25 Questions: Meet Karen Seiger, "Markets of New York"

Karen Seiger, in one of her favorite months, October, at a market.

Karen Seiger is the author of the book and website, “Markets of New York.” She is a market enthusiast, author, blogger about markets and founder of Sirene MediaWorks, a marketing company that helps businesses with social media, loyalty programming, and sustainable/green marketing. 

Previously, Karen worked in international marketing, loyalty, partnership management, and business development at American Express. She managed international aid and development programs in Latin America and Africa before that. She travels to Paris any chance she gets, and you can find her most weekends at New York City’s outdoor markets. Her website, and books, is a wealth of information, especially for people who love things handmade. Many crafters know of Karen, but don't know her personally, Here she is, in 25 questions.

1. What are you listening to right now?  Having a Flight of the Conchords revival today. Can’t stop listening to “Frodo, Don’t Wear the Ring” and cracking up. I also can’t stop listening to Challa, a new song from my Bollywood crush, Shahrukh Khan. 

2.DC or New York? New York! I lived in DC for 11 years and loved it, but New York is home. 

3. What is your favorite weather? Cool, sunny fall or early spring. Any day that’s cool enough so I can wear my favorite sweaters or warm enough to jump in a lake.

4. Where was the best meal you ate?  Well, aside from pretty much every bite I’ve had in the markets, the very best meal I’ve ever had was for James’ birthday at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. They made us a butter tasting, and everything was literally fresh from the farm. Then we had dessert outside and watched a million fireflies put on a show for us on a hillside.

5. Favorite airline? How about “Least Favorite Airline”? United/Continental

6. Facebook or Twitter? Facebook. 

7. Who was the last person you talked to on the phone? My mom.

8. What’s your favorite TV show?  Anything on Masterpiece Mystery, especially the new Sherlock Holmes. CBS Sunday Morning, too. I like really good stories.

9. What’s your favorite holiday? Thanksgiving! No religion, just eating, snoozing, and eating some more, with friends and family.

10. What is your favorite month? Well, my birthday is in March, and I celebrate it all month long. But I have a soft spot for October weather.

11. Best job, and why? Best job I ever had was as a writing tutor for students with learning and physical disabilities in college. A bunch of us worked in a huge open space and shouted out grammar questions to each other as needed. So much fun, so much collaboration -- and some real learning went on there.

12. Favorite market food? I truly, deeply love it all. Except I can’t do kimmchi, ever since a jar of it popped open in my totebag on the subway. (I’m sure I‘m not the only one who will never forget that experience, i.e. everyone else who was on that train car.)

13. What was the last movie you saw?  It was “Kites,” another awesome Bollywood movie (I just get sick of Hollywood, and they never break into singing and dancing.)

14. Butter, plain, salted, cheese or caramel pop corn? Butter on a savory day, caramel on a sweet day. Have you tried maple syrup popcorn? Delicious!!

15. Favorite NYC neighborhood? I love so many, but the West Village is my favorite to live in.

16. Favorite piece purchased at a market? I love everything I purchase in the markets. But my perfect, handmade, black suede loafers from John Lobb for Hermes that I got at Hell’s Kitchen Flea are way up there.

17. What 3 things are physically close to you? Right now? My cellphone, my lovely handmade onyx desk lamp that my parents got me in Mexico a million years ago, and an orchid we rescued from the trash room.

18. Have you ever crashed a car? Not personally, but I’ve been in some bang-ups, and I’ve had whiplash twice, although once was from an incident in gym class.

19. What time did you wake up this morning? Crack o’ 8:30

20. What does your last text message say? “Funny!”

21. Have you ever been to a different country? Yes – 29 I think.

22. What is your favorite sushi roll? The Karen Roll at Sakura Hana in the West Village. Followed closely by the James Roll. (Really!)

23. How old will you be turning on your next birthday? I haven’t decided yet.

24. Are you a day person or a night person?  DEFINITELY a night person, despite the universe conspiring to the contrary.

25. Can you taste the difference between Coke and Pepsi?  OMG Yes! Can’t you? I’m a Mexican Coke person – I love the real sugar.

Susan Spedalle/ Wink and Flip

A Family History of Embroidery

Nordea's blog piece on Artful Embroidery (September 19) reminded me of my teenage years when my mother, a crewel embroiderer, taught me some simple stitches. We lived in the middle of Long Island, where there was never enough for kids to do. 

