Profile

At angela adams, most of what we do is for the home. We design household items including area rugs, furniture, duvets, pillows, sheets, towels, shower curtains, and bath rugs. We also design tote bags and fun little accessories like wallets.

I’m the creative director but I don’t design every detail of every item any more. We have a very talented team—sort of a dream team. I might say, “I want to do an ocean themed thing.” We all work together on what’s the best way to do that. It’s a team effort from designing the patterns that might go on a product or selecting the materials that go into a product and scaling it. Every single detail is considered. My husband is a furniture designer and he designs all of the furniture.

Unfortunately, I don’t get to do the creative direction full time, because my husband and I also oversee the business. We have a great team. The actual business takes a lot of time especially in a tough economy. It needs a lot of attention to make sure you don’t go too far down the wrong road. 

Primarily, from the creative perspective, I have to look ahead. I try to look a year out at least.  I determine the palette that we will be working in. We have to make sure that when our products are merchandised in a store, all of our products sing the same tune. They need to sit next to each other comfortably. We establish a palate and make sure that the trays and the rugs and the tote bags all look like they came from the same place.  Then, we will establish a theme.  It might be the ocean or the garden. We will work at what it means to us.  For example, the ocean means high tide, low tide. It means water, boats, and particular types of birds and sounds. Then, we peel back all the different layers to try to get to something where people will look at one item and say, “Ooh. This reminds me of growing up and going to the beach in the summer.”  

We think as long as the shapes are organic and resemble things we see in nature, people are going to relate to it and understand it. Also, we don’t start and finish every design on the computer. Everything starts in a sketchbook. Having the hand drawn element also helps people relate to it and find comfort in it.

I work in downtown Portland, Maine, at the bottom of a hill.  We live at the top of the hill. I like that we walk to work. It’s a great little neighborhood. It’s a nice quality of life. We rarely get on a highway. That feels nice.

I have two studios. They are two different places that feel pretty similar in terms of color and pattern but they reflect two different stages of the process. I have one studio where everyone works that is full of products, samples and sketches and lots of ideas. There are lots of notes and color chips everywhere. It is full of swatches and material.  It is a vibrant environment with a lot of very busy people who are running around and doing a lot in a short amount of time.

I have another little, private studio that is between work and home. It is where I can get a lot done by myself on new overall concepts and direction. I can sketch up new ideas, whether good or bad, paste them up, and live with them for awhile before I have to talk about them with anyone. I can process my ideas.

Patience. It’s a big one. Not patience because of the people I’m around– they probably need to be more patient with me—but patience with the pace at which things happen. I tend to want things to happen fast. We are a small company so we can move quickly and often. We can move faster than large companies. It will drive me crazy that something that we work on won’t actually come to fruition for a year and a half.

You need to believe in it. It’s one of the things at the top of the list. When the going gets tough and crazy and it starts feeling like the thing you have been working on might not happen, that’s right where you have to dig in and make it happen. That’s something that happens all the time. There is almost this moment when I’m afraid to doubt it because it feels like it could fall apart. That happens every season. There are a few pieces where you think it’s not going to happen in time. You have to pull all of the pieces of the puzzle together. It’s a lot of hard work.

Commitment.

Discipline. Staying at it and not getting unfocused. It happens sometimes.

“Organization” is key.  But I’m not super organized. Luckily, our team is very organized. I have the benefit of their organizational skills.

Open-mindedness.  Trying not to cling so tightly to an idea that you can’t let go of it if it’s not really working.

You need to be a good team player.

I do travel. I feel like I sometimes make a big deal like I travel all the time. But I don’t travel half as much as people who do travel a lot travel.  About twice a year I travel a lot during show season. Mostly to California, New York, Chicago and the South East. All of my travel lately has been domestic. It’s fun. They are all great places. We have great licensing partners in all of those places.  But I’m always glad to get home.

I love the people that I work with. I look forward to seeing them everyday. I love what we do. We have all kinds of challenges, like we get to design towels and we’ve never designed towels before. It will be fun to design towels the way we would like to see towels. We have the challenge to design things that we want to live with. That’s pretty deluxe.

Lots of things. Certainly beautiful places. Animals. People.

Nature. It sounds like an easy answer but it’s true. It’s never the same twice. Maine has strong seasons. We don’t have the same palate all of the time. It’s easy to be inspired by and look forward to it every day.

My mother has been super supportive and that helps. It starts early and carries through for years. It gives you the confidence to try something again even if it didn’t work the first time.  Somebody who is going to be there no matter what is also really important person to have in your life.

I’m also lucky to work with my husband who is very supportive and very much involved.

In terms of design influence, it’s all over the place. It can be painters, fashion designers, interesting vintage autos. It’s everywhere. It’s not that we follow any particular designer. It is all across the board. I love modern furniture designers and the French designers.

I’ve been given a lot of good advice. Hopefully, I took most of it.
Have the courage to go out and try an idea and build the idea yourself.

