Nokomis : Innovation + Job News

Even if you’ve never been to the Big Apple, you’ve probably heard of Humans of New York — the wildly successful, ongoing photo essay that’s touched more than 20 countries and earned millions of social shares.
 
New York City has more than eight million inhabitants from all over the world, but it’s not the only place with a multitude of human-scale stories worth sharing. MSP has its very own analog: Humans of Minneapolis, Minneapolis-based photographer Stephanie Glaros’ often poignant look at the joys, sorrows and oddities of life in the urban North.
 
Glaros started Humans of Minneapolis as an occasional tumblr blog — a useful vehicle for her ample interactive talents. She’s since added a Facebook page and Instagram feed to bring her subjects to a wider audience. Last month, the Minneapolis Parks Foundation announced that Glaros would conduct a “summer-long portrait series profiling visitors to Minneapolis neighborhood parks,” showcased in Humans of Minneapolis’ digital ecosystem and the Park Foundation’s own social properties.
 
According to the Parks Foundation, Glaros will profile 15 park visitors in all. The portrait series aims to draw attention to Minneapolis’ 160-plus parks, which (per the Parks Foundation) attracted more than six million visitors last year. Shortly after the portrait series’ announcement, the Trust for Public Land announced that Minneapolis had once again earned the top spot in its closely watched urban U.S. park system rankings, continuing a dominant run that dates back to the early 2010s.
 
“Stephanie’s series will help us begin to tell the stories of the people who use our parks every day and show the multitude of ways people use and love our Minneapolis parks,” the Parks Foundation said in a release.
 
Some of the stories Glaros captures on the Humans of Minneapolis blog are challenging, to put it mildly. Interviews conducted immediately following Prince’s death were heartbreaking. More recently, she spoke with a young man whose ex-girlfriend’s brother had died violently the previous week; in the interview, he talked openly about his own mortality and agonized about carrying a firearm for protection.
 
It’s not yet clear whether Glaros’ park stories will hew toward the weighty, or whether they’ll focus on the lighter side of summer in MSP. No matter what the next few months bring, Glaros is excited to explore her beloved, snow-less home city and forge new connections with her fellow Minneapolitans.
 
“People are reserved here and they don’t want attention, so it can be a bit of a challenge to draw people out,” she told the Star Tribune in April. “I look at that as a challenge to get real and get outside of our shells and make a connection…[t]here’s something magical about connecting with a complete stranger.”
 
 

The calendar still says winter, but Tangletown Gardens is ramping up hiring, and investing in initiatives to make the popular South Minneapolis business “even better at what we grow, what we produce, and what we create for our customers and the communities we serve,” says co-founder and principal Scott Endres.
 
That doesn’t mean, however, that Endres and co-owner Dean Engelmann will tear up a playbook that has worked for more than a decade.
 
“The growth of our business has always been organic,” Endres says. “We make sure things as are as good as they can be before taking the next step. Right now, we feel there is room to grow and refine all aspects of our business without having to take on new ventures.”
 
Tangletown Gardens’ current ventures keep Endres, Engelmann and their staffers plenty busy. The flagship garden center at 54th & Nicollet supports a flourishing garden design and consulting business that counts some of the Twin Cities’ most notable companies, nonprofits, government organizations and individuals as clients. Off the top of his head, Endres lists the Museum of Russian Art, the Minneapolis Park Board, the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum and the U of M’s Horticulture Department as “garden partners.”
 
Endres and Engelmann met while enrolled in the University of Minnesota’s horticulture program. They worked in the landscape design business before setting out as partners and founding Tangletown. Careful product selection and innovative cultivation strategies play a role in their success, along with their backgrounds. According to Endres, Tangletown has “thousands of...perennial, annual and vegetable varieties,” along with “the most diverse group of unusual and hard-to-find woody plants in the Upper Midwest.”
 
In addition to the garden center, Endres and Engelmann run Wise Acre Eatery, a bastion of the Twin Cities’ farm-to-fork movement, and a 100-acre farm in Plato, which supplies Wise Acre and a flourishing CSA. According to Wise Acre’s website, “80 to 90 percent of what we serve is grown sustainably” on the Plato farm.
 
Since opening in 2012, Wise Acre has been joined by a host of farm-centric restaurants across town. But it remains unique. “Unlike the owners of any other restaurant we know of, we are the folks sowing the seeds, nurturing plants, and tending the animals in the morning, then delivering the harvest to our restaurant’s kitchen in the afternoon,” says Endres.
 
Endres and Engelmann grow produce year-round in state-of-the-art greenhouses to maintain their locally grown supply. The owners also keep Scottish Highland cattle, two heritage pork breeds and free-range poultry on the farm — a self-contained food ecosystem that relies on “biology, not toxic chemicals,” says Endres.
 
