When Shibumi is flying, like a flag, it marks a spot and a moment in time, sheltering friends and families who are nesting under it.” There is something profoundly sophisticated for a product to celebrate something that speaks to the nature and spirit of a place in which it exists. “Shibumi Shade honors the wind, an element that is inherent to the experience of the beach, instead of fighting it. Dane Barnes says his friend Van Nolintha, owner of Brewery Bhavana and Bida Manda in downtown Raleigh, describes it best: The design of the Shibumi Shade is unique, an arched pole that holds a panel made of ripstop parachute material that floats on the wind. This year, Shibumi Shades are sold in 20 retail stores in North and South Carolina as well as Florida and have made an appearance at over 200 beaches from Emerald Isle to Santa Monica and from Cape Cod to Oahu. The story has been the same every year since, though they now use a larger cut and sew facility in Asheboro. They again made as many as they could, but again sold out. In 2017, the team transitioned to having a professional cut and sew facility in Raleigh sew the Shibumi Shade. “Shibumi is also a small apartment complex in Chapel Hill, where Dane, Alex, and I all lived in college, so it’s a common thread between us.” “Shibumi is a Japanese design concept that means the elegance of simplicity, which we think fits the Shibumi Shade well,” Scott Barnes explains. The name they chose for their product was the Shibumi Shade. They hadn’t planned on selling any but a lot of families at the beach asked where they could get one, so they decided to sew and sell a few dozen that summer, sewing everything on nights and weekends. The friends took it down to Emerald Isle for trials and soon had a lot of orders for their invention. The summer of 2016 saw the completion of the first Shade prototype, produced in a spare bedroom. This got us off the ground at first, but we quickly realized this was too big of an ‘ask,’ and in order to pour hours of development time into sewing concepts, ultimately we took on the sewing ourselves.” At first, we asked a friend to sew a canopy for us because she had the knowledge and a sewing machine handy. “Learning to sew allowed us to innovate more quickly. “One of the biggest new skills we had to learn was sewing,” Slater says. The next step in the design took the friends well outside the skill set usually learned by young male North Carolinians. This required us to challenge our own preconceptions about what we thought would work, and to actually go out and prove the concept.” “Getting something in the sand so that we could test and learn about it was more important than looking for the perfect solution - at a stage when we didn’t know what the ‘perfect solution’ looked like yet. “We improvised the very first prototype with a simple set of PVC conduit pipe,” Slater says. Designing a prototype involved lots of trial and error.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |