story

"This is Lichen, and it's no longer just Ed and Jared curating furniture. We've got a whole team now. I'm Jared Blake, one of the co-founders here at Lichen. I'm Ed Be, the other co-founder here at Lichen".

"I would best describe Lichen as a mix of past, present, future. So, we met in the summer of 2017. I bought an Eames chair from Jared. From there, we got a coffee the next day ... "

"I kind of noticed that we had all of these similarities beyond just the chair, and that conversation over coffee just led us to going into business together".

"Maybe a week later, we started a storage unit, started collecting more things, selling through that storage unit. Then a year passed, and we decided it was time to start a shop from that storage unit".

"We've got a whole team now. We've got Eric making scents and candles. We've got Alvaro making lighting and chairs. We've got Christine making mirrors and tables, and the best is yet to come".

"The creation of the company was kind of founded on like-minded similarities that myself and Ed, I guess, saw in each other and in this space that we were in, just trying to figure out what it is we wanted to do".

"It was a realisation that we can make old furniture live symbiotically with new furniture. That's the definition of Lichen in general".

"Yeah, we just spend a lot of time finding the things that are sometimes discarded, and we recontextualise them".

"We use music, and sound, and design, and all forms of creative expression and just put them in a blender and see what happens and what resonates with who. It's like all a continuum of style ... "

"You get the hat, you get the shoes, you get the trousers. But when you go home, there should still be some follow-through. There are almost direct parallels between apparel and home, and we're kind of in the middle of it. The Air Max really stands the test of time".

"I think it's very interesting that Tinker Hatfield was an architectural designer who lent his thought process to sneakers, which I think is something that we always do as well with our studios ... "

"Pulling from a lot of different backgrounds and genres to apply them to something unique and different. The Air Max 1 still remains one of the most iconic pieces of design in sneaker history. All from this bubble, which started in 1987".

"Going back from 1987 to now really just shows the timelessness of the bubble in this shoe, in the Air Max. Now it's one of those things where you don't even know the name of the shoe. You see the bubble, and you know it's an Air Max".

"Invisible—that's how you become timeless. You can look around this room, or when you go home you can look around, and the things that have always been there where you don't remember when you bought it or why you didn't have it, that's good design".

"That's part of what makes it futureproof. It's something that's appreciative in the past tense, in the future".

"I think that Air Max 1 is definitely a blueprint and an archetype of a whole collection of shoes".

Visionaries

Lichen NYC