STUDIO - flip & tumble - shopping bags



	the studio / for those random bits we'd love to share

cute as a cupcake

With Valentine's Day coming up, we couldn't resist. We found the perfect little home for an f&t ball nestled in with these delectable delights.

Flora Grubb

We visited Flora Grubb this weekend ogling over all their unique arid plants and beautifully designed displays. As you might already know we here at flip & tumble are just a little obsessed with felt so we were pretty excited when we came across these massive felt planters. They're fuzzy sides looked they were about to burst!

Best of all tucked in the back of this place is a little gem, Ritual Roasters coffee shop. With cups of perfectly brewed coffee in hand we took a seat on their patio and bathed in the sun while taking in the view of their vertical succulent wall. This is one of our favorite places to go; it's so serene and peaceful, like a mini vacation every time we visit.

2009 eco-thrift gift guide

We've been busy in the studio checking in with our favorite designers for their top eco thrift gift ideas. We've got everything from gifts you grow to fluffies you sew, and we're excited to finally launch all the top ideas that made the cut in our official 2009 eco-thrift gift guide. Check it out and also look out for how you can score some free f&t shopping bags.

SF open studios

Just had a chance to check out ArtSpan's Open Studio tour in SF. Seeing the artist's work was great, but more than that I loved seeing other peoples creative spaces sprinkled with little tidbits of inspiration, ideas, and other personal treasures. Seeing all these paints made us want to add just a few hundred more colors to our bag palette. ArtSpan's tour is going on for just one more weekend, so check it out if you're in SF.

gobble, gobble, gobble

No, it's not Thanksgiving yet, but this pic reminds me of Pac Man. Keep your produce bag ready for action by scrunching one along with your 24-7 bag.

fun theory

A theory we love and hope will spread. Something all of us could use more of.

wrap it!

Start saving paper, scraps of cloth, bottle caps and other odds end ends as the holidays approach. Many of the things we throw away can be used for some creative and unique wrapping jobs come December.

sunny seattle

Just got back from a great time in Seattle! We visited Post alley to check out the wall of gum, it was kind of gross but a really cool texture. SAM had a great exhibit, Target Practice, about artists who have literally attacked their canvases to escape from more traditional painting methods. There was a neat piece by Yoko Ono, Painting to Hammer a Nail, where visitors were invited to hammer nails into a canvas. A few short weeks later visitors began to hang up little notes and other daily objects, basically transforming the piece from cold and harsh to a more personable show of community. It's always interesting to see what the public creates when given the chance.

woody

flip & tumble has a new furry friend over at bagsy it, our new UK distributor. Check out Woody's post on their blog!

ooh! designer prints

If you've been poking around the f&t website lately, you may have noticed a couple new prints. We like to think we're pretty good with the design thing, but we can't take the credit for these. We were lucky enough to pair up with some great designers who helped us out. Marty-May Masek's a local, from right here in Northern California that is. The inspiration for the bike print came from the birds that flew overhead as Marty peddled away on her bike. We like her print because it reminds us that just taking a relaxing ride in the fresh summer air is totally productive. Our second designer, Karoly, hails all the way from Hungary. Karoly is a whiz at somehow taking the free flowing, creative side of graffiti, and blending it with the structure and clean lines of typography. We love how it all comes out fun, a bit abstract, and completely modern.

just in!

The produce bags are here! We've been on the road at tradeshows so we haven't a chance to give them a whirl at the market, but we did find them to be the perfect little totables for all the business cards we collected. For more pics, check out the shop page.

loose lemons

Wondering what we've been working on lately? We've been busy reigning in those loose lemons. We felt pretty silly taking plastic produce bags, or trying to juggle a dozen pluots on our way to the checkout. Poor bruised pluots. Coming soon, we're coming out with a set of reusable produce bags perfect for keeping all those fruits and veggies together and tidy. Here we come, pluots, lemons, pears, broccoli, and all you succulent little pieces of produce!

expandos

We're pretty lucky that you can squish, squeeze, drop, and smush our bags and they'll still keep tumbling along good as new, but for those products that need a little cushioning when they're being shipped, we think these Expandos provide a pretty clever packing solution. Made from flat sheets of cardboard, these little doodads go through a special machine to take on their nifty 3-d forms.

super mini!

