Kim: Okay. I have a series of personal questions and also studio related questions...
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Fritz: Hmmm…

Kim: Do you eat breakfast every day?

Fritz: Oof, no. I've played around with the intermittent fasting thing. Which I like to call skipping breakfast. But I also feel like I have very little self-control and sometimes, I just want to eat something, so I do. So, I'm not hard and fast in my fasting.

Kim: On a scale of one to 10, how much do you like candy?

Fritz: I'm a 10! A 10 for sure.

Kim: Yeah, I knew that!

Fritz:  Lauren and I were just talking inside about, like, "Oh, have you tried this one?” She's like, “of course I've tried this candy. I mean, those nerd gummy clusters, what's not to love?”

Kim: I just feel like the cavity is immediate… I’ve got a soft tooth.

Fritz: A soft tooth!

** Fritz laughs **

Kim: Okay—where did you grow up and what were you like in high school?

Fritz: I grew up in Forks, Washington—the now home of the Twilight Saga. It's in the middle of nowhere on the Olympic Peninsula, far from everything. I played sports, but was really into art and music and got along with pretty much everyone. I liked school spirit and also alternative music, and yeah… I'm trying to think of what I was like in high school?
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Kim: Those are good descriptors. I like thinking about the fact that we're only a year apart—and I grew up in Canada, but it's only about four hours, I think, away from Forks.

Fritz: Yeah. Real close as the crow flies, I think.

Kim: As the crow flies, close.

Fritz: We knew the same crows.

** Kim laughs **

Kim: We knew the same crows, and we were listening to the same alternative music. And that's funny to me.

Fritz: Yeah! We could hook our radio up to cable; we could get the Seattle radio station. So, I listened to 107.7 The End a lot back when they were first playing the same music they play now, but it was good back then. They had a show called The Young and the Restless on Sundays and they played, like,  only local bands, and it was super fun.

Kim: What was your path before you got into design? Walk us through a little of Fritz's life.

Fritz: I think I was always really into design and didn't really know what to call it. I loved Microsoft Publisher back in the day. Abused Word Art really badly in high school. Every project I turned into a designer art project, if I could.

Kim: Did you know what design was?

Fritz: No, I mean, not really. I didn't even know it was a thing you could do. I took an aptitude test and a radio or television personality was what I scored highly for. So then I went into communications, which was like the closest thing they had to that where I went to college at Linfield in McMinville, Oregon and didn't really like it at all. It was very journalism focused, and I'm not a great writer. I mean, I love writing lines, like tag lines and stuff like that, but writing an essay… I’m not the best at an essay.

Kim: Yeah. They're hard.

Fritz: Yeah, and I just never really was that stoked on it. So I graduated from there, fought forest fires, again—I did that for like six summers—and went back to that and was like, “I'm never going back to school." And then I found out about graphic design kind of by way of I think just trying to find a job. I turned in like a hundred applications or resumes in 2002 and got zero interviews. It was the Dot Com crash, and every job I applied for I'm sure there were a bunch of qualified people applying for. And the jobs I was applying for were ones I wasn't qualified for, too. But I did see like, “Wow, that's a cool thing you could do.” My aunt, Tootie, hooked me up with her friend who made the online graphics for CBS, I think, and was the graphic designer that she knew. So I went and had a meeting with her and showed her some of my really rudimentary work, and she's like, “Well, you need a portfolio to get hired for design. You're probably gonna wanna go back to school for that.” Which was kind of devastating for me, because I thought it'd be like the first time through school. But then I ended up going back to school at PSU—applied to school that summer and then just got kind of obsessed with design. Ya know, just any time your mind is open to a whole new world of things and everything around you is suddenly like, “Whoa, look at this. Wow, how bad is that menu?”

Kim: Yeah! You start seeing Kerning. You’re like, “Oh no!”

Fritz: You can't unsee it.

Kim: That space—never again can you unsee it!

Fritz: Like why? Why would they do this?

** Kim and Fritz are both laughing **

Fritz: You're like angry all the time about it.

