{"id":680,"date":"2019-10-09T20:43:51","date_gmt":"2019-10-09T20:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.fitnyc.edu\/thehomepage\/?p=680"},"modified":"2023-06-08T10:37:46","modified_gmt":"2023-06-08T14:37:46","slug":"680","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.fitnyc.edu\/thehomepage\/2019\/10\/09\/680\/","title":{"rendered":"Alumni Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Material Concerns<\/h2>\n
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By Raquel Laneri<\/div>\n
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\n
\"Lauren
Lauren Birrittella<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Shopping with Lauren Birrittella<\/strong>, Home Products Development<\/a> ’07, is a hands-on experience. She can\u2019t help knocking on a piece of furniture to see if it sounds like wood, or running an expensive sweater through her fingers to see whether it\u2019s fine cashmere or some kind of blend. When she visits people\u2019s houses, she admits, it takes every ounce of self-control not to touch everything. Fortunately, Birrittella is paid to do just that. A color, materials, and finishes (CMF) specialist at Glen Raven<\/a>, Birrittella is the gatekeeper of the 10,000 different kinds of materials supplied by the North Carolina\u2013based fabric manufacturer, best known for its Sunbrella<\/a> shade textiles. She runs the Glen Raven Materials Explorer, a free online database featuring 200 representative materials\u2014from SPF-enhanced cloths and water-resistant fibers to antimicrobial finishes and industrial metal fasteners\u2014that architects, furniture makers, automotive designers, and more consider incorporating into their creations. \u201cWe have so many different products, and we sell into so many different industries,\u201d she says. \u201cSephora, Harvard Bioscience \u2026 and I have to know about all the new materials and innovations happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Glen
Glen Raven\u2019s Concept Gallery.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Birrittella\u2019s obsession began at FIT, when her senior trend project had her visiting Material ConneXion, the world\u2019s biggest materials library and consultancy. \u201cI thought it was the coolest place in the world,\u201d Birrittella recalls. She got an internship and eventually was hired as an archivist maintaining a library of more than 7,000 materials. While there, she collaborated with her design hero Betsey Johnson<\/a> on a weather-resistant mannequin for an outdoor installation called Sidewalk Catwalk. In 2011, Glen Raven wanted to launch a similar \u201cMaterials Explorer\u201d library\u2014to showcase its own textiles, as well as the metals, plastics, and other materials it carries from other manufacturers\u2014and asked Birrittella to spearhead the project. \u201cThere was no library at all before,\u201d she says, \u201cso I had to work with all the market managers and designers and the people who make the fabrics to pick an assortment of 200 samples that represent those 10,000 different products. \u201cIt was initially a short-term contract to make the library, but I loved Glen Raven and Burlington so much that nine years later, I\u2019m still here.\u201d In addition to the online archive\u2014which she updates continuously\u2014 Birrittella keeps Glen Raven\u2019s six brick-and-mortar Concept Galleries stocked, organizing exhibitions on topics such as 3D printing for designers and R&D teams seeking ideas and inspiration. But she says that her work isn\u2019t just for designers. \u201cThe way we interact with our world is affected by the quality or even just the feel of different materials,\u201d she says. \u201cLike, everyone is addicted to their phone, but if it felt really gross like sandpaper, would you keep pulling it out of your pocket? Probably not. It really affects everything. That\u2019s exactly what my role is about\u2014to show the importance of materials.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Material Concerns By Raquel Laneri Lauren Birrittella Shopping with Lauren Birrittella, Home Products Development ’07, is a hands-on experience. She can\u2019t help knocking on a piece of furniture to see if it sounds like wood, or running an expensive sweater through her fingers to see whether it\u2019s fine cashmere or some kind of blend. When […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":457,"featured_media":772,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[242,19557,38797],"tags":[64624,64622,64616,64623],"class_list":["post-680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-industry","category-product-development","tag-alulmni","tag-classof2007","tag-homeproductsfit","tag-hpcareers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blog.fitnyc.edu\/thehomepage\/files\/2019\/10\/LIBRARY-3D-PRINT.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s54COZ-680","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fitnyc.edu\/thehomepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fitnyc.edu\/thehomepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fitnyc.edu\/thehomepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fitnyc.edu\/thehomepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/457"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fitnyc.edu\/thehomepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fitnyc.edu\/thehomepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fitnyc.edu\/thehomepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fitnyc.edu\/thehomepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fitnyc.edu\/thehomepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fitnyc.edu\/thehomepage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}