Who are you? What do you do?

Erin: I’m Erin Przekop. I am an artist, turned fashion designer, turned huntress for local creatives. Tom and I started Fiercely Curious earlier this year, a site showcasing original artwork by Brooklyn based artists. We host pop up art shows too! And now we’ve just launched the sister site: Fiercely Made. You can find beautiful work by furniture makers, surfboard shapers, bike makers, knife makers, clay throwers and weavers. It’s great!

Tom: My name’s Tom Critchlow. I’m a British transplant - I’ve been living in NYC for just over 3 years. I work during the day at Google. Nights and weekends I build things for the web - most recently Erin and I are building Fiercely Curious and Fiercely Made as a way to celebrate local makers and artists in Brooklyn. I’m obsessed with this idea of creating experiences that are local and intimate, so we build stories online and offer studio visits and the ability to meet the artists and makers behind the things you buy. We hope this adds something missing from the globally-connected web experience we’re used to, and feels a little different.

Weekdays

Erin: I start my day with a rough and tumble session with my cats. Ideally, you want to pin them down and sleep longer. That’s the goal...but it never works. So alas, I must get up, feed them (the lady cat likes breakfast on the balcony) and then I get my favorite meal of the day started. After that, it’s a trip to my local coffee shop, Van Leeuwen on Bergen St. for some cold brew.

Off to my first appointment of the day- hurry...late! Always by bike, and usually to Williamsburg or Bushwick. Nice and sweaty, I arrive with my camera and a light heart. I get excited before I meet every artist or artisan (It’s much like online dating to begin, as I’ve already vetted them through internet and word of mouth). I feel like I’ve got to win them over, and they have to win me over. We fall in love. Every time. Then I’m giddy and off to meet my next love interest. I’ll have up to three studio visits per day and they are always amazing. It’s a day spent with incredible people who sacrifice a lot (cash and comfort) to pursue what they truly believe in. It’s only a win there.

Back home I frantically catch up on emails, phone calls, endure some soft cat abuse for having abandoned them for the day and then off to volleyball, friend’s BBQs, concerts in the park, whatever...but ALWAYS something.

Tom: I’m allergic to mornings so I try and avoid them. Mostly they start about 8.30 when my alarm goes off and I stumble out of bed in a haze and feed the cats (two - one plump and in your face, the other skinny and scared of everything). I get into the office around 10am most days - I have a late start since I often work with folks on the west coast. Plus I’m allergic to mornings. Did I mention that?

Then, most of my day is spent in a blur of video conferences, desk work and meetings. You know - the kind of “knowledge worker” routine that involves bad posture, typing, being frustrated with computers and way too much email.

I try and punctuate it with a lunchtime workout session - I joined the BRICK crossfit gym last year since it’s so close to the Google office. I try and go every day - by which I mean I probably go twice a week.

Weeknights is one or more of the following: beach volleyball, indoor volleyball, basketball, rock climbing, tech meetups, working on the Fiercelys, cooking, drinking with friends.

Day Off? Lie in.

Erin: If we’ve got a day off we try our best to lie in. But in reality - get yelled at by the cats. Meteora is a rockstar rescued from a dumpster in Florence. As a kitten, she was able to ricochet from one hallway wall to the other with all four paws on each wall before landing. Feisty, just like her mom.

Rafiki is two years younger and also Italian. He comes from the countryside. He’s named after the first character that I debuted as in the time that I was a character at Disney. I probably didn’t mention that. Kiki is quiet, chill, loves couch time and sleeping. Just like his dad. He’s a ladies man.

Tom: 6am, 8am, 9am. The battle of wills with the feisty cat Mete begins. She will scream at me that it’s breakfast time. I respond with some kind of motions and coo-ing sounds that persuade her it’s better to jump up and come cuddle in bed. This doesn’t involve me getting up or even really waking up. But if the cats hadn’t warmed up to me I know I never would have been allowed to move in.

Coffee out, breakfast in.

