Andrii was renting an apartment on the same floor, so we were meeting each other quite often. We quickly became friends and had some conversations on different topics.
He was an expat, as much as I am. He moved to Lviv from the United Kingdom, where the last ~15 years he spent working on various farms. He’s a farmer, so to say. His wife is from Lviv, and they decided to settle down here. Their baby girl was born in Lviv, and so his life was pretty much settled, partly at farm, partly at home. They lived not far from us (a 15 minutes drive), yet since my life was settled too, we mostly saw each other here, in my location, where the farm is.
At some point, he invited me to demonstrate his farm, how the whole process of growing greens happens.
Furniture#
His farm aparment lacked on any renovation, it was a freshely built apartment complex, and he moved in as soon as it was allowed by the building company. Here he built a huge rack with lamps. It has 6 levels, with some (very loud and powerful) computer fans from servers on one side and lamps at each level’s tops. Also, he made a custom made sink, a deep washing stand. It was a one bedroom apartment. Meaning two rooms, one bedroom, one kitchen, plus bathroom, plus a tiny dressing room. And a balcony of the similar size. He had a lot of space.
At some point, I occupied half of one’s room. Nick persuaded me to made a custom furniture for my new apartment, together. While the idea was great, the timing was the worst possible. Our newborn baby arrived, and so I wasn’t able to participate in the project as much as he presumably expected.
When I had my opportunity, Nick would drive to me, and we would work at Andrii’s farm, freeing the space occupied by the materials. He helped us a great deal. Truth be told, we hugely underestimated the effort needed for such a project. We would successfully finish it, but it it would take us months, not days or weeks as we initially expected. However, at this — much later — point, I can say that all the furniture in my apartment is designed and made by me and Nick. That was quite an achievement, considering we never did furniture in our lives. But we wanted to extend our design skills much further.
Involving into this project united us all, plus I found one more friend, who help us direct the whole process with his tremendous experience in actually making furniture. But that’s a separate story.
Design#
Very early in our communication, I told Andrii that I’m a designer by heart, so I can help him with anything design. He didn’t need much, mostly stickers for his products (different cultures) and some casual advertisements he would pitch for restaurant.
He was amazed by how quickly I do this work, while I enjoyed helping him and giving his new business a look. You can explore some of these works in his instagram account, @gogreen_microgreens.
I would highlight boxes from the fair fest. Here you can see the old designs + my new design.
Also, there was a Polish version of these designs.
There were many more similar works. I did all of them for food free, sometimes jokingly asking for a new culture to try.
Andrii started supplying us microgreens for free, just because we enjoyed them.
One of the ad-hoc designs is this advertisement for Andrii, for him to visit restaurants. He came to me with the design his wife implemented, and I tweaked it here and there.
I won’t bother to translate it, the idea is that there’s a price list for Ho-Re-Ca.
Horeca (also HoReCa, HORECA) is the Dutch, German, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese and French languages term for the food service and hotel industries. The term is a syllabic abbreviation of the words Hotel/Restaurant/Café. The term is mostly used in the Benelux countries and Switzerland.
Plotter#
I did all the designs in Adobe Illustrator. It was less convenient than Figma, but I shared a Dropbox directory with Andrii, so he had access to all of the files when needed.
Adobe Illustrator allowed us to work with his cutting plotter. That’s a device that cuts lines on a paper (or cardboard, or leather) with a knife. In a way, its user interface is similar to a regular printer. With a special software (in our case, Windows and macOS only), you send the materials to the device, to ‘print’ them, and the plotter does the job. There is some trickery involved, to make the paper positioned correctly and the knife to cut exactly where it’s intended. As a result, we got a nicely cut stickers.
Unfortunately, Andrii took his plotter with him when he was leaving the country, and I did not buy anything to compensate. I found this to be the lowest possible priority.
Plans#
I never planned to actually join Andrii. I didn’t even consider that one day this company would grow and I could help with all things design then. I just helped a friend with some of his tasks, if I saw that my expertise would have some value for him.
Turned out, this entity would become mine in a year. But we have a couple of more stories before then.
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