Off to tradeshows we go! flip & tumble is heading to Altanta, LA, SF, and Seattle. Designing the booth is the perfect excuse for making little furniture and reliving dollhouse fun.

lazy on a budget

Chock full of green tips that are both easy and affordable, we're definitely digging Josh's new book, The Lazy Environmentalist on a Budget. We love it because' 1) we're all about being lazy, especially when we can be green and lazy at the same time. 2) love the green lazyboy logo 3) Josh likes our bags, and maybe it's the vanity in us, but we like people who like our bags.

square + circle = squircle

Wondering what we've been up to? Well all work and no play makes for boring f&t'ers, so we've been playing with fun, colorful shapes transforming them into bold, modern prints for the bags. Lookout for a limited release soon.

sweet!

25lbs, an f&t bag and Martha Stewart! Check out the clip to see.

meet our new friend!

We just discovered toddland and we're in love! A pretty impressive feat considering that it�s a men's clothing store and flip & tumble's mancount is zero. But how can you not love them? toddland's got rainbows, burros, kittens, and all things good. They've got a great website that we just couldn't get enough of, so we made them answer some more questions for us. Here are the highlights. --------------------------- 1. What's your favorite piece of Toddland clothing and why? - well its kind of like kids. you can't pick a favorite (even though its totally the jumpsuit) --------------------------- 2. Is there any piece of clothing you would love to sell on Toddland, but is just a little too out there? - nothing is too out there. even as we speak we are booking tickets to Holland to get some wooden clog rollerskates made. we are also in development on gloves that look like sandwiches. that way you can wear them and someone will go, "hey, put down that sandwich." and you'll "go, i can't" and they'll go "why?" and you'll go "cuz these are attached to my hands." sandwich gloves. they're the next piano key necktie. --------------------------- 3. Who's your hero? - there's a couple... - 1. you (or whoever is reading this answer) - 2. jerry mitchell from the movie three o'clock high. microwaves his laundry AND a poptart. - 3. charles. he's always in charge. unlike that low life lembeck..... - 4. the two old guys in the muppet show balcony. ---------------------------

bot-mobile

Felt, 'bots, and recycled materials. Can't get much better than that. When we discovered that Joann's carries a felt made from recycled bottles, we had to put this soft, fun, felty goodness to work. This one's getting gifted to Eva's new little niece Milo, but Eva was kind enough to share her how to's.

colors are here!

whoo hoo! lots of new colors.

d.school...new space
We're superlate on this posting, but we couldn't resist posting it anyway.

We went back to check out the new d.school space, and spied some pretty nifty personal statements. ---Lauren Milroy setup 30 jars smushed with random everyday objects. Lesson learned, wasabe in a jar, not so appetizing. ---Nifty furnishings by Peter Russo made out of the free stuff on craigslist. ---A night sky light beam installation by Joe Mellin. Pretty spectacular on this misty night.

our story

There we were once again at the checkout surrounded by the comforting yellow and blue of good old IKEA. We were quickly jolted out of our stupor when we spotted those .59 cent blue bags and had another one of those, 'oh !@#$ I forgot my reusable shopping bag' moments. Sure the upside of being designers is that we're good at sporting fun new kicks and usually we can pull off those weird thick black eyeglass frames, but the downside is that little things that don't quite seem to work rattle around our in heads bugging us for a solution. Was the whole IKEA situation just a matter of shoppers getting distracted with thoughts of KLIPPAN couches and TINDRA tealights? Were we really the only ones forgetting our bags? We started asking friends/family/random strangers more about their reusable shopping bag habits. We got some strange looks, but ended up learning that most people in our area owned reusable bags, but they just weren't getting used. They were too difficult to remember. There were too many unplanned shopping trips. Overall, it was just too hard. Armed with a sticky problem, we felt that a simple solution would be to have a bag that you could keep with you all the time. For us, that meant that it had to be super-stashable for a messenger bag or purse, and it had to be stylish enough that you wouldn't feel like a dork if you were heading out for a night of tapas and tango with friends. The design also needed to be supereasy to compact. We like our origami, but we didn't want to be folding any cranes after a long day of shopping. We played with all kinds of ways of compacting something big into something little, but ultimately took our cue from sockballs, those balls formed from rolling your socks and stretching the end over. Our final design uses a stretchy pouch that's attached to the bag and works pretty much the same way.

who are we?

At heart, we're designers. We like taking those pesky, annoying problems, and finding clever, simple, and joyful solutions. We (Hetal & Eva) met while attending Stanford University's Product Design graduate program where we created everything from kites that flew in the clear blue sky, to pumpkins that cast a scary glow on Halloween night. We graduated and quickly figured out that the standard 9-5 hohum wasn't working for us, so we took the leap and started flip & tumble.