My mom was a craft person extraordinaire. She made braided rugs, like this, for the rooms in our home by going to rummage sales on the last day when a shopper could fill a bag for $1.

She loaded up on wool jackets and pants, cut the material into strips, sewed the strips together at the ends and folded as she went. She braided the folded strips and then sewed the braids into an oval, like this.

The artistry came in blending the colors that would sit next to each other in the rug.

My mom also made pictures from wool thread, called crewel embroidery. She made mostly simple flower and fruit compositions that went with our New England antique furniture: ladder back chairs and butcher tables and pewter sconces and mugs.

Crewel is a style of free embroidery thousands of years old, done on linen or cotton and many stitches allow the sight of the linen through and around the design. These pieces, like the pillow below, she would frame and hang on the wall above the couch in the living room.

Both my parents were painters, as were relatives on my mother’s side. One of them lived in a lighthouse and painted it, as well as other shore scenes. Some painted the farmlands of Hicksville, Long Island in the early 1900s, which is where they lived, on potato farms. My father painted landscapes in oil and my mother used all media for her pieces. She painted well into her 80s, traveling to Italy to live and paint in Rome for a month.

All my embroidery was done on faded blue jeans. 

My masterpiece was a blue jean skirt that I made from a cut up pair of jeans. I put a few flowers on it, like this:

But I kept working on it over time. In the end, it had the feel of this piece:

According to my mother, I wore it every day from Memorial to Labor Day. It had fringe and hanging threads on the bottom. It was not something that could be purchased at the Smith Haven or Walt Whitman Malls, which is where everyone shopped. It was probably the most comfortable thing I ever wore, and I made it. 

WinkandFlip

winkandflip on etsy

30 Peaches in 30 Days

I’m the kind of person who comes up with an idea and executes it. Consequently, I have very few items on my bucket list. I’ve tried to work at adding things but they are either fairly expensive (a trip to India) or improbable (living in California).

I recently realized that every summer for as long I can remember, I regret that I did not eat more peaches, corn and tomatoes in the last days of summer. I decided I did not want to go to my final resting place not having eaten enough peaches.

Yes, you read that right. This year I added to my bucket list: Eat a peach every day for 30 days before summer ends.

Peaches are meant to be consumed out of hand, juice dribbling into a napkin. As far as I’m concerned, almost anything one can do to a peach ruins it.

Canned peaches taste to me like slippery tennis balls. Frozen peaches aren’t fragrant. Peach iced tea is tasty but it doesn’t approximate the taste of a fresh peach. The closest I’ve come to real peach taste in a peach product is a nectar drink that I first came across in Greece, called Premium Fresh peach nectar in a cardboard container from Philicon. At 130 calories for eight ounces, it contains water, peach puree, and sugar and is actually a product of Bulgaria.

In my quest, I found it was really worth it to buy the $2.50 (ouch) a pound giant peaches. They are like the steak of the fruit world. So full of juice and fiber, after you eat one, you’re full.

To eat a peach every day, you have to buy a peach every day, or every other day, so they are really ripe. Peaches are best stored at 32 degrees, as they continue to ripen after being picked from the tree. I prefer them room temperature.

An illustration from the 1800s.

Getting peaches home every day can turn into a project. I bought some at my local Korean grocery store. I bought some from the community supported agriculture stand at the Hester Street Fair, trucked in from farms on the East End of Long Island. I bought some from a stand in Chinatown. The peach is native to China, and the country is still the world’s largest producer of the fruit.

I told my daughter about my quest and since she lives in the same building, across the hall from me, I sometimes came home to find a peach sitting atop the doorknob of the front door of my apartment.

A surprise!

Peaches are divided into clingstones and freestones, depending on whether or not the flesh sticks to the stone. White flesh are very sweet with little acidity. Yellow-fleshed peaches are sweet but can have an acidic tang. Europeans use the white peaches to make the Italian Proseco-based drink called Bellini.

I mostly ate peaches plain. I wash them with Environne Fruit & Vegetable Wash, which removes pesticides, waxes and chemicals used in crop production. My friend Jill uses it in her kitchen. She runs a weblog tracking innovations in technology, practices and materials that are pushing architecture and home design towards a smarter and more sustainable future. If it's good enough for her, it's good enough for me.

During my 30 days, I once made a salad of peach chunks, red lettuce and ginger sesame salad dressing. Chicken, and chow mien noodles, could also be added. I came across a recipe for a peach salsa, combining the fruit with kiwi, strawberries, lime juice, green onion, cilantro and jalapeno pepper. Maybe. I mostly ate the peaches out of hand. I’m not a fan of any recipe that cooks a peach, since I think heating a peach ruins what makes it great; the fragrance and the subtle flavor. So no cobbler, no peach pie.