I think it is really important for young people who are thinking about what they want to do with their life to understand:  You can actually design a life. You don’t necessarily have to limit your design to what you are going to do 8 or 10 hours a day during the workday.  If you really think about the things you love doing, whether you love drawing or being with animals or children, you can design your life to incorporate that.  You can make it an important part of your life. You can look forward to every day because you get to be around and do the things that you love doing. I think that people think they have to design the workday. They don’t take into account that they can design the whole thing. You don’t go punch out at a certain hour every day and then go start your life. You just live in it the whole time.

I grew up with people thinking that I was going to be involved with athletics or phys ed because I had done a lot of sports. That’s great and fun but it took me a long time to realize that it wasn’t what I actually wanted to do. I think that sometimes in junior high, high school or even college, people can easily pigeon-hole you. People say, “Oh, She’s going to be a teacher. She’s going to be a doctor. She’s going to be an artist.”  I think it’s important to take that in and understand that they think that because you must have some skills that are pointing them in that direction. But at the same time it’s important to back up a little bit and ask, “What do I want to do.” Just because you might have some talent doesn’t mean that you are going to be inspired or passionate about that. You can still love animals and kids but not think that you have to make your whole career based around that.

Make sure you don’t let your life get too molded for you before you have a chance to back up and think about the things you might want to do. It takes some people into their thirties, forties or fifties, to actually say out loud to themselves, “You know what I always wanted to do was this.”  Everybody thought that I would to do that so those doors just kept opening for me. Sometimes if you look to the right or to the left, there’s another door that might be more exciting for you.

I think sometimes people get stifled by the idea that they have to figure out the be-all-end-all career for themselves early.  If you are not sure about something, just go ahead and try it out for a few years. Give it a chance and see what you like or don’t like about it. Don’t be afraid to veer off from that and take pieces of that off down another road.  Don’t be overwhelmed by the thought, ”You have to pick your ultimate plan and design that now.” Give yourself a chance of going through layers of experimenting before you start to really shape what you ultimately want to do for a period of time.

I grew up on an island off the coast of mid-coast Maine. I started out as a doodler.  I’ve been doodling little drawings and patterns since I was a little girl. My family really supported that and let me paint patterns on the walls and windowsills in our house. It was great. I grew up knowing that I would do something with that habit and turn it into some kind of a career – a full time job.

I went to school at the Philadelphia Art Institute and got an associates degree in Interior Design. When I first went to school, I thought I might want to be an architect. I was never a great student. Once I got into the school, I thought it was going to be my last blast in a formal curriculum. I knew that I didn’t want to be an interior designer but I wanted to know how to read floor plans and learn about the history of architecture and furniture design.

The core of my experience and education has been learning by doing.

When I got out of school, I managed a craft gallery in Philadelphia. I was able to learn how to run a little business. It was a great place called American Pie, which specialized in American crafts. I learned how to go to trade shows and buy product and merchandize them in a craft gallery. During that time I was painting patterns on furniture and selling them in the gallery. That was fun.

I left American Pie to manage a seasonal art gallery.  It was a good experience to learn how to run a business. Then, I opened my own gallery. I concentrated on Maine artists. The gallery was open from July to October. I did that for about four years. It was a good experience to learn how to put shows together and do the marketing. I learned how to attract customers and put on an opening event. Those were key years for learning whether I really wanted to be a gallery owner or whether I wanted to be someone who is actively creating product. I knew that I wanted to be more involved in the active creation of product than being the person who sold it.

I thought I needed to get organized with my doodles if I was ever going to actually make a career out of it. I bought an overhead projector and I started to catalogue my designs. I didn’t have a computer so I would do 8 ½ by 11 drawings of the designs and project them on the wall. Then, I’d paint them in all sorts of scales and colors. I built a stack of patterns. I thought, once I get this stack so high, I need to go out and talk to people about applications for them. I started to paint the patterns on people’s walls and furniture. I was more excited about finding a medium like wallpaper or fabric, but I didn’t know how to go about that. 

One day, I was meeting with an interior designer in Portland and I was showing him my designs with the hope that he would hire me to paint on the walls of some of his client’s homes. I saw a stack of rug samples on the floor.  They were about 2 feet by 2 feet in bright colors. They were very traditional designs but I was attracted to the medium. I asked him, “What are those?” He said, “Those are custom rug samples. Maine has a history of rug making. You can design rugs and have them made here in Maine.” I thought, “Bingo! There is a great application for my designs.” Having come from selling art and one-of-a-kind paintings, I thought, “I know how to sell rugs because it is similar to selling a painting verses trying to learn how to sell bolts and bolts of fabric.”

In the beginning, I thought,” First, we’ll do rugs and then wallpaper, fabrics and dinnerware.” But every product is like its own business. The rugs became more consuming than I had anticipated. It’s been fun but we are still excited about some of the products we were thinking about ten years ago.