Tom: After the cats relax, iced coffee from Van Leeuwen. Best coffee in the neighborhood and we know everyone there. Then breakfast at home. Someone should really reign in my breakfast habit. During the week, since I’m basically a zombie in the morning I pour a massive bowl of oatmeal, pour boiling water on top, mix and eat (for surprises I sometimes add berries, nuts and goats milk yogurt). I always make far too much. I should buy smaller bowls. That would fix my problem.

Erin: Always out to get coffee. I'm telling you, Van Leeuwen do it best! I'm there every day either working or just enjoying. Lots of sunlight which I'm a fan of, and did I mention I love ice cream? The baristas are great and they have amazing cold brew. They play an amazing array of vinyl....mostly contributed by Alice the shop manager. Today Dan and I agreed to swap books, so tomorrow, I'll be bringing him Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and he'll be bringing me Dave Eggers You Shall Know Our Velocity. And I'm lucky enough to be running my own schedule right now (I wish everyone could..it's amazing!). I spend a lot of time out and on my bike, so when I've got to get online to email and design, I need to crank it. There's nothing better than disappearing from my own environment for a few hours to dive into someone else's playlist. I chase good vibes and the places where I work are filled with such interestingly diverse people. And since I've always got to rock on back to the homestead to feed the two hungry rug rats, it's perfect that its just around the corner.

After, always home for breakfast. It’s my favorite meal of the day! (Brunch is a crime against breakfast AND lunch lovers- have both, never sacrifice one!). And Tom does it best! He’s refined the art of poached eggs and my contribution is all green. I pluck all the basil I can harvest from the balcony, blend it with Frankie’s olive oil, celtic sea salt, pepper and lemon juice while he goes to town on the eggs and toast. We’ll throw down some smoked salmon and avocado if we’re feeling feisty and off to the balcony with all those things intricately stacked on top of one another.

Bikes

Erin: I love biking. It’s liberating, fast and makes me feel as close as I could to flying. I’ve been biking since before I can remember, but I got into road biking here in Brooklyn as my friends were doing it, so I started riding on their bikes...a lot. I have very generous friends.

Now, we ride 100 miles up north or in Long Island. My favorite ride of all time is the Montauk Century. I get a beer at 8am from Blue Point Brewery and a Briermere Farms pie at the mile marker 90. I mean a WHOLE pie. I really think everyone should ride. There are so many things that we skip when we go from point A to Z (work, home, bar, gym). We basically miss everything in between! I feel like I wish my brain had a storage app for all of the things I’ve spotted and tried to remember while riding. I find myself circling back to locate a place I was interested in, some graffitied mural or a poster, anything.

Tom: Most weekends we’ll get out and about on our bikes - the usual route is doing laps of Prospect Park. Such a lovely route. Erin is what got me riding bikes in New York. When we first met it wasn’t bike riding weather, but by the time spring rolled around we were practically living together and she said “If you want to see me over the summer you need to get a bike.” Meanwhile, I still had scars on my arm from the last time I’d tried to ride a bike. Consider it a weakness of mine. But love is a powerful force! So I hopped on a bike, wobbled around, ended up buying one and within a few months we’d signed up for a 100 mile ride to Montauk. I’m still a nervous biker. I like to pat my helmet before I get on to make sure it’s still there and solid.

Reading, watching, listening

Erin: We always have music on. Langhorne Slim, Alabama Shakes, The Black Keys and Jack White. I listen to jazz too- Miles, Chet, Bill Evans too, but mostly just rocking out. Never news if I can help it. I’ve been working my way through Michael Chabon’s latest novel Telegraph Avenue waiting for the genius of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay to emerge. Might as well tackle some French homework- saved that for the last minute, surprise surprise!

Tom: Weekends are usually lighter on consumption since we’re pretty active, out and about exercising, socializing or working on side projects. When I do get to read it’ll be a real book (I recently gave up my kindle for old school textures) - I love to read sci fi, literature, science non-fiction and anything in between. But I read a LOT generally. Like pretty much all the time. I use Twitter mainly as my filter bubble to find links to things that look interesting and everything goes through Pocket so I can read it on my phone while I’m offline (i.e. commuting). On the commute: headphone music, often jazz, but right now I’m digging this track Tokyo by a band called Controller. You might have heard of them? [editor's note: this is Tom shamelessly flattering the Sunday Routine house band.]