I’m about three-quarters of the way through my quest. Have I gotten tired of peaches? Surprisingly, I have not. But after 23 days, I’m almost good till next summer.

Wink&Flip

winkandflip

The Etsy Wedding Registry

This is Jenn and Evan. They “embrace[d] all things macabre in their Day of the Dead-themed nupitals in a refurbished dairy barn."

Every wedding movie has a scene in which the bride and groom wander around a department store, zapping crystal and towels with a handheld device that lets them “register” these gifts for their wedding.

The husband usually ducks out early to meet his buddies for a beer and the bride, overwhelmed, and dazed from zapping, finally hands over the taser to a sales clerk. Could there be a better way?

The wedding registry is meant to help a bride set up her first home, but it's also a paean to American consumerism. Etsy's handmade and vintage suggestions for weddings can make the celebration seem a little less materialistic.

“Register with Etsy” is a program that encourages brides and grooms to create a list of handmade and vintage gifts from which their guests can choose. And they can do it all from the comfort of their laptop. No pushy sales people, no spending hours on your feet wondering inane things like "should our new life start with an electronic scale and a digital read out, or the old fashioned kind of scale with the bouncing red needle?"

“Unique gifts for the next chapter of your life,” reads the Etsy tag line. It certainly beats travelling around to antique shops and flea markets looking for those unique touches that can make a celebration all one's own. The stories -- there are lots of stories -- and features seem to focus on non-traditional wedding options. 

For instance, this is Matt and Asia. They incorporated their love of video games into their special day. 

Brides-to-be first click on a blue box that says Create Wedding Registry. Up pops a calendar asking, “When is your wedding date?” I chose June 16, 2013 for my fantasy wedding. Better get browsing, I only have 10 months to pull it all together. 

Your automatically-created Wedding Registry is divided into Dining & Entertainment, Kitchen, Housewares & Décor, Furniture, Electronics and Lifestyle. The focus is on the out-of-the-ordinary. 

Suitably formal as a member of my imaginary wedding party in his collar accessory necktie for $10, here is my cat. (No, not really my cat)... this is my real cat and he would never don formal wear.

I will be honeymooning by bike along the Appalachian Trail and all the luggage I'll need will be this Swiss Army munitions bag (that's the real fantasy!), which will set back one of my guests $72.

Imagine how amused everyone will be when they are asked to whack this handmade wedding pinata.

This seems to kill two birds with one stone, and these pinatas are very popular. There are no less than 12 handmade wedding cake pinatas on Etsy, priced from $28 to $172. Will a family member who gets my sense of humor treat the happy couple to such a novel party accessory?  

The registry offers a box to click that suggests inspiring ideas for my imaginary wedding. This covers dresses, décor and paper goods, rings, bridal accessories, and the needs of the actual wedding party (the maids and men of honor.) These days Mad Men-style weddings seem to be very in vogue and there is an entire article on this style, a throwback to be sure. 

Wouldn't I look stunning in this dress? Ugh, the link says it's sold.

Here's another. Articles put the bride directly in touch with featured products, and that's the beauty of the thing. Emma Lester of northwest England, links her article on 50's style weddings to this $800 Audrey Hepburn-style dress. 

This item seems to combine the guest book and a puzzle. You can figure it out here.

The section that is part telenovela, part New York Times article, documents real wedding stories. There are all kinds of narratives, including many such as the au courant union of Liz and Christina. Some are sweet, and country-themed. Then there was this super-hero style celebration.
(Please don't over look the fact that the bride is wearing red patent leather boots, but the bridesmaids are all wearing red house slippers! This would be easy to do as the eye masks seem to pull all the attention.)

Creating a wedding registry, or just browsing through the Etsy wedding products and stories, is dreamy. That, and a Pinterest board, could make planning -- or just fantasizing -- hours of fun.

Wink and Flip 

winkandflip

Put On Your Dancin' Shoes, It's Almost...

OMG it’s less than a month until Fashion’s Night Out: Limited-edition products, celebrity appearances, fashion editors, model sightings, famous designers ringing up your purchase, live music and booze. It’s a citywide extravaganza. Although I’m still applying Chanel SPF 30 to my face, it’s time to think about the event that marks a change in the seasons, regardless of the weather. 

