Some nice shine for SHFT in the Huffington Post this week. Comedy writer Nick Kreiss interviewed Adrian Grenier and Peter Glatzer, SHFT's co-founders, discussing our origins, the SHFT Pop-Up Store and Gallery, and much more.
NK – Hi guys. Let's start with the basics. What is SHFT?
AG – SHFT.com is a website that started basically as a platform for Peter and I to share our appreciation for the environment. It was initially a place for us to gather all this great environment based media and information, and it's become a community.
PG – Adrian and I had been marinating this idea – a sustainable, sexy design-forward media platform – for a couple of years. After we did our TV show and focused on it, we were lucky to get a couple of meaningful sponsors with Stonyfield Farm, of organic yogurt fame and more recently Marvell – a company that makes computer chips that are much more energy efficient. We feel that the idea of "environmentalism" as a separate category, as it's own thing, is anathema. It should be folded into the fabric of our lives. It's just the way we need to live today. We wanted to create and aggregate content that spoke to a more modern inspired way to live because it's the way we need to move forward.
AG – We also wanted to raise the standard of sustainability. We felt it has been so rushed into the mainstream that there was never really a chance to curate it. There is a lot of mediocre, ugly sustainably made stuff out there. There was nowhere to go for just the cool stuff, just the stuff that turned us on. Now there's a burgeoning sustainable design market and Peter and I have a very youthful excitement about it.
NK – And what is the cool stuff? What is the stuff that turns you on?
PG – In a way, we try to use shft.com to nudge these sustainable ideas into pop culture. What we're finding is that the culture, artists are dealing with these issues. There are almost fifty artists represented here tonight; none of them were commissioned to work in this specific subject area. People are concerned with these issues; artists are dealing with this subject.
Read the whole interview at Huffington Post.
Top photo by Hettie Griffiths