“Healthy soil creates healthy food and gardens, which ultimately create healthy people,” adds Engelmann.
 
This philosophy reflects Endres’ and Engelmann’s upbringing. Though horticulturalists by training, both grew up on small working farms in the family for generations. “Our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers knew the way they treated their land would shape its future,” says Endres. “We farm today in much the same way as the farms we grew up on.”
 
Current Tangletown Job Listings in Minneapolis
 

1. Garden Designer
2. Container Designer
3. Gardener
4. Seasonal Garden Center Associate
5. Seasonal Landscape Team Member

 

Max Martin, a luxury shoe brand based in the Nokomis neighborhood of Minneapolis and recently featured in celebrity swag bags at the Grammys and Oscars, goes into production next month with its first full high-heel line. In addition to the Fall 2014 line, a Spring/Summer 2015 line is also in the works. If these two big releases prove successful, a more inclusive women’s shoe line—beyond high heels—could be on the horizon, along with men’s shoes and possibly accessories or other clothing items.

Max Martin got its start in 2012 after William Panzarella, founder of the Minneapolis-based Aegis Foundation (which helps “vulnerable, needy, underserved, and imperiled youth plan, prepare, and focus on education” according to the website), was seeking a sponsor for the foundation’s annual High Heel Dash on Nicollet Mall.

Panzarella noticed a proliferation of shoe brands with ties to celebrities. A longtime hip-hop fan, he immediately saw the potential for a hip-hop line that leveraged his connections to the music industry. Panzarella broadened the idea into a high-heel line that wouldn’t just appeal to musicians. He credits MC Lyte, a former president of the L.A. Chapter of the Grammy Association, with generating publicity about Max Martin among L.A.’s fashionable set, which has driven early sales. Panzarella donates a portion of Max Martin’s pre-season sales to charity.

Being featured at two national awards ceremonies, again thanks to MC Lyte, was a big step forward for Max Martin. For Panzarella, the marketing represented a significant investment, but “the press pays for itself,” he says. During awards season, the shoes were features on Entertainment Tonight and ABC News, as well as in local Twin Cities media outlets. Panzarella also hosted Minneapolis’ “official Oscar viewing party” at Muse. Proceeds from that event benefited the Smile Network and Aegis Foundation.

Panzarella’s fall line includes a striking boot called “Leo,” an angular stiletto called “Betty,” and a classic high-heel called “Moma,” among others. The line’s goal: to prove that true luxury footwear can be made by American hands. The shoes are manufactured in Los Angeles and reportedly are easier on the feet than many other designer shoes, which make them easier to wear on the red carpet—and around town.

The American-made angle was present from the get-go: During Panzarella’s initial market research, he realized that virtually every high-end footwear brand is made in low-cost Chinese factories or, at best, Italian workshops. Spurred on by 2012’s Chinese-made U.S. Olympic uniform fiasco, he set aside his romantic notions of master Italian cobblers manning antiquated shoemaking equipment and resolved to create a footwear line made by Americans, for Americans.

So far, Max Martin’s raw materials, components, and production processes exceed the Federal Trade Commission’s “American Made” guidelines. Panzarella has “tentative plans” to move production to Minnesota in the future.

 

Got big plans for April 26? Lu Lippold, the local producer for One Day on Earth’s “One Day in the Twin Cities,” has a suggestion: Grab whatever video recording device you can—cameraphones included—and record the audio-visual pulse of your neighborhood.

On the final Saturday of April, the Twin Cities and 10 other U.S. metros will host the fourth installment of One Day on Earth’s celebration of film, culture, and all-around placemaking. Founded by Los Angeles-based film producers Kyle Ruddick and Brandon Litman, One Day on Earth (ODOE) has a “goal of creating a unique worldwide media event where thousands of participants would simultaneously film over a 24-hour period,” according to its website.

The first event took place on October 10, 2010 (10-10-10); 11-11-11 and 12-12-12 followed. ODOE skipped 2013, but its organizers weren’t about to wait until 2101 for their next shot. Instead, they selected a spring Saturday—both to accommodate amateur filmmakers with 9-to-5 jobs, and to give participants in the Northern Hemisphere longer daylight hours to work with—for a bigger, bolder, slightly revamped version of the event.

For the first time, participants get 10 questions to inspire their creativity and guide their storytelling, from “What is the best thing happening in your city today?” to “Who is your city not serving?” The goal is to create a multi-frame snapshot of “cities in progress,” one that doesn’t simply answer the who-what-where of the places it covers.

