American Supply creates the materials luxury businesses need to unleash their creativity, and inspire love for their brand.
We work passionately alongside our clients to conceive and create store windows and merchandising solutions that embody their identity.
American Supply is pleased to announce that our Founder and CEO Albert Benguigui will conduct a conference: “Materials and Brand Identity in Luxury Merchandising”, at the upcoming September 2019 edition of Maison & Objet – the self-confessed international authority for home decor, interior design, architecture, and lifestyle culture – in their dedicated Retail Lab. The aim of their Retail Lab conference program is to “explore best practices, studying emerging trends and sharing experiences and cutting-edge debates / workshops conducted by retail specialists.”
A brand is established on a territory, with its history, its logo, well-defined color… but what is its material? In the age of digitalization, the allure of the point of sale & the creation of an experience are new challenges for brands.
Please mark 14h00 on Sunday September the 8th in your diary, to ensure that you don’t miss out! For more information, and to take a look at the full conference schedule, visit the Maison & Objet website here.
Alucore is an aluminium composite panel consisting of two cover sheets and a honeycomb core used primarily in the aeronautic, architectural and construction industries as a structural material, it is renowned for being both lightweight and extremely strong. Made from 100% aluminium, making it 100% recyclable, Alucore is durable and ecologic. We have been re-imagining the potential of this versatile material, manufactured by our industrial partner 3A Composites, leaders in the composite material industry, in innovative ways and out of its usual context.
Firstly, we experimented with it as a print support, digitally printing on the face in matt black ink, allowing the unprinted metallic surfaces to shine, and giving a new depth to our graduated halftone print. The application softened the surface, emphasising the raw industrial edges.
Our second application involved cutting it into slices and piling it sculpturally to expose it’s lesser-known honeycomb core, celebrating this new dimension to the material. The light has a complex refraction in this manner, as the raw, dull and polished surfaces collide in the process of slicing, giving us a unique new surface material. The sculptural possibilities in this application are limited only by our imaginations!
The Palais Galliera, offsite at The Musée Bourdelle, presents a fascinating look at the back of clothing and our complicated relationship to the side of ourselves we see least in their current show Back side – Fashion from Behind. Where our primary interactions with others relate to the face, it often takes a more intimate relationship to reveal someone’s back. Our backs are strong, holding our entire body up straight, but ultimately vulnerable as we cannot see people coming who approach us from behind. In English we say that a friend ‘has our back’ meaning they will be there for us if we need them, though, if they let us down and cross us we say they ‘stab us in the back’.
Fashion has a long fascination with the back of clothing, leaning towards womenswear in it’s obsession with untapped sensuality and turning to menswear when sending out a message, such as the classic Hells Angels leather jackets, and in terms of pure craftsmanship: for both sexes when tailoring a garment for an impeccable frontal silhouette.
The exhibition is sensitive in its exploration of the theme, featuring standout garments from Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, Alexander Mcqueen, Yves Saint Laurent, Schiaparelli and Martine Sitbon to name a few, whilst the Musée Bourdelle setting elevates it to another level, punctuating the sartorial moments with the magnificent sculptures of Antoine Bourdelle.
“Think pink! think pink! when you shop for summer clothes. Think pink! think pink! if you want that quel-que chose.”
Funny Face soundtrack, 1957
For menswear this season, the fashion houses showed us life through rose-tinted spectacles as the boys blushed their way down the runway, making pink officially punk again. In this gender aware day and age, yellow is the conscious color of choice for a child’s bedroom so as not to lead them towards the more commonly gender associative blue or pink. For women, pink is so perfunctory that it has little impact unless it is – Schiaparelli style – Shocking Pink! Though, for men, it still keeps its deliciously bad boy spirit, which was in high demand for Summer 2020 – expect to see men in rosy tones, from dusky to shocking next season – bring on La Vie En Rose!
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
Anton Chekhov
Terrazzo was the world’s first example of sustainable flooring, commonly attributed to Venetian workers, who salvaged marble fragments from their construction jobs and mixed them with clay to create the flooring in their private homes. Though, historically, we can see evidence of types of terrazzo as flooring in Turkey that dates back almost 10,000 years! It has been a staple of the coolest interior designers in recent years, after the resurgence of appreciation for the work of the Memphis Group founded by Ettore Sottsass in the 80s.
Our Terr-Glazzo is a contemporary agglomerate interpretation, using modern waste including recycled glass and porcelain, quartz, granite dust, and unusable broken glass mosaic tiles to create a new iteration of this classic material. Much like it’s iconic sustainable ancestor, Terr-Glazzo is 60 – 70% recycled, using a minimum of PE Resin and pigments to bind and color it.
It is available in polished or matt surface finishes that are suitable for both commercial and domestic use and certified food-grade so that it can be used for the preparation of wet foods. The sheets come in various dimensions and can be cut and machined like any other ceramic tile.