Ideally, how does your weekend end?

Erin: The weekend always ends the same and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Our closest friends here are Alaskan and they live their Brooklyn lives very much as you would imagine Alaskans to. Kayaks out back, multiple bikes parked out front, rock climbers (the Gunks), cross country skiers (we do this in Prospect Park or right out on the Brooklyn waterfront) home brewed beer, hops growing out back and of course bbq- steaks, fresh salmon, veggies, garden herbs. All fabulous. In the winter time this routine turns into a fire pit and we burrow foil wrapped bananas which have been stuffed with chocolate deep into the hot coals and sip scotch while they cook and huddle over the fire. Anyone want to join us??

Tom: Ideally we’ll wind down early on Sunday eve with a “couch night” - home cooked food and watching a movie. We usually get enticed out so this doesn’t happen so often but hey you asked for the ideal! I want to show Erin one of my favorite films - The Beat That My Heart Skipped - but it’s not available for streaming so I ordered the DVD. That might be a good one for this Sunday….

Join Tom & Erin and Brooklyn based artists and makers on Friday, September 19 from 6:00-10:00pm, in Gowanus for the Fiercely Made launch party.

You can find out more about the artists at Fiercely Curious and the makers at Fiercely Made on the sites, and find events on Facebook. Follow Erin on Instagram @FiercelyCurious. You can find Tom on Twitter @TomCritchlow.

Photos by Bekka Palmer, a Brooklyn based photographer, designer and maker. See more of Bekka's work here.

Who are you? What do you do?

My name is John V Willshire. I founded Smithery three years ago. It’s an innovation studio rooted in helping companies Make Things People Want, rather than Make People Want Things. I also make my own products, like Artefact Cards, which are blank playing cards for creating and shaping ideas. They help people play with their ideas in order to make them better. I’ve seen thousands of people use them to tap into creativity they never knew they had, but my favourite example was when our son James used them to draw ‘dragons’ for us to spot on a day out in nearby Ashdown Forest (the inspiration for the Hundred Aker Wood in Winnie the Pooh).

Close to the edge

We live in a small village called Plumpton Green in Sussex. Helen and I used to live in Brighton, and before that London, but we’ve been drifting out away from busy cities as we’ve got older and the kids arrived. I grew up on the edge of a town, and spent my childhood with friends hacking through the local woods, so maybe I’m subconsciously trying to provide the same for James and Charlotte as they grow up.

Balancing, a workshop in progress

Starting Smithery was the best decision I've ever made, but I didn't discover what it was until about six months into doing it. Nowadays, for anyone who works in an office, work life and family life have become harder to cleanly divide, largely because two incompatible systems, ‘email’ and ‘office’, have been compressed together without much care. Email has no respect for time nor geography, whereas the point of an office is that it is strictly constrained in both the ‘where’ and the ‘when’.

The danger is people pretty much end up working all the time, wherever you are, but are still expected to occupy a desk. In setting up Smithery, I tried to build a business around a family, rather than the other way around.

It means I can recut the traditional ‘three spaces’, and make the most of both time and productivity levels. I’ll work inside a client’s office, bumping up against the culture whilst working on things with them, work in the home office, being much closer to the rest of the family, or be out and about just soaking up interesting things (usually in London or Brighton).

Family things

Mornings, whatever day of the week, are family things for the first hour. The kids invariably wake us up sometime around six by shouting for us, or bounding in.

Then I’ll make tea for us, milk for the kids, and then we’ll all slowly wake up in the big bed. It’s only at about 7am that there’s a weekday / weekend split. Even if I’m working at home, I like working early, so we’ll all start getting up and head downstairs for breakfast. We usually just stick to cereal during the week, though we have ‘mixups’; you try and find interesting combinations of putting two different cereals together, just to see what they’re like. I think everyone does that with cereal though, at least some of the time.