As One Day in the Twin Cities’ point person, Lippold supervises local filmmakers and pitched the project to dozens of partner organizations, including the Science Museum of Minnesota and Springboard for the Arts to visual media companies like Cinequipt and Vimeo. (The McKnight Foundation and the Central Corridor Funders Collaborative are the largest local sponsors.)

The upside? “[The event] is a great way to shine a light on all the hard work that our nonprofit community does,” says Lippold.

Lippold also works with a handful of local ambassadors, some of whom enjoy national acclaim. These include noted cinematographer Jeff Stonehouse, veteran documentarian Matt Ehling, and community-focused filmmaker D.A. Bullock. They’ll be contributing their talents—and stature—to One Day in the Twin Cities’ promotion and execution.

One Day in the Twin Cities could be seen well beyond Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Along with their counterparts from other participating cities, local filmmakers may see their work incorporated into a condensed, three-part series that Litman and Lichtbau will market to PBS affiliates around the country. No word on whether TPT will air the special, but TPT Rewire has agreed to publicize the event in the coming weeks.

The real stars of One Day in the Twin Cities, though, are its filmmakers. Even if you’ve never filmed anything in your life, says Lippold, you can contribute meaningful work. Thanks to an interactive map feature on ODOE’s main site, the work will visible to anyone who visits.

“If I were just starting out in video, I would see this as a huge opportunity,” says Lippold. Since all contributions are credited by name and location, each participant “instantly becomes a documentary filmmaker,” she adds.

Source: Lu Lippold
Writer: Brian Martucci

A former Medtronic manager has found a second career giving greeting cards a second life.

Last fall Christy Eichers started selling kits to help consumers reuse old greeting cards. Regreet kits come with fresh envelopes and recycled-paper labels to affix over the original signatures.

They also come with tracking labels that let users go online and see how many times the cards have been reused and where they wind up (as with the Where's George? dollar bill tracker.)

Eichers describes the inspiration as "a bit of necessity and a bit of red wine."

She was back home visiting family and friends in Mankato two winters ago when the idea struck. She couldn't motivate herself to go out into the cold to buy a birthday card for a friend, so her her mother suggested reusing one of the cards her father had just received for his birthday.

Her first thought: Where's the White Out? But later she started to wonder whether her crafty solution might contain a business idea. She took that thought to a WomenVenture class, developed a business plan, and started her company in October 2009.

Along the way she decided to take a voluntary severance package from her former employer, Medtronic, where she worked as part of the community affairs team. "A little bit of craziness," she says," but sometimes you just have to take the leap."

Regreet's card reuse kits are now for sale online and in 14 retail stores in seven states. And cards with the labels affixed have logged more than 138,000 miles around the globe.

Eichers doesn't have any employees, but she has a regular circle of consultants and creative professionals who work on contract, and she recently started signing up sales reps, too. Much of her energy is going toward building awareness and educating consumers about the product.

The $11.99 kits come with supplies to repurpose eight greeting cards, which works out to about $1.50 per card. In September, $2 from every purchase will support breast cancer research and awareness through the the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation.

Source: Christy Eichers, Regreet
Writer: Dan Haugen

 

Call it organic growth. A south Minneapolis design shop is finding success in a downturn by focusing on food co-ops and other "mission-oriented" clients.

In fact, the past few years have been the best on record for Spunk Design Machine, a 14-year-old creative boutique in the Nokomis neighborhood.

Founder Jeff Johnson says the shop's work is up at least 30 percent from a year ago, and much of it is in a niche he's coined "mission-oriented branding."

"I feel incredibly excited and bullish about this trend," says Johnson. "All of the clients that are doing mission-oriented branding seem to be succeeding."

They're organizations like the Seward Co-op, Peace Coffee and Galactic Pizza, which, like Spunk, pay attention to a triple bottom line that looks at financial, environmental and community factors. From Johnson's vantage point, it seems that companies selling good products with a clear message are "rocking it" despite, or perhaps because of, the recession.

"We've been just really fortunate that we've been attracting a lot of those clients in the past couple of years," says Johnson. Its current roster includes about 30 clients.

Among the projects he's most proud of: a compostable pizza box he designed with Galactic Pizza. Standard pizza boxes can't be recycled because of the grease content. The solution they came up with was to collect and compost the used boxes. The entire box is a $1-off coupon. After they're turned in, they're composted in a bin behind the store, and then the finished compost is sold for roadside planting projects.

Spunk Design Machine opened a New York office a couple of years ago, but Minneapolis remains its home base. Johnson says he's yet to come across a better town to build a creative business: "Minneapolis is just filled with a lot of dorky, humble, very smart people who make amazing stuff."

Source: Jeff Johnson, Spunk Design Machine
Writer: Dan Haugen