Frottee di Mare - Frottee Freaks

Discovering bath towels as a field of innovation – in addition to courage, this also demands a good amount of “freakiness”. For Jan Leu, this trait already developed during his studies. Enrolled in architecture at the ETH in Zurich, he wondered why the university’s merchandising – caps, pullovers, shirts – wasn’t cooler and more upbeat, more like that of American colleges. At the time, he was only able to convince his fellow students, but not the decision-makers. However, the desire to turn everyday things into something special became stronger – and Jan Leu switched to design.

Two ground-breaking encounters followed. First, Jan met the artist Nina Hebting, his current partner. Her abstract drawings fascinated him. And he became acquainted with a high-quality bath towel to which he had treated himself on a whim. “This beautiful fabric, this wonderful manufacturing – I asked myself, why is there not more of it?” At some point, the idea arose to bring together Nina’s art and fine terrycloth.

Coming from watercolour and oil painting, Nina Hebting had never explored textiles or weaving techniques before. But now she dove in. Above all, she was fascinated by the limitations of weaving: “You can only work with two colours at a time – and everything you fabricate on the front has consequences on the back.” Nina Hebting set herself the goal of overcoming this limitation, making it invisible by skilfully handling surfaces and lines.

To bring their idea to market as quickly as possible, the two decided on a crowd-funding model: Each participant could pre-order a terry towel against advance payment. With the money collected, production of the first towels could begin. The founders entered into a production partnership with one of the last terrycloth mills in the Alpine region.

The young company Frottee di Mare – a clever play on words: frottee means terrycloth but sounds close to frutti – needed to get off to a successful start. For this reason, the two founders opted for professional coaching from the Creative Hub. Since the beginning of 2017, they have been using Creative Link coaching to get up to speed on topics like market development, online marketing and more. 

Nina Hebting: “This coaching is particularly valuable for people like us, who come from a more artistic and less commercial background.” In addition to the transfer of expertise, the two of them see another major advantage in our coaching. Jan Leu: “You get honest feedback on your business idea and lots of suggestions for optimising things. Especially the retail experience of many people here really takes us further.”

The listing says it all: Frottee di Mare can be found at Zurich’s hottest concept stores (Einzigart, Edition Populaire, Norkind, Tipi), National Museum Zurich, Fondation Beyeler Basel, Kunsthalle Basel, and MUDAC Lausanne. Further retailers will follow soon. We’ll stay tuned – the future of terrycloth looks terrific!