Last week I met a creative visionary, Carrie Hayden.
Carrie is an interior designer and then some. She serves as the President and Creative Director of her brand which encompasses Hayden Collective, her beautiful and thoughtfully designed showroom in Seattle’s cool Capitol Hill neighborhood, as well as interior design services, bespoke product development and collaborations, and creative consulting.
I loved talking with Carrie about her creative process of developing products like textiles and wallcoverings. The process itself is an art form – figuring out how to physically combine and express your vision that is inspired by something in nature, art, the corner of a piece of fabric. Anything, really.
As creatives know and deeply understand, inspiration is literally everywhere.
I love that Carrie’s process doesn’t start with boundaries. She’s not thinking about how a certain print would look in a repeat pattern on a pillow, for instance. Her goal at the beginning is to put together, “a raw expression of where my emotions are at right now.” The first part is a personal journey that starts with an idea.
After the initial creative spark, Carrie does one of my favorite things – gathers images and textures and inspiration to create a mood board to convey her idea. She looks to artists that she loves, researches textures on Pinterest, goes back to her fashion roots to see what’s happening there, and turns to technology for things like 3D printing. After collecting inspiration and making her idea more cohesive and concrete, she starts to think about what forms it can take – for instance, wallpaper, bags, a canvas, the bottom of a shoe, coffee table books, etc. “You can live with things in different ways that are artistic.”
Once she’s completed her own process, she begins working through different iterations with a designer. The challenge is trying to maintain the original vision while going through the process of developing patterns. You never know what you’re going to get during the experimental stage. “Sometimes your mistakes produce the best work.”
Carrie is passionate about collaborating with artists and designers to produce thoughtful collections. She told me how she’s inspired by the creative process of street artists – their spontaneity, the history of artists like Keith Haring, the slight juvenile side to it, and that they’re telling a story.
“I want to be able to show my process and the story behind my work versus here are my four or five SKUs of textiles.”
I love that about her!
Thank you so much for sharing your creative process with me, Carrie! I kept thinking about it all afternoon on the day that we met. I hope to see you again in the new year! xo
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