A shift towards the small batch; Alex Tieghi-Walker champions one-offs with staying power

Fast fashion. Mass production. These are dirty words today; suggestive of not just cheap goods, but of an impatient consumerist mindset. While a more refined, crafted sensibility can be seen by bigger retail players such as The Conran Shop or something like Labour and Wait, which also sells highly-crafted homewares, these are produced on a substantial level, with multiple stores and an international reach. On the other hand, there’s a steadily growing alternative that is interested in things that can’t scale up. Eric Oglander (@tihngs) sells folk objects like toys and boxes and nick-nacks, specifically American in origin; Johnny Riberio (@choloclown) also sells folk art, mostly sourced from Mexico and the American Southwest, and there’s Fanny Singer who runs Permanent Collection, which sells small-batch homewares among other things.

“I would love to theorize a bigger cause for what I’m doing,” Alex Tieghi-Walker tells me. “That I’m a messenger encouraging people to purchase fewer mass-produced objects, and to support artists and craftspeople.” But he’s uncomfortable, he explains, to isolate his activities like that. Instead, he sees himself as part of a larger, emerging shift. “I think people are yearning to shop differently,” he says. Objects, he tells me, can tell stories. And the big story right now is that people are rejecting the way in which we have been taught to consume up until now.

Tiwa Select is a newly launched project from Tieghi-Walker. As a shop selling commissioned small-batch pieces created by hand and for the home, alongside found objects, folk art, antiques, everything they stock is a one-off, embracing their faults and flaws and imperfections. Their stock is wide ranging; there’s Jeffrey Cheung, founder of Unity, a queer skate and publishing collective in Oakland, who created paper globe lanterns in his characteristic magical style; and table runners by Megumi Arai, a Boro textile artists Tieghi-Walker met in 2019 at Milan during Salone del Mobile; as well as an edition of prints by Alex Booker that blend seamlessly with other works in Tiwa Select collection. 

The commissioning and distribution plan was curiously shaped by the context of the home, before Covid-19 pushed their plans to be more digitally based. Tieghi-Walker had originally planned to keep Tiwa Select physical and rooted in the domestic, setting up shop in and moving between different homes – starting with his own, a 120-year-old redwood barn in Berkeley, California. “I wanted people to see the objects in the context of the spaces in which they would be used,” he explains. Social distancing rules prevented this, of course. But this idea remains, as from the onset Tieghi-Walker wanted to pose a challenge to the makers involved; “I reached out to artists who have little to no experience making objects for the home, and challenged them to shift their work to homewares.” The rest of the objects, the antiques and folk art, were sourced personally by Tieghi-Walker for over a year.

“People are striving to find authenticity in the world,” Tieghi-Walker says, reflecting on the wider influences behind the project. It’s not just purchasing furniture and homewares, but wider lifestyle choices; from food, to fashion and even social media. He points to flea markets; they have “become way more acceptable, even trendy over the past few years,” he adds. “I think Tiwa Select answers somewhat to that desire.”

But he is cautious, too, about who has access to this kind of authenticity. “I feel like to an extent, the missions of Tiwa Select line up with a general shift towards appreciating quality and craftsmanship, and a rejection of mass-produced objects,” he explains. “Of course, being able to consume this way is born from a place of enormous privilege, and I realize that to an extent, Tiwa Select isn’t so accessible, that said, I am trying to keep the mix of objects balanced in order to always keep a point of entry for everyone.” 

The desire to share objects with stories, while reflective of wider trends, is personal for Tieghi-Walker too. His father is a ceramicist and his grandmother made “fascinating textiles.” At the time, he explains, they didn’t see her as a “folk artist” when she was alive, but she left a substantial number of patchwork throws, rugs, materials and objects following her passing. They were created as functional objects at the time, but are now mostly decoration. 

“I was surrounded by people creating interesting objects,” he says reflecting on his childhood. This wasn’t just in his family home, but in the local area too. He grew up near St Fagans National Museum of History in Wales, an open-air museum celebrating Welsh folk culture. “We would go almost weekly and I would learn so much about folk art and see it in creation during rotating exhibitions,” he says. This passon continued through his adulthood, where he started amassing his own collection of ceramics, textiles, and homewares. Complemented by extensive travel for work, in Asia, Latin America, and now American, this experience has, as he explains, “only helped my interest and understanding to grow. I’ve loved seeing regionalised versions of folk practices.”

Tieghi-Walker has had a busy and varied career thus far. From starting a zine in university, a self described “light-hearted gossip rag”, to working at NOWNESS in its early years, and then launching Airbnb’s first print publication, it is storytelling that has guided his work up until this point. “I’ve always had little side hustles,” he says. “I like to stay busy.” Now Tiwa Select is his new mission. “I get restless following one discipline,” he says. This venture opens up room to collaborate with writers, animators, illustrators, photographers, filmmakers and more while balancing practical need to balance business with passion.

“I’ve always dreamed of running a shop or a space to bring together my interests,” Tieghi-Walker notes. He wants to blend the informal, jokey attitude captured by his zines, such as the Anonymous Sex Journal, with an additional food element and also celebrate art.  But more than that, it’s bringing in people to collaborate and share stories. The idea has been slowly burning for a few years. He reflects back to when he first moved to Berkeley, saying: “I found a home that came with a built-in shop space and it took me a couple of years of figuring out what it could be.”

It took another year, during a trip to Japan and some chance encounters at a friend’s wedding, to bring everything together. “Japanese Shops are fascinating,” he explains. “They are either huge, brash, bright and hellish, or the exact opposite: beautifully curated, small.. such care and precision in every detail.” This was the catalyst which sparked the idea for Tiwa Selects before it even had a name; on a train from from Kyoto to Tokyo, he wrote a manifesto. Following the germ of the idea, he asked a friend, Simon Renggli, to help create the brand identity, logo and wider visual identity. “Which has become as important to telling the story of the store as the objects themselves.”

Big ideas and storytelling ambitions aside, Tieghi-Walker has maintained a practical business sense from the start. By aiming to do Tiwa Select as a mobile store that moved between homes, he eliminated the significant overheads that come from renting a permanent store space. There were plans for pop-up stores, in LA and San Francisco, which were dashed by Covid-19. “I love the idea of Tiwa not having a fixed home, and keeping it somewhat informal,” he tells me.  

Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, he’s showing no signs of slowing down. Cancelling the launch event was “tough” but he’s stepped up alternative efforts to compensate. Following the ‘shelter in place’ orders in California, just two weeks before the launch, he instead mailed the printed material for the launch to people’s homes. In addition, despite never intending for Tiwa Select to have a significant online presence, he knew he had to capture the momentum. Yet, he’s resisting the ease of a simple click-to-buy platform. He explains how they’re keeping the personal touch intact, saying “people will still need to email and communicate with me about the items for sale.”

Thinking about why he wanted to launch Tiwa Select in the first place has helped keep him focused during this stressful time. Tieghi-Walker explains: “I think people have a clear idea of what the business is because of this focus, I think that has helped it adapt without losing any of its soul.” As our conversation was coming to an end, I asked what his advice would be for someone else with plans to launch something. “I think being adaptable would be my main piece of advice,” he responds. “Nothing turns out the way you plan, just ride with that and stay true to your vision, it can take any format if the vision is strong enough.”

Check out Tiwa Select to see their collection, and follow their story on Instagram.