My name is Yevgenia Markiyeva, and I'm going to tell you about the Crafts&Design
brand. I created it in 2017 and the idea was to make handcrafted and designer objects for
art's sake and as something I could sell.

You are not alone today, are you?

No, I'm not, I've worked with my partner Lada Bilkina for a long time, now she's going
to introduce herself.

I'm Lada Bilkina and I'm a fashion designer at Crafts&Design and I'm responsible for
production and realization of our ideas.

What does Crafts&Design do?

We create collections of clothes, objects or interior decorations. Lately we've been
making mostly clothes because there's a bigger demand for them. We're preparing two
collections and making up a third one, but we don't forget about the art objects. It's a
long and complicated process, first you have an idea, then you realize it, then you make
the media to advertise it, then the post-production stage, and you mustn't lose the sense
of what you do.

Is Crafts&Design more about fashion or about philosophy?

I think it's about philosophy or rather about the new fashion philosophy. Fashion comes and goes, and the sense remains.

Lada, could you tell us more about the sense, please?

So why we're not about fashion. It's because the philosophy of our brand is based on the
idea of slow production. That's why we're into the topic of environmentally friendly and
careful treatment of objects, using up their resource, when they lose their old meaning
and we change them to give them a new one so they may be used in a new context.

So they can be bought again.

Yes, and this is how we work with things. So our idea is the careful use of objects and
using up their resource, their reinterpretation. It concerns not only material objects, we
also work with the philosophy of traditional things. It's hard to work with crafts because
we no longer live in the historical context when all those crafts were popular and were
used in everyday life. People no longer put embroidered doilies on their TV-sets. So it's
hard working with crafts because they already have meanings that have formed in our
minds, handcrafted objects have certain images passed on to us from our ancestors. Their meaning is already set, and to reinterpret it in the contemporary context you have to
break it and then assemble it again so it can acquire a new meaning, put it in a new
context. And its central core is archaic, which is about our roots and what those symbols
mean. So when you think about handiwork, like assembling a brick stove or handling a
spindle, you have to preserve its base code. And then you have to break the husk
plastered on it by the historical context and put it in a new contemporary context. That's
why crafted objects whose images are set in the public mind are hard to work with.

Who are your consumers?

Our consumer is a modern person in the good sense, someone who is interested in art,
who, like us, appreciates a handcrafted object, understands its aesthetics, looks for new
meanings. There are a lot of such people there, they come from various spheres.

Judging by where your sales units are located, you've found your consumer, where
exactly?

We sell our art objects on the Internet, you can make an individual order in Instagram or
in VK. We also sell our men's clothes in a little congenial shop named TweedHat in
Moscow, in Zlatoust'inskiy lane. We're also selling our things at the Flacon Design
Factory and the RigRaiser where the guys deal with ecological problems, do a lot of
recycling and upcycling. Also Moscow Academic Theatre created a cool open space just
before the pandemic, so they have few visitors, but they have a little shop of handcrafted
designer objects, they have a great assortment, and they invited us too.