Jaime Derringer, TRAME Paris

💭 Thoughts on pushing yourself, smaller athletic brands, and giving a work your full attention.

Jaime Derringer is the founder of popular design destination, Design Milk (an O.G. design blog) where she remains an Advisor. She is currently Head of Brand at collaborative studio and gallery TRAME Paris where she creates cultural experiences and collaborations that are a dialogue between digital art technology and heritage craft. Her areas of interest are creative and marketing strategy for both web2 web3 brands in art, design, architecture/interiors, with a focus on blockchain, metaverse, and AI. She is also an artist and writes a Substack publication called Unsquare, where she shares her thoughts about leadership, creativity, business, and culture. She also has a 1063 streak on Duolingo! 

🎯 Current focus

I am always working on many things I’m excited about, in fact, I make it a rule that I don’t work on things that don’t excite me! So let me narrow it down: I learned to weave in 2022 and ever since then I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve been working on a large, 40”x40” weaving since last March and I’m now adding the finishing touches. I’m really excited for it to be complete so I can hang it in my home. Plus, I need to get it done and off my loom because I can’t stop thinking about making more! I’m pretty obsessed right now.

🧊 Tesseracts 

I just went down this rabbit hole about 4-dimensional space. It’s really fascinating because our brains cannot comprehend 4D, and yet we have defined what 4D is, and even created the concept of the tesseract as a demonstration of what 4D space might be like. However, one can’t really build a tesseract IRL because we cannot actually create anything in 4D. It’s a total mind trip! I’m fascinated by physics, even if 9-% of it is over my head.

📚 All Fours by Miranda July

I just finished reading All Fours by Miranda July, which is one of the first mainstream novels about perimenopause. I’m so happy that this topic is getting so much visibility now, as it’s important for those of us going through this change to openly discuss it. Not only have we not talked enough about it, but there hasn’t been nearly enough medical research done on hormones, perimenopause, or menopause—I mean, we just got the (bleak) results of the first tampon toxicity study! 

🏃‍♂️ Pushing yourself to simply start

My go-to mantra is Start Now. Starting is one of the hardest things for me to do… I am not motivated to begin anything, but once I get started, I’m fine. It’s that first step of turning on my computer, putting pen to paper, driving to the store, putting the first brushstroke on a canvas… whatever it is, I have to constantly push myself to simply start. Part of my training to force myself to start is to take action without thinking… I have to get my body to perform an action before my mind can catch up to it and talk me out of it!

📰 Giving a work your full attention 

I have zero attention span for social media (probably caused by social media!), so my go-tos right now are newsletters, Substack pubs, or IRL events! I recently read an article in a print magazine, can you believe it? I also listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts. I prefer to give a work my full attention, otherwise I don’t really digest it. I used to be proud of multi-tasking and now it’s a bad habit. I set aside time in the morning and during lunch simply to go through my newsletters and subscribed pubs without distraction. I find that the overwhelming amount of bite-sized content with lack of context and nuance on social media has made it less desirable to me, I think I’m finally just over it. I don’t ever leave with something to really chew on, you know? 

👟 On & other smaller athletic brands

On and other smaller athletic brands (e.g., Holo, Tracksmith, Vuori). I was an early fan of On from the time they launched, and have had multiple pairs myself. I have watched the brand explode, and now they sponsor Olympic athletes and Boston Marathon winners. They are also constantly innovating: they released impressive Lightspray™ shoes, but what I’m really obsessed with is their new marketing campaigns featuring Zendaya. My favorite one is when she challenges Roger Federer to an air tennis match… fun! Given the current wishy-washy stuff going on over at Nike, and discussion of athletes wanting to be more independent of big brands, It will be interesting to see what happens with brands and athletes. I think we’ll see more athletes choosing unexpected brands to partner with going forward.

🎶 Music soundtracking the past, present and future

Music is my best friend, no shade to my human besties. I cannot imagine my life without a soundtrack. Lately, I’ve been revisiting ambient records like Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II and Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music For Airports. I’ve also been vibing to Björk playlists recently too. 

I have diverse music tastes — I can go from Phil Collins to Mac Miller to Bad Brains to Goldie. But, I also gravitate to music that is a little off-kilter, which is probably a good way to describe my overall taste in… practically everything. It’s what my husband would refer to as “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse-esque.” But I love a good pop song — this is a bop!

Good music can transport me to my past, show me an optimistic future, or it can let me sit in my present emotion—and deeply. And I feel it deeply, like it tickles my arm, or punches me in the gut, or drapes a warm blanket around me. As McKenzie Wark says in her book Raving, “you need to let the music fuck you.” Boy, does it.

Follow Jaime on Instagram, Linkedin & Substack, and check out her website here.

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