Kim: Did you do the thing where you got excited about a typeface and just used it for all of your projects?

Fritz: Oh yeah.

Kim: Yeah, I did that too. What was your typeface?

Fritz: Which one? I mean, I had some weird ass projects that I did, if I look back at ‘em, one was like fully Copperplate Gothic.

Kim: Mine was Bauhaus!

** laughing ensues **

Fritz: I can't remember what it was, but I was taking just a ton of art classes and design classes, and it was just like getting a post-bacc, second degree in design, and had so much fun doing it ’cause like, almost all the professors worked in the industry in Portland. I knew somebody who worked at Cinco and at Nemo and at Wieden+Kennedy and Sandstrom. And it was just so cool, ‘cause people were actually doing the job you wanted to do and also, you know, there to teach you about it. It was like you either choose digital, web design, or print… and I didn't know if I wanted to keep learning new coding languages. That was fun to do, but I think I was more into the design side of it or the graphic design side of it. And then by the time I graduated I was like, “Man, I should have done industrial design—made furniture or something like that.” It was just instantly you see the other things and are like, “Oh, there's more of this.”

Kim: “There’s more to this—why didn't anybody tell me?” Well… you found your way back to it now. Which is interesting.

Fritz: Yeah, on purpose.

Kim: Yeah, right. So then you graduated and went on to work at Wieden?

Fritz: Yeah. First, I worked for this guy, Mike King, who screen printed posters, like rock posters. He was super prolific and just made lots of cool, fun, weird stuff. And I kind of hassled him to give me an internship, and he didn't do internships, but I was relentless enough. I was like, “Okay, well then, I’ll help you move outta your studio!” ‘Cause he was moving studios.

Kim: ”I'm gonna be around!”

Fritz: Yeah. Did that for, I don't know, maybe a year, and was also working at Diesel Fuel Prints, which is another screen printing shop. I started doing the poster thing and was like, “I don't know if I want to do this as a career.” And that's when I got a job at Sockeye Creative for a little while, and then I hit up my former professor, who was now at Wieden, and was like, “Hey, are you guys hiring at all?” And he was like, “Yeah, we are.” So, I put in my portfolio and got a job there like a week or two later, and it was super fun. I worked there for two years in the studio and then started doing some art direction on EA and Starbucks and a few other things, and then was very quickly like, “I don't know if this is the route I want to take.” It wasn't fulfilling me. And I was doing a lot of stuff on the side with Stumptown and Clyde Common, and all these kind of very-directly-tied-to-the-people-who-were-running-it projects.

Kim: Yeah. Is that why it wasn't fulfilling for you?

Fritz: Yeah, I think at Wieden, it didn't feel like we got that much client interaction, and when we did, it was just somebody who worked there, not really the person who cared about the thing. It just felt different doing the smaller projects that were directly with the people who owned it or had the vision for it. It was less just about the targeted market and more about making this amazing thing, ya know? That just had something kind of addictive to it for me. So at some point, I decided to go out and do this on my own. I had started talking with Jeremy, who was at Ace Hotel at the time, internally about like, “Hey, are you guys hiring anybody?” ‘Cause I was working on a bunch of Stumptown stuff still. And I guess the whole economy had collapsed in the meantime since I went out on my own and…

Kim: Perfect timing…

Fritz: Oh, yeah. It was great. Yeah, Victoria opened a clothing store, and then I was out on my own, and like, every job disappeared…

Kim: Oh god…

Fritz: …everything was kind of weird. I just didn't love working by myself, and so I started looking for other people to work with, and that's how Jeremy and I started talking. We talked with the Olympic Provisions folks as they were starting up, which was a combination of Clyde Common and Ace Hotel and a few other places. People were all coming together to do this thing. Did that and a week into it, we were like, “Okay, this is fun working together to solve problems and figure this stuff out.”

Kim: On that note, so then OMFGCO started, and it's been going for 13…? 14…?

Fritz: 14 years…

Kim: 14 years now! I think there's a spirit of OMFGCO that has continued through all of those years. How would you define that?