Anna Wintour and Natalie Massenet at Net-a-Porter's pop-up

Fashion’s Night Out, or FNO as the cognoscenti call it, is the kickoff to New York Fashion Week. Last year’s FNO featured events in 18 countries, with more than 4,500 right here in the United States. American Vogue, the Council of Fashion Designers of America, NYC & Company and the City of New York originally collaborated on the project to celebrate fashion, restore consumer confidence after 9/11, and boost the industry. They thought they needed to put the fun back into shopping.

             FNO has been marked on our family’s calendar since it began four years ago in 2009. This year it will be held on September 6^th from 6 to 11 pm.

The very first FNO my daughter was a college intern at Teen Vogue magazine, which each year closes Bleecker Street to hold a block party and fashion show. I got to meet her bosses, Teen Vogue editors doing personal appearances in shops all around the party. There were free sneakers and Taylor Momsen singing in little more than a man’s tailored shirt, garters and stockings. It was all very glamorous, a little crazy, and all night long, everyone had a drink in their hand.

The second year Natasha was interning at Marie Claire magazine. We went back to the fun in the West Village and traipsed from store to store, got a wicked photo of the two of us at Marc Jacobs, ate cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery and watched the calamity of an entire city coming out to get their party on at the same time. Many girls got their high heels stuck in the cobblestones.

FNO is a little like New Year’s Eve. It’s a citywide celebration that can get a little rowdy. On the cab ride home that year, our taxi stopped for a red light on 57^th Street and a man opened the backseat door. He was so drunk he did not see that there was a 22-year old girl already in the seat, and he proceeded to sit down, on top of her. She pushed him out of the cab and he offered something between an apology and an explanation: “I just want to get home,” he slurred. Not glamorous.

Last year we were invited, as part of the Hester Street Fair, to sell both our handmade, and curated line of jewelry at Henri Bendel on Fifth Avenue. We were positioned opposite the bank of elevators on one of the upper floors and I vividly remember watching a sea of women and girls stepping out of the elevator, coming towards us, all night long. Like the waves on the seashore, they just kept rolling in.

Natasha Spedalle, owner of Wink and Flip, at Henri Bendel

This year, on August 1st, I realized we wanted to sell again on Fashion’s Night Out and should get going on booking ourselves somewhere. Then it dawned on me.

“Let’s do our own event!” I told Natasha.

“Where?” she asked, “in the living room?”

We’d both overlooked the fact that by September 6^th we will have our own pop-up shop in the middle of the Urban Space Meatpacking market, in the middle of NYC’s uber-fashionable Meatpacking district. Right next to, in fact, a DVF store. Diane Von Furstenberg was one of the founders, along with Anna Wintour, of Fashion’s Night Out. I later learned there are no less than 65 FNO events in the Meatpacking district.

Diane Von Furstenberg at the 2011 Fashion's Night Out

We filled out the required forms, insurance certificates, got the many approvals and I am proud to say we will be listed as an official Fashion’s Night Out event on the FNO web site. It will read:

Wink and Flip at UrbanSpace Meatpacking

437-51 West 13th Street, New York NY 10014

Wink&Flip's Fall Jewelry Preview and Macaron Parlour Treats, 6-8pm 

Drop by Wink and Flip for an evening of styling advice and shopping. Owner Natasha Spedalle is toasting the night with Macaron Parlour macarons, her limited-edition FNO necklace, and a 15% gift card good on a follow-up purchase at W&F’s Meatpacking location, or on winkandflip.com.

            Here is the 15% off coupon Natasha designed:

Taylor Momsen won’t be there, but we hope lots of curious shoppers might come by and visit.

Last year FNP launced an app to simplify planning the fashion-filled evening. Keep an eye out for that. Visit fashionsnightout.com for updates, and follow Fashion's Night Out on Twitter and Facebook to stay informed. Proceeds from sales of official FNO gear benefit the New York Community Trust's New York City AIDS Fund.

Susan and Natasha
Wink and Flip
etsy.com/shop/winkandflip

Inside Etsy Hack Week

                              

                                                             An engineer hard at work at Etsy headquarters.

Not being a computer geek myself, I wasn't sure what a Hack Week was, no less the role I might play in one at Etsy. But I try to attend every Etsy event to which I am invited since I'm convinced that the keys to sales success lie somewhere in the building at 55 Washington Street in Brooklyn, and the more frequently I visit, the greater the likelihood that I will stumble upon them.

