#smallgreendoor

Creative Studio Case Study: CiscoHome 

Small Green Door has been in creative partnership with Cisco Pinedo of CiscoHome for over 7 years. One project we did with him was to find a way to visually depict CiscoHome’s long history in Los Angeles. With the founding of a new store on Melrose avenue, we wanted to show the community that CiscoHome is a part of the fabric of Los Angeles. We considered repainting the wall, but found that it would be extremely expensive to sandblast the wall and paint a fresh slate. Our creative director, Leo Estevez, took to researching and decided that an old school ink transfer graffiti technique would do just the trick. 

We’ve experimenting with image making using some of our in-studio art pieces. In these images we’ve been toying with the idea of the future society is moving towards. We’re particularly interested in the schism between the future we’re promised and the future we see around us. We stumbled across this Breakfast Machine video and love the way it plays on this concept. 

The flying car is a trope that represents this schism. We’ve incorporated a small beige car into a few of our images to embody this classic vision of the future. Even before the Jetsons and Back to the Future, the flying car has been emblematic of human potential.

Check out this article from Popular Mechanics chronicling attempts at building a flying car: The Long, Weird History of the Flying Car

One of our favorites is this 1947 ConVair model. It was the first flying car to mimic the appearance and familiarity of a sedan. Despite is visual appeal, it sadly crashed during testing and was never released to the public. 

To this day the concept has never been fully realized in the way it has been imagined by pop culture. There are of course road-able aircrafts as this Mashable article explains: Dude, Where’s my Flying Car? The Flubber style flying sedan though is something that only exists in our collective imagination. 

Technological advancements make the flying car more feasible than ever before, but social advancements has made it less desirable. The concept of a flying car is a mash-up of old school technology and limited imagination. As we move into the future, truly marvelous innovation is digital rather than physical. These physical representations of technological ability have become tropes of an imagined future.  

Frankie & Albert was a home-brewed idea, design, and realization. Small Green Door incubated and oversaw all creative and operational aspects of this online subscription shop delivering vintage home decor. 

We have recently pulled back from this project to focus on the growth of Small Green Door, though Frankie & Albert may have a resurgence at some point and it is a project we are very proud of from a design perspective. 

Through Frankie & Albert we were able to experiment within the subscription model constraint. We started Frankie & Albert as a subscription service for personalized home decor with a swap meet element allowing customers to return, exchange, and choose new items depending on their satisfaction. Sadly many of the items we were carefully picking, cleaning, and curating were breaking on return trips rendering the exchange model rather inefficient. After a few months we launched a business model shift to a choice-based subscription service with no returns. 

We designed a new website format that allowed for daily posting of new sets and reserve/wait-list capabilities to allow each subscriber to choose their monthly sets. While some customers enjoyed the choice element, we received a mixed feedback revealing to us a large part of the value of a subscription box is the surprise element.