John Conroy ensures project success by asking the right questions. “We design projects by thinking about how they could fail,” says John Conroy, owner of House of Canvas, Ottawa, Ont., Canada. “By considering all the things that could possibly go wrong, before even starting the project, we minimize surprises.” While in high school, Conroy began [...]

Interview by Sigrid Tornquist How do you balance meeting deadlines and running the company within the reasonable hours of the day? You have to realize that there’s life outside the company, and as soon as you fail to see that, something’s going to suffer. The best way to address that challenge is by proper planning [...]

By Sigrid Tornquist Taking on the more challenging projects is one of the things John Conroy enjoys about running House of Canvas. “Often we get jobs other companies have passed on because they’re just too difficult,” Conroy says. One such project Conroy and his team took on was designing and installing a canopy for outdoor [...]

Jason Iverson’s approach is anything but business as usual. Jason Iverson is passionate about his business. It’s obvious when he talks about the details of his designs and how he works with his customers. He has been able to combine two of his passions—product design and sailing—to launch Iverson’s Design Inc., a successful business designing [...]

Janet Echelman’s art installations create an almost mystical connection between earth, light and air, appearing over the skylines in venues from Amsterdam, The Netherlands, to Sydney, Australia. GLOW 2013, an organization sponsoring a dusk-to-dawn art celebration held in Santa Monica, Calif., commissioned Echelman to help transform the beach into a “playground for thoughtful and participatory, [...]

Rural turn-of-the-century Australia and Hollywood in the 1960s are bound together by a book, P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins, in a new Disney movie starring Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson, “Saving Mr. Banks.” Re-creating the two distinctive locations through ads, signs and décor elements fell to Martin T. Charles of SagaBoy Productions, Santa Monica, Calif., [...]

After a long day of work or play, the active person’s clothing tends to be wrinkled, smelly, germy or damp. It may be time for a laundry load or another visit to the dry cleaners. But wait! A Swiss appliance manufacturer has an innovative shortcut to cleaning clothing: Refresh Butler. The appliance, which can be [...]

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2014 that would remove current language requiring purchasing from Federal Prison Industries (FPI) and bar FPI from receiving contracts reserved for small businesses. Military purchasing of clothing, footwear, tents, protective gear and other fabric products is a lucrative source of business [...]

Even after washing, textiles can retain unpleasant odors, the metabolic byproducts of bacteria that survive the laundry cycle. SANITIZED AG of Basel, Switzerland, developed a new technology, Sanitized® Pluma, to coat textiles with a special polymer that retains a thin film of water on the surface of the material. The film prevents bacteria from docking [...]

Eastman Kodak Co. developed proprietary technology derived from its expertise in photosensitive materials that works as an antimicrobial agent in textiles. In November, PurThread Technologies Inc., Durham, N.C., announced an exclusive agreement to use Kodak’s antimicrobial agent in high-performance and medical textiles. The antimicrobial is embedded into synthetic fibers before they are spun into yarn [...]