Interview with Joanna Figueroa, Fabric Designer & Owner of the Fig Tree Company - March 2010
by Penny McMorris
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Joanna, thanks for talking with us. I wanted to get to know you better mainly because I found your work so appealing. I know I've seen you exhibiting at Quilt Market in Houston [ed. Note: Quilt Market is the semi-annual wholesale trade show which is held in the Spring & Fall] but when our company is also exhibiting there we don't get much of a chance to get out of our booth and wander. So I feel like I should know all about you but I don't. Thus this interview:
Q: Can you tell me a bit about your company, when and how it started?
Well, the year I was married we moved to a new apartment in a new town and being in that just newly married state, spent a lot of time on our own. I had always loved vintage quilts and had dabbled in every kind of art imaginable so I thought why not try quilting? I was passing by a local quilt shop one day and decided to go in and sign up for a drop in class! I have no idea what made me do that. I basically taught myself how to sew and quilt from a book and mostly learned through trial and error. It wasn't long before I was hooked! Some of those early quilts are really quite, well... interesting!
Soon after I started making small quilts and sewn accessories to sell at arts and crafts sales. As my design sense developed I started designing my own patterns mostly because I found that I just didn't like following other people's instructions! As I look back on it now, I think to myself that it was a somewhat odd reason to start a business, but that's where it all started. I started working at the local fabric store to support my growing love of all things fabric and I soon found myself teaching classes. I realized that the aspect of teaching that I loved the most was the process of helping my students choose a color palette. I started teaching about how to see color and how to create that certain look with fabric. The opportunity to design fabric for MODA came soon after that at a Spring Quilt Market. Besides the fact that I had a definite point of view, I think I was just at the right place at the right time. I have been designing fabric ever since that first collection and feel like I learn new things with each new group.
Q: How did you come up with your company name?
So many people ask about our name! They want to know if it's about the love of the fruit or maybe a Biblical reference. I always say that I hope I am not disappointing them but it's nothing all that creative! Our last name is Figueroa and my husband has been referred to as Fig for most of his life. Fig Tree just came from that. Just to have fun with it, we refer to our 3 kids as figlets on occasion... they don't find it nearly as amusing as my husband and I do!
Q: You were recently featured in a wonderful article in the August 2009 issue of Where Women Create which mentioned that you were quite influenced by working for your dad as a child. Can you tell us more about that?
I just loved working on that article and found myself talking about all sorts of background stories that I don't normally even think about. We emigrated to the US when I was 8 years old and my dad started a hair care product business as soon as we "reached the shores" so to speak. We came literally with the money in my parents' pockets and an idea of how to make it here. As my dad was starting his first business, my parents were also selling Polish handmade rugs called "kilims" that they had shipped here before we arrived. They were the true entrepreneurs of our family and really were the "American Dream" story if there ever was one. As a result, I always grew up around small business and didn't think much about the kind of hard work that goes into making a business grow.
When we were older elementary and younger teens, my sister and I had to fill our quota of shampoo bottles before we could go outside and play in the neighborhood [my dad's business was a professional hair care company for salons and we had a giant shampoo filling machine in the house in those beginning years]! I attended trade shows with him ever since I can remember, we regularly went to the office and had summer jobs in the warehouses when we needed extra spending money. It was just the way we were raised and I really didn't think that much about it at the time. We were always talking about marketing, about sales, about finding a good idea or a good name. When I think about it, it was laying the foundations for everything that I do today. I just didn't know it at the time.
Q: From what I've read it sounds like your husband is a really important part of your business, am I right?
My husband, Eric, and I really have a wonderful partnership. We share the business. We share the family life and work as well. He runs all of the business-side of our company, is in charge of all production and shipping and manages our handful of employees at this point. He politely refers to me as "the talent" and tells me to go back to the studio and produce something new when he thinks I am mucking around too much in his production office! I tell him that in return, he can have any title he likes... CFO, CEO, Production Manager, Mr. Fig Tree. Whatever he likes! He really does a much better job at that side of our work and I am left to the designing, fabric work and pattern instruction, which is really my passion. I really couldn't think of a better way to structure our business. It really is a family affair and we fully plan on employing all of the kids when they are old enough... they just don't know it yet!