Hacking, which often has a negative connotation, is actually the skillful writing or refining of computer programs, especially an unofficial alternative or addition. Hack Week is a five-day event started by Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson that allows the company's engineers to abandon their regular work and concentrate instead on a project of their choosing. Engineers, who create solutions that bridge the gap between discoveries and human needs, apply scientific knowledge, math and ingenuity to technical problems while considering cost and practicality. And twice a year they get to have some serious fun with it.

Members of the engineering department form ad hoc teams, and spend 120 hours trying to create the change they want to see in the world. They iron out the kinks, and in a company-wide presentation, sell their ideas.  Etsians vote on which idea is best, and the new feature goes into effect almost immediately. Last year, Etsy Hack Week resulted in the floating heart that hovers over products that can be clicked to Favorite an item. The code name was Cassanova, but that's the only secret I could get out of anyone during Hack Week.

So what was I, a  New York Etsy team member, doing there? Intel. A handful of us shared information on how we work with our shops. We sat at two picnic tables piled high with fruit plates, and as dogs trotted into the room and subways rumbled by, the engineers threw out questions to the group. Dressed in shorts and t-shirts, or a bow tie and blue nail polish, they came and went, posed questions, and then disappeared. I leaned over to spy on the computer screen of the one closest to me, a friendly guy with a mop of black hair in a purple t-shirt with a digitized cartoon figure on front. They all looked casual and at ease, these engineers, but while listening to sellers speak, most had multiple windows open on their computers, with code running on their screens. The stuff looked like science fiction.

Etsy code from the Code as Craft blog.

And in English, it's not much better. I'll take you to lunch if you can figure out what this means: "We created a tool that runs a sample of popular and long-tail queries through a new algorithm and displays as much information as can be determined without real people being involved; an estimated percent of changed search results over the universe of all queries…"

The engineers popped in and out of the room because as soon as their questions were answered, they disappeared back to their desks, impatient to turn their project ideas into realities. They were researching, then applying and transforming the information we gave them. The clock was ticking. The pressure was on; day one was nearly over. On a wall, above their collective desks, there is a sign that reads We Can Do Hard Things.

Indeed. Etsy gets more than 10,000 emails a week that must be responded to quickly and with detailed answers. Launch Planning and Operational Reviews assure that any system changes that are rolling out over the coming weeks are stable. Near the engineer's sector are six super-sized TV screens, each with data or graphs, that illustrate Etsy is running smoothly. These guys -- and nine women --  are the air traffic controllers of the handmade world. 

The engineers asked what frustrates us, and what we would change if we could. We threw all sorts of ideas at them. "Are we asking for the world?" I leaned over and queried the purple-shirted engineer, because we basically wanted our Etsy shops to do everything we have ever used and loved in Google, on an Apple, or even in an Angry Birds game. We don't understand what it takes to make these things happen, so if it's Christmas in July, why not ask Santa for e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g?

"No," he laughed. The engineers were hungry to learn what we cared about. On a normal workday, they measure their successes by the Mean Time Between Wins (MTBW), and good information from us could improve their Time.

I noticed one quiet engineer, sitting a little off to the side, who frequently flashed an all-knowing smile when team members talked about features they liked. About one improvement he said: "It was incredibly painful when I was creating it a few years ago, so I'm glad you use it." I later learned the redhead was Kellan Elliott-McCrea, the Chief Technology Officer, who dropped out of a Russian Literature degree to sell his first start-up to Palm, then built a site that morphed into Twitter. Before joining Etsy, he created many of the key systems that allowed Flickr to reach the size it is today.

So were we of value to these technological geniuses? Evidently, yes. Some of our ideas were "blindingly-obvious-in retrospect," to the engineers, and those were the best, said the CTO. On a more abstract level, it was "really interesting to hear about sellers inventing a process of experimentation and discovery on top of the site's current tool kit. It's clearly work we could be doing a better job to support, especially as it meshed well with how we think about our own work."

Lest you think engineers are not makers in the manner that Etsy sellers are makers, take a peak at their blog, Code as Craft (http://codeascraft.etsy.com). It's evidence that  they make their living with a craft they love, which in this case is software. The blog chronicles their experiences building and running a handmade marketplace. There is also a Code is Craft lecture series at headquarters.

So what invention won Hack Week? At press time, the engineers were still working hard on demo pitches to employees! Stay tuned to find out what they chose…

Susan and Natasha, Wink and Flip

etsy.com/shop/winkandflip