spent many hours deep in dialogue with Haenska and Western Trash, Nest Guild businesses who took time out of their busy days to participate in Nest’s strategic growth assessment. Haenska’s  modern bags, backpacks, and totes are the cool, design-forward outcomes of a ruthless commitment to sustainable material sourcing and a mastery of handstitching. Meanwhile, Western Trash is finding new use in discarded wine bottles, which business leader, Krzysztof Zielinski, assures us are not hard to come by around West Berlin. Employing age-old Czech glass-cutting skills, Western Trash is handcrafting upcylced bottles into light fixtures and tableware that have striking minimalist appeal.

From Berlin, it was onto the Ambiente Trade Show in Frankfurt to scour the show floors for the latest and greatest in handmade. Many thanks to Nest Giving Tuesday partners, QVC, for making this trip possible, and providing Nest with the opportunity to expand our work into Europe where the need for cultural preservation through craftsmanship is strong.