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Lane Marinho

 

Lane Marinho is a creative in every sense of the word; and her eponymous footwear label Atelier Lane Marinho is testament to that creative ability.

Ditching Brazil’s commercial shoe industry, Lane now approaches design in a thoughtful, curated way—and the results speak for themselves. The colourful, embellished and knotted sandals she produces look good enough to eat and have garnered, for obvious reasons, a cult following. 

Here, the designer talks learning to delegate, leaving behind an industry that didn’t align with her values and losing her creativity, only to find it again. If you’ve fallen for Lane like we have, her Instagram, which allows you a glimpse into her creative process, is also window into her many other talents including painting, knitting and jewellery-making endeavours, all of which leave us a little jealous.

 

Enjoy! xx 

 

Tell us a little about yourself, who are you and what do you do?

My name is Lane Marinho, I'm Brazilian and I was born in the city of Salvador, Bahia, where I lived until I was 22. Then I lived in the South of Brazil (for four years) and in SĂŁo Paulo (12 years). I moved, five months ago, to the South of France, with my husband. We are in the countryside of Provence, 40 minutes away from Marseille.

 

I was a very sweet and quiet child, one of those dedicated to studies and also very shy. Today I can say that I no longer have that shyness and I am very communicative. But I keep the same reserve and discretion from childhood: the taste for moments of solitude and silence.

 

I have always enjoyed drawing and creating things with my hands. It has always been a place that I felt good; a place of my own, like someone who comes home after a full day [and] finds peace in a large, free space. That is why I am always trying to enlarge this "mental place" [by] making: ceramics, drawings, painting, photography, sewing etc. I am a big enthusiast of arts and crafts. 

 

I've created a project about artisanal sandals [under Atelier Lane Marinho] in 2013. I keep working on it from here and coordinating the team in SĂŁo Paulo. I feel very happy and proud for making small scale, conscious products.

What does an average day look like for you?

Well, my routine has changed a lot in the last few months with this move to France and the pandemic. So I'll talk about how it's been recently.

 

I usually wake up around 8am, do my yoga (I'm trying to create discipline to progress and it hasn't been easy) and then I eat a big bowl of fruit with grains. Since I'm five hours ahead of Brazil, I end up using the morning (when there are no emails coming in or Whatsapp-related to work), to put into drawings, sewing, experiments, trials and prototypes—a deliberate practice. It's a moment of silence, without external interference. I usually go into a state of complete flow, one where I even forget that I exist, or that there is time or space. It is a good feeling.

 

Around 12:30, I start thinking about lunch and see what's available for cooking (I've been cooking every day since the pandemic started). I'm lucky to have made my husband and I a small garden during the confinement period, which also allows me to pick some vegetables and herbs for cooking. So I prepare lunch for us (I am the one in the couple who has the greater tendency to make healthier and more nutritious choices).

 

After lunch, around 2:30, I start to work directly with the team in Brazil. I follow the details to make the shoes and choose the next styles, colours and materials. I am also responsible for the communication of the project and I also take care to update the website.

 

Around 6:30 I try to swim a little and enjoy the summer and the sun we still have now. At night, we sat on the terrace to talk about the day (or about life) and we appreciate the sunset. We have dinner together and then we stay at home: he always reads something interesting; I can be reading too or I can return to the sewing machine, or start drawing or painting 'til midnight.

 

What turning point in your career do you consider your “big break”?

I worked for in years in the big shoe industry in Brazil: big fast fashion collections, which always left me very uncomfortable for countless reasons.

This long experience drained my creativity. At this point I thought I didn't know how to draw, I didn't know what I really liked—I was really at an empty point in my life. So, in 2012, I decided to take a creative immersion [course] with a Scottish teacher in Rio de Janeiro, Charles Watson. I quit my job (although they didn't accept and suggested that I come back after the course). It was 45 days of intensive drawing and a re-encounter with something I always had an immense passion for. At the end of the course, I was crying, very touched, [and] wondering how I had allowed myself to be taken away from something so precious to me: my genuine creativity and my space for experiments. It's been a never-ending journey ever since.

 

What advice do you have for striking a work/life balance?

I believe that to have returned to drawing and experimenting in my life were essential to get back the same energy that I had as a child. But it was also a discovery that experimentation only was not enough; that all areas of life deserved attention. Therefore, another great turning point for me was also to re-appropriate my health care, my body and my own home. So this balance that I was looking for was completed with organising my workspace, a healthier diet, and trying to read and practice my spirituality.

 

What anxieties, if any, do you hold about your life/career? And how do you deal with them? 

I have had many, many fears and anxieties in this entire process. Trust and fearlessness grew little by little when I realised that I had to put myself in uncomfortable situations to grow.