Couture is defined by the hand-work that it takes to produce it, and each garment has an obligation to be constructed by hand from start to finish. Couture houses have to abide by the following strict rules to qualify as couture: design made-to-order garments for private clients with fittings, maintain a workshop in Paris that employs at least 15 full-time staff members, employ 20 full-time technical people in at least one atelier every season and, finally, present a collection of at least 50 original designs to the public, both day and evening garments, in January and July of each year. At American Supply we celebrate the artisanal act of handicraft, working in-house by hand and with expert artisans on many creative projects, so we always look to the Haute Couture collections for artisanal inspiration at this time of year! Here are some of our favorites from the recent Autumn/Winter 2019 Haute Couture shows.
Each year American Supply hosts a themed Carpet Party in partnership with industrial and material partners, inviting artists, designers and creatives to collaborate. The carpet party is an exclusive opportunity for our clients to discover the latest material developments, and see the ongoing work and research of our in-house creative team.
The theme for 2019 was Recreation with our in-house creative team investigating the double sense implicit in the word: both to Recreate and to experience Recreation – a moment of leisure and fun out of working hours – that allowed us to focus on innovative, eco-friendly, and recycled materials. We are particularly conscious of the impact materials and material productions can have on the environment and dedicated to contributing, promoting, and raising environmental awareness, so Recreation Carpet permitted us to focus on these important concerns.
The carpet and furniture were created using a new material from our database, Creafoam : a 100% recycled agglomerated foam which is made entirely from industrial foam waste with no added glue or additives. We worked with it in various applications, and in varying thicknesses. The carpet and cladding was created with 10mm adhesive and non-adhesive variants, and the foam seating and tables were thermo-cut from 300mm plaques, whilst shelving and tables were made from the waste that was created from cutting the solid furniture from the 300mm plaques. These were used as supports to display our latest eco-friendly, sustainable and recycled materials. Details for these materials can be found on this page. The colour for the foam was ‘pure recycled’ – random multicoloured – with no specification given to the factory, but we are able to choose the colours and create something bespoke if it is needed.
Our main material partner for the party 3A Composites develops, manufactures and markets high-quality aluminium composite panels, structural composite materials, plastic sheets and lightweight foam boards. We worked with their 100% paper Dispa material in seven separate layers for the invitation to the event, and with their 100% aluminium Alucore material – an aluminium composite panel consisting of two cover sheets and a honeycomb core of aluminium traditionally used in the transport and architecture industries – to create a luxury POS in 200 separately cut layers, expertly machined by our industrial factory partner Almay Technologies. This allowed us to work with, and celebrate, the honeycomb edges of the two materials that is not often utilised. Both materials are 100% recyclable. We also printed the aluminium face of a plaque of Alucore for their partner presentation, demonstrating the beautiful luminosity and hardiness of this material as a potential printed support.
Our innovation partner IWD provides software and services to help brands achieve perfect merchandising solutions. They presented their one-of-a-kind 3D software solutions for visual merchandising on a flat screen television, elevated on a specially created lollipop form in MDF and aluminium, covered in our 10mm Creafoamadhesive.
For the first time, we hosted a professional conference – ‘Innovation and Creativity in Retail’ – hosted by our President Albert Benguigui with key industry professionals: Jonathan Siboni (President at Luxurynsight), Elie Papiernick (Managing Partner and Creative Director of Centdegrés) and Guillaume Vignerot (Head Of New Business Development at IWD).
We also presented several new woven textile works by the artist Jeanne Goutelle, that sit at the crossroads of art and design, as prime examples of artisanal textile and colour research, and textile experiments by material researcher Tiphaine Saint-Martinre-imagined using our excess waste materials. Last but not least, Joué, a team of designers who produce innovative digital instruments presented two different iterations of their tactile interfaces, dressed in Creafoam and Micro Bille Stretch Silver, that guests could freely interact with. The sounds we imagined produced by the materials were a collaboration between American Supply and musician François Marcaud.
Last but not least, the canapés were provided by Pain Perdu, a new 100% anti-waste caterer that recuperates the old bread from boulangeries and breaks it down into flour, before baking new breads, cakes and products – a true act of sustainable recreation that we were happy to have on board !
Healing water is an important source of life and vitality, and yet it remains hard to grasp … 2 many times we have asked ourselves, how can we keep it close to us? Oh ! Surely this precious liquid is far too important to be wrapped in plastic ?
As a parting gift for our guests at our Recreation Carpet Party, we gave them something to hold onto and a way to help them to become more sustainable – a unique reusable glass water bottle.
American Supply designed the bottle in borosilicate glass, with a laser engraved aluminum cap. We added a removable 100% recycled foam sheath, in our 3mm adhesive Creafoam, for a better grip, with a hand-finished grosgrain corset.
We have a limited amount of bottles remaining, if you would like to be one of the lucky few to receive one, please contact us and we will see what we can do !