Fritz: I mean, I think there's a lot of optimism in it. Just a willingness to figure it out. And also our core value, everything is an opportunity, I feel is very much a part of it. We get to choose with most of these things, whether we're gonna be disappointed by them or use that as another constraint to be more creative within. And I think that part definitely feels true, and that those are the kind of attitudes that do best with our team, too. People who are like, “Alright, well, let's figure it out again.” Because that's kind of the most fun part of it is just figuring it out over and over.

Kim: Yeah, same. There's also an element of not taking yourself or the studio or our work too seriously. Even though, of course, we want to do a good job. That's something that actually really drew me to the company in a way.  

Fritz: Yeah, it's weird. I think it's a combination of not taking ourselves too seriously and caring too much, all at the same time. I think we're always trying to find the balance of how do we apply the right amount of effort to this, so that we don't go broke, but also have fun while we're doing it. I don't want to do the year-long branding project where we come up with a fake reason for every part of the logo, so that we can care about it collectively. I think consistently, we're talking about feelings and “why should we care about this?” and “how can we help others to care about it?” I think that's the fun part. And maybe, back to the caring too much thing—I think it's just a superpower and a superweakness all at the same time.

Kim: Yeah, that’s very true.

Fritz: Like most things.

Kim: The figuring-it-out part is also very much embedded in like—we talk about ourselves being industry agnostic intentionally, like really working with lots of different types of companies, and that forces us to have to figure it out. There's a lot of firsts. Can you talk about the firsts a little bit?

Fritz: I think the “outsider” in us helps us to figure out how to explain it to other people who might be getting into it. I think when we first started working in cannabis, the sense of overwhelm we got was something that we were like, this is not unique. Everybody who walks into one of these dispensaries is gonna be like, ”Whoa. This is too much. I don't even know what these things mean.” So thank you for organizing them into those categories, but how do we bring it down to a conversational level or a human level that we could all relate to? I think that's something that we usually get caught up doing just for ourselves to make sense of it up front, but it always feels then like, oh wait, this could apply.

Kim: I think it's also the style aspect of it. Working with all of these different types of companies and products, we can't really have one style that fits all of these different things. And I think that also is a value of the studio.

Fritz: Yeah. I think that's a not-just-playing-the-hits kind of approach. Where we’re always making a new album. Even if the client wants you to make another album that sounds like the last one, it's kind of like, well, we already did that. Let's think about what's changed in the world or in our lives or in this context now, and then think about what makes sense for it. We have multiple designers contributing to the visual identity beyond just the research portion of it up front, but they all come with totally different approaches, and it’s so fun to see where it could possibly go. I think that openness feels kind of core to what we do.

Kim: Yeah, I think so too. It also just keeps it really interesting for us. It's hard to get bored when you are constantly having to learn about new things and figure out ways of telling stories about them or finding stories within them. We talk about the nuggets a lot.

Fritz: Yeah, yeah. Nug hunters.

Kim: Nug hunters!

Fritz: Just hunting for nuggets. It's all trying to find meaning in all of what we’re doing. Delight's been a word that’s been core to us from a long way back.

Kim: Delight is a good word!

Fritz: I think that sense of delight is catching somebody off guard or giving them something that they weren't expecting or asking for. It always feels like such a fun opportunity or just a good way to feel. Some amount of joy in what we're doing and that someone else could feel that on the other side is a great idea.

Kim: What would you say are your favorite kinds of jobs?

Fritz: I think more about the people I like to work with client wise more than I think about the jobs in particular. I still love doing the hotel project in some market that we haven't been to, and we get to go try to figure it out—what's relevant here and what makes a place, a place, you know? Those are kind of my favorite ones. Ones with that discovery element, like going to Singapore with our group was incredible. We get to meet so many interesting people and have so many great conversations and really try to understand something as well as we can from…

Kim: …from the amount of time that we're there—yeah! That's a real highlight for me for sure.

Fritz: It is. I love going to a place and just learning.