Q: How many books have you written? Did you start by self-publishing? Or were you with That Patchwork Place from the start?
I have worked on several different book projects over the years. I started with individual patterns first and then began working on booklets for Leisure Arts many years ago. We actually did 4 of them over a fairly short time span. It was a nice way to get my designs out in the industry but I wanted to work on a more substantial product that I could be proud of. That is when I started my partnership with That Patchwork Place. I have done 2 books with them, "Houses" and "Fresh Vintage Sewing", both of which were such a pleasure to work on with such a wonderful and creative team of folks.
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Over the last year and a half I have contributed to several other books including The Quiltmakers [by David & Charles, a British publishing company], Table Runners & Skinny Quilts II [That Patchwork Place] as well as having just finished a Jelly Roll book in French for the French publisher Les Editions de Saxe. We have also done several special projects for our favorite magazines, American Patchwork & Quilting and Quilts & More. Makes me a bit tired just to write all of that down at once!
Working on a book on top of all of my other pattern and fabric work makes for a pretty tough production schedule though and so I have been taking a break for the last year or so until I was ready to start again. I am currently working on some new book ideas so I hope you will stay tuned.
Q: You seem to have a special love of clean design in the colors of apricot, cream, yellow, robin's egg blue, pale pink and milk chocolate brown. I'm sure I've left out some color favorites. But it's a definite palette and look. Tell us more about what you've referred to as "forgotten colors" and what inspires you.
I love that term "forgotten colors" and I can't even take credit for the term. I was reading a decorating magazine years ago and came across an interior decorator that referred to some of the colors in her palette as the forgotten colors. I thought it was a perfect description of the colors I loved to work in — those colors that are neither primary, nor pastel, nor reproduction, nor modern.
They are a warm, saturated, somewhat vintage feeling version of the more modern colors of today. When I first started working with colors such as pumpkin, butter cream, plum, chartreuse green, chocolate brown, apple green, apricot, tomato red, aqua and robin egg's blue, etc. those colors weren't being used that much. I sometimes heard that folks thought my colors were too "yellow" or too muted or too something. People weren't quite familiar with them. Now I can't take the credit for the color combinations I used. I had found them in old advertising posters, vintage children's illustrations, old china and antique French textiles. For me, those colors were on everything that I loved and was drawn to at the flea market. I started calling the feel of all of those colors together, "Fresh Vintage". I thought the name was a perfect combination of what the colors represented to me — a mix of the old and the new, of history and of today's home. It was my point of view.
Q: Can you tell us how you began designing fabric?
Fabric design was one of those both completely natural and completely serendipitous events. The more I worked on pattern designs, the more I realized that I was always recreating this fresh feeling version of the more vintage feeling fabrics out there. I was never content to work in one line collection that I found and I was always spending hours looking to match those "forgotten" colors that we were talking about above. I found that many of the fabrics that I loved were MODA but that by putting them together into my palette and adding cream, I was coming up with something completely different than what was already out on the market. MODA noticed as well and at Pittsburgh Spring Quilt Market in 2003 [I think], the plans for our first line started. I have to admit, that although I had a graphic design background, I had absolutely no idea how to design fabric at first. I learned quickly and "on the job"! I can't imagine any other job in the world that I would rather have.
Fabric lines by Fig Tree quilts
Q: Do you travel and teach? Or is your traveling more for inspiration, and if so, what places most inspire you? I'm guessing it's a mixture of both work & inspiration.
I do travel to teach but just several times a year. As our company has grown and our "look" has become more popular, we receive more and more requests to teach each year. For me, teaching is a bit of a side endeavor and a way of educating women about our inspiration and color palette but my family still comes first. Because of those commitments, other than a few MODA related events and teaching venues each year [both here in the US and in Spain & France], I only teach for guilds and retreats several times a year.