 

The greatest of all anxieties was related to the fear of having to work in the old format again, in companies that I shared neither the ideals nor the ethics. I was terrified that this might happen: that in order to survive I would need to return to a work format that I disagreed with in [every respect]. So the way I found to fight that was to work, and communicate my work, in the most honest way possible. Which resulted in the whole project and all my research being built with truth, poetry and affection.

 

How has the current COVID-19 situation affected your industry, and your work personally? How have you dealt with it?

The truth is that it was already very difficult to get good raw materials and good craftsmen to do an excellent job in Brazil before COVID. Now, things have become even more difficult: with many dismissals, longer deadlines and an uncertainty of what may still happen.

On the other hand, I feel the craftsmen and seamstresses who work with me [are] even stronger and wanting to make things better [as] this kind of manual, small-scale and consciously done work fits better in a post-pandemic world. And that even the clients have shown more interest and have given more value.

 

What does productivity look like to you, and what tips do you have for managing your time?

For me productivity is [to] allow yourself to be unproductive. The gaps in moments when I am not producing give me much more energy and make me never lose passion for what I do.

 

If I work without this breath, then the work becomes repetitive, monotonous and without surprises. So my way of [handling] this is always to leave some work in progress, and when I realise that I am entering the "automatic" mode, I stop and leave it to start again when I feel that the creative energy has returned to the "energetic" level, as I usually say.

 

How do you deal with procrastination? 

Nowadays, in which I am usually involved with many activities that I really love to do, it is much rarer to procrastinate. Generally my procrastination is related to decision making on bureaucratic and financial matters. But I think I was able to solve this by delegating this part of the work to someone who likes and knows how to do it much better than me. So I can consider that I procrastinate very little. And when I do, I don't feel guilty and I find it natural.

 

What do you consider your biggest failure? And how did you persevere and grow from the experience?

When I started my personal project, I think my biggest mistake was trying to do everything by myself.

In the beginning, when I started to make the sandals by hand, I executed everything completely alone: buying materials, prototyping, sewing, assembling, selling, communicating, hand-painted packaging, shipping, etc.

As people liked it very much from the beginning, I was quickly overwhelmed. And it was so strong (adding to that my perfectionism), that I arrived at a level of exhaustion that practically left me without strength for anything. 

But I managed to reverse this situation by finding people who could take over some steps of the process. And my husband was one of the great motivators, always with a very human perspective. He is someone who knows me very well and understood from the beginning I was more interested in making beautiful things than business. That's why today he is the person who takes care of the business for me, so I can focus on my creative process.

When working on a new project, how do you overcome self-doubt and fear?

I think the best way to overcome fear and self-doubt is to be as natural, genuine and true as you can be. I believe this is where our security in doing our best comes from. When you do what you truly believe, the space for fear practically disappears. Of course, this only happens with experience. And it is always a long process to follow.

 

Do you have any rituals that help with your work or mental health?

I think the most important thing in my rituals is to work very hard, to make a big mess in this process and to [get] organised [again] afterwards. It's the way I've found to organise myself internally after a creative explosion. This way I can start again with renewed energy and a calmer mind.

 

Can you recommend any resources that have helped you in your career?

I highly recommend this 40-day immersion course I took with Charles Watson in Rio de Janeiro. He has long researched creative processes in several areas. In addition to other projects such as art study groups, trips around the world visiting artists' workshops and the largest biennials in the world.

Are there any misconceptions about what you do that you’d like to dispel or clarify?

The only thing related to my work that generated confusion is that I started making pairs to order. With my "almost" burn out, I decided to make small productions only and no longer on demand. And this still generates confusion. Now, the work continues in a totally handmade way, with a small series of models and new colours every month in a ready-to-wear format. It was the healthiest way I found to keep making new products, since the avalanche of orders (for a micro-company like mine) generated repetitive work only. What no longer challenged me creatively.

 

How do you navigate social media, any rules or guidelines you set for yourself?

I believe that social networks need to be a place of exchange of inspiration. This is how I see and try to work. With this I end up having a lot of fun, trying to share how I see the world and trying inspire people to see beauty and poetry in the simplest things that are out there.

What is keeping you inspired and sane right now?

Who do you nominate for the next interview? Why?

Flávia Aranha. She is an amazing person and professional. At the same time she is very sweet (I know her personally) and is a force of nature, willing to face all difficulties to follow her ideals—so full of ethics and humanity. She has does amazing, thorough research of natural pigments, fibres and fabrics. And she's working with so many communities in the countryside of Brazil, which produce organic cotton, traditional ceramics, accessories made by natural fibres from Amazonia, etc. She also disseminates the work of different peoples of Latin America, including the Indigenous culture, and all the guardians of ancestral cultures involved in the extraction of natural pigments around the world.

 

Much love, 
Lilith and Arabella

L+A xx

 

Nominated:

Flávia 

Aranha

⏤

Designer 

 

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