When Faryl Robin Gilston, Accessories Design ’89, Marketing: Fashion and Related Industries ’88, and her footwear company, Faryl Robin, came to FIT to develop a completely new identity for the brand, she worked with the college’s DTech Lab to freely generate the new look and new designs. But when Advertising and Digital Design students Caitlin Yackley and Mateo Gonzalez and Footwear and Accessories Design students Andrew Kaefer and Yosely Felix sat down to meet with Gilston, they were surprised that their “creative brief”—a document that summarizes the key expectations of a design project—was a blank sheet of paper.
“To this group’s credit, we didn’t give them a brief,” Gilston said. “We said, ‘This is who we are, this is our DNA, this is what is important to us.’ I wanted to give them freedom in whatever way they chose because that was what was important to me.”
Gilston herself was integrally involved in the process with the students. “It’s easy to hire someone and say this is exactly what I want,” Gilston said, “but it’s also really important to us as an organization to be humble enough to recognize that everybody enters a playing field with their own point of view and that there are modes in time where that needs to be challenged.”
The brand identity the students developed is called FRTHR, a modular and sustainable shoe concept that redefines travel footwear. The name embodies physical distance and travel, moving further as a brand, and the initials “FR” for Faryl Robin. It fills a gap in the market for a non-sneaker shoe that the team bills as “the perfect shoes for travel.” With multiple designs, all of which feature a sock-like inner shoe and a durable outsole shoe, the brand revamp brings a fresh vision to a crowded industry.
“Gilston wanted to do something that had never been done before,” said Kaefer. “It was daunting.”
The new brand is not currently going to market, but for the students, working in an experiential learning environment was an invaluable experience.
“I feel lucky,” said Gonzalez. “This has been a very good foundation that I will take with me wherever I go. I feel like I’m not just a better designer but a better person. I can take this with me everywhere.”