Kim: Talking to strangers about their lives and getting a feel for it and the senses of this place.

Fritz: I'm generally the kind of person who will talk to the person next to them at the bar. So that feels like, “Oh! I'm working! And I'm doing this thing.” It's a luxury… go to every great cocktail bar in New Orleans and then think about what we should do for our cocktail concept. Those are the kind of things that are just so absurd.

Kim: You're like, “I can't believe this is a job!”

Fritz: “We're gonna drink every cocktail in the city!” The early cannabis days were funny too, just ‘cause you're like, “Well, I guess we should try it and figure out what this is like.” That led to some funny stories.

Kim: I love the stories… How has your role changed over the years?

Fritz: How hasn't it changed? At one point it was just two or three of us doing all the stuff. And then slowly getting further and further away from doing the design work itself. I don't know… it's just evolved over and over. Like the Laylow was our first interior design project of that scale, doing a hotel. It ended up just being a group of us set up in our basement of the studio and we pulled several all-nighters and did all these things that I would hate to do now. But it felt like that was almost like getting a graduate degree.

Kim: Well, that was one of the firsts, right?

Fritz: Yeah, it was one of the firsts.

Kim: One of the many firsts. First time you did a full hotel like that.

Fritz: We were like, “Yeah, okay, we'll figure out how to do this.” And we were behind schedule and didn't know all the things we didn't know and learned a lot. All in all, it was a great project that I think we're really proud of still, even though there's a lot of things I'd love to go back and change. Just like every project, I guess.

** Fritz laughs **

At that time, I felt like I was just focusing a little less on the business and more on that part of the business to figure out how we were gonna grow that. I think that collaboration is definitely core to us as well. Always has been. There was an era when we didn't have teams, we had a buddy system, so you always had a buddy on every project.Which was kind of a hilarious way to call it, but just having that other person to pass files back and forth with or bounce ideas off of always just led to something different than what any of us would do on our own.

Kim: Yep, totally. What do you think you would do if you weren't doing this?

Fritz: I don't know exactly. I like building things. I'm building a tree house right now for Enzo, and that's been a lot of fun.

Kim: And it's not really a tree house… it's a full house, in a tree.

Fritz: Yeah, like a tiny house in a tree. That's been fun. I like that there's a “figuring out” and design and a lot of layers to it that feel really akin to what we're doing. Like there's a thing that you did at the end of the day. Especially when it's building. I like getting off of a computer.

Kim: Same.

Fritz: It's like really hard to get onto a computer on the weekend sometimes. I'm just like, “Oh, do I really need to do this? I guess I will.”

Kim: What is next for OMFGCO? Or what do you hope is next?

Fritz: Total enlightenment.

Kim: Great. I'll see you there!

** Fritz and Kim are laughing **

Fritz: Uh, no, what is next? I hope we continue on this path we're on right now. Sustainability is exciting to think about, but I also think a lot about how we could be a little less in the service industry and have some kind of balance to what we're doing with product or something else like that.

Kim: Well, shout out to our shop that's gonna be on our new website.

Fritz: Oh yeah! It's gonna be our first shop-dot-omfgco-dot-com.

Kim: It's gonna be awesome!

Fritz: Yeah. The first products are dropping…

Kim: …early next year!

** bird whistle noises **

Kim: That's our bird whistle. Yeah, I'm excited about how everything is developing and about the new site that's coming out and the community aspect of things. I feel like we're putting ourselves in a position to have more community engagement soon, which feels good.

Fritz: Yeah, there's so many things that we've talked about and almost had happen fully in the last year. Just realizing a lot of those, like the next variation of the studio in a physical form, and continuing to grow relationships with some of the partners we really like to work with, and partnerships in general. I think those are my favorite ways to work, the projects where it really feels like we're invested and connected, and we understand the real problems of the business, so we can design accordingly. It just feels great when we're doing it that way.

Kim: Yeah, agreed. Well, should we go get another cocktail?

Fritz: Yeah.

Kim: Cheers.

** sound of glasses clinking **