The signal for ‘work time’ seems to be when I make coffee; I make two cups of coffee, white for Helen, black for me, using the Aeropress. It makes a super clean tasting coffee compared to most other methods, but’s it’s also really manual. It feels good to make something with your hands early in the day.

I’ll stick some music on to start working to. I realised something the other day - when I worked at the agency before (I was previously Chief Innovation Officer at PHD in London), I used to listen to lots of bands and albums on headphones, perhaps to escape someone else’s world. Now that I run my own thing, I seem to listen to ‘background’ stuff.

So a lot of what I listen to during the week are soundtracks. I’ve even tried to craft a perfect “get shit done” playlist, an hour and seventeen minutes to put on when something really needs doing. My Spotify and Last.FM algorithms are all messed up as a result though.

Urgency, or not

Here’s this divergent point from before - so 7 o’clock rolls around, and there’s no urgency about starting work, but we still start drifting downstairs. When we’ve got more time for breakfast, we often have eggs, but every so often we’ll make animal pancakes.

It started when James was younger, about eighteen months old maybe. One of his first words was ‘cat’, so when we were making pancakes I’d make him a cat (which is pretty easy in pancake batter - a big circle, small circle, tail and ears). Over the years though, it’s become a bit more complicated… dinosaurs were our most recent attempt, which turned out ok.

There’s something brilliant about pancakes as a lesson for life. No matter what you do, the first attempt, that first pancake in the pan, is going to be rubbish. You might just end up chucking it in the bin. But if you don’t make the first one, you’ve never get to make any of the good ones.

Our malleable world

After breakfast on non workdays, we can do things together that take a bit longer. We might make things with Makedo, the brilliant wee invention which is basically kid-friendly nuts & bolts for cardboard. What I love most about it is that it takes kids from pretending that a box is anything, to thinking about how they might make it work as that thing.

We’ve always enjoyed making things, of course, perhaps in a more formal way before we had kids though. Helen and I led a band called Gamages Model Train Club. Helen did a lot of making, especially with materials - blankets, toys, all sorts. I wrote a jokily angry column for a music magazine, which became angrily jokey. But then, you know, young kids change what you do, and have time to do.

Thinking about it now, I think we still have ‘hobbies’, but they’ve just become less formal. Rather than fixed targets for exploratory methods, it’s flipped around - fixed methods for whatever comes along. I’ve been thinking about the idea of This Malleable World - everything is made of things, so whoever you are, you can choose to make things out of other things.

As a family, I think our hobby might be just taking a general making approach and applying it to whatever comes along. Our hobby is tinkering with things.

Great spaces

Once we’re done messing around with things at home, we might pack a picnic and head out somewhere, either on our own or with friends. Living where we do, we’re lucky enough to be surrounded by great spaces to go and play around in; countryside, parks, beaches, old stately home gardens, all about a half hour hop in the car.

Let’s say the weather’s nice, it’s summer… we head to the beach, perhaps over to Birling Gap. The fascinating thing about Birling Gap is it’s gappishness - bits of it keep disappearing into the sea. Imagine a fragile version of the White Cliffs of Dover. It gives you a longer sense of perspective on things.

Finally, if it’s a weekend, I’m more likely to cook than I am during the week. I’ve always enjoyed cooking, but it’s only in the last five years or so I’ve felt happy enough putting recipes together myself, stealing little ideas from other places to try out. I’ve just about perfected my chilli recipe. Chorizo and a bottle of Poacher’s Choice as stock, that’s the secret.

Ideally, how does the weekend end?

I usually end up working on Sunday nights. When everyone’s disappeared off to bed, I head into the office, and just begin to noodle around with a few things for the coming week, or catch up on studio projects I want to make some progress on.

I really don’t mind though, I find Sunday nights to be a really fertile time for working, especially if we’ve had a great weekend. Plus, working this way means you can happily swap Sunday night for an afternoon in the park with the kids later in the week.

You can read more from John at Smithery.co, find him on Twitter @willsh, and work through better ideas with Artefact Cards.

All photos by Will Whipple. Will is a London based people based photographer with a healthy mix of technical and artistic depth. See more of his work at WillWhipple.com, and find him on Twitter @willwhipple.