Other than that, the rest of our travel is for inspiration. I think as a designer who works primarily out of a home studio and as a "mostly stay at home mom" of 3 kids, getting away to new, charming locations is not just a luxury but it's a creative must for me. There is a certain "space" that travel affords me that is hard to replicate at home. If you follow my work at all, you'll know that Paris holds a special place for me and is a place that I have had the pleasure of visiting once a year for the last several years. If I can't make such a faraway journey work out, we make sure that we are able to adventure together as a couple or as a family to small country towns, to visit flea markets, to explore farm towns and small historic downtowns. That is definitely one of my favorite weekend activities whether by myself, with my husband or with the whole Fig crew in tow.
Q: And as if you're not busy enough, you also write a regular "On Display" column for American Quilt Retailer. How do you come up with topic ideas for your column?
Since my husband has a business degree background in marketing and Fig Tree is always a topic of conversation, we are constantly talking about and brainstorming marketing and advertising ideas for our business and the quilting and textile industry. Marketing topics are kind of the norm at our family dinner table, boring, I know, for the kids but actually they sometimes come up with the best ideas! So many of my topics for American Quilt Retailer are ideas that have been swirling around in my head for a while and they somehow come to the forefront when I start writing each new article. Sometimes it's a bit more organized than that if Susan has a particular topic she wants to cover, but usually its driven by what we see in our industry.
Q: I understand you're an EQ user. Can you tell us when you first began using the program, and how you use it?
I've been using EQ in one way or another for years. It started as just a place to experiment with blocks and settings mostly. It was an alternate way to make "sample blocks" for patterns I was working on without having to put in all the time of actually sewing them all. As I got more familiar with the program and our work deadlines came closer together and faster, we started using EQ as a way of generating new quilts before we ever had the fabric available in real life. For each new collection we create for MODA, we receive electronic swatches. After we have imported those into the EQ program, we begin to create the quilts that I have already sketched out on paper to see how the design will "play" with the new fabric collection. The freedom to try dozens of settings, sashings and borders is really the function that we utilize that most. The block itself usually comes from another source for me but it is the luxury of putting it all together in so many different possibilities, so quickly is the feature that makes our work so much easier.
Q: You have such a clear personal style. Can you give our readers any tips on how they might be able to discover their own style?
One of the questions I have gotten asked the most over the years of working in this industry is how to become a pattern designer or how to become a fabric designer. My first answer is always the same... What you really need to find in any industry, but particularly in a creative one such as ours, is your own niche — your own point of view that doesn't mimic or try to look like that of another that you admire. These days, the word "inspiration" is thrown around so often that it has lost a lot of its depth. Inspiration does not mean taking the work of someone you admire and "tweaking" it a bit. Inspiration comes from you and through you. To truly find your own style, you have to start looking around at what you are drawn to, what you are inspired by and how you interpret it differently when you put it all together. What are your favorite colors? How do you like to dress? To decorate your home? What kinds of color schemes and palettes are you drawn to when you look at magazines?
I always encourage people to start an inspiration folder or file where you put all the articles and clippings and greeting cards and wrapping paper scraps that appeal to you. Anything is game.
After doing this for a while you will begin to see patterns and themes. You will begin to see something emerging. This isn't something that happens overnight. It's a way to train yourself to look at your surroundings. Try working with those themes in whatever medium is your favorite — whether it is painting or drawing or computer graphic design. How can that style that you see emerging be completely reinterpreted by your own perspective, your own voice. Once you have found that, you have started to find your own style. I know you will love the journey!
Thanks so much Joanna. Now when I see you at Quilt Market this spring in Minneapolis I'll stop and say "hi," and feel like we're friends rather than strangers.
Visit Fig Tree Company's Site: www.figtreequilts.com and Blog: http://www.figtreequilts.typepad.com/
Read more about Joanna & her company on AllPeopleQuilt.com and QuitlersBuzz.com