What's going on @ Onetribe
If you’re reading this blog entry, we’d like to offer you a little discount as a thanks. We’ve just added several great new products – some stocked items, some made-to-order pieces and a few unique pairs. Use coupon code ‘juneblogreader‘ for the rest of the month for 10% off an order of qualifying products with a total of $25 or more.
Click here to visit the new products section of the website and check out the new goodies.
We’ve recently debuted two new elegant hanging designs. These items are made of mother of pearl (shell) and are carved in a beautiful art deco style. The combination of the material and style creates very graceful hanging pieces perfect for smaller sized stretched lobes.
The two styles are the Nacre d’Or and the Petite Nacre d’Or. Both can be found in the “Shell” material section of the Onetribe site.
We had a huge number of submissions to our t-shirt design contest featured previously on the blog. We had so much fun going through the entries and seeing everyone’s wonderful artwork, but in the end we did have to narrow down the field, which was very difficult. We have selected several winners who will all receive the prize package combination of shirts, store credit and promotion.
These shirts have gone into production and will be printed 1-2 a month until just after the first of 2011. As we print these shirts, we will come back to this post and make the images clickable and link to each product page. Each will be printed locally here in Richmond, Virginia (USA) in small runs from S-XXL sizing on certified organic cotton t-shirts
Our first winner is local Richmond, Virginia artist Andre Shank. Andre sent along some beautiful illustrations that work very well for our Onetribe brand and philosophy. Both of his final submissions have Mesoamerican roots, which we loved, and the very expressive and bold style with which they were illustrated hooked us instantly. Andre is a ninja of many mediums and is available for illustration and design work as well as hands on craft, sculpture etc. and can be reached at ‘bombproofdesign at gmail dot com.’ We will surely be doing more work with Andre in the future for both graphical designs as well as some potential jewelry goodness.
Artist Hope Phillips sent in a beautiful illustration that we were thrilled to choose and we think will make a great addition to our lineup. Again, very expressive line work in this piece, elegant concept, and the touches of Onetribe signature jewelry designs (and one of our personal favorites, the Aztec Flower) certainly didn’t hurt. Hope is a young kid studying Fine Arts in Montreal, interested in art history, body modification, and baking vegan cookies. She’s got some work up at http://hoperin.deviantart.com & can always be reached at hoperin at live dot com.
Artist James Matson sent in several great designs that we ended up choosing. James chose to exploit our love for Eastern religion and culture and provided us with two designs using those concepts. Simple linework and great style really make these wonderful illustrations that we were thrilled to have represent our company. James writes of his first design, titled “Tools of Enlightenment,” it “depicts a South-East Asian inspired deity holding different items representing the different stages of the process of jewelry making. In each arm, he holds: a branch of wood (the raw, natural material); a circle template (the designing and planning phase); a dremel (fabrication); and a pendant (representing the finished jewelry product).
The second design is a Ganesha illustration, again seated atop a pedestal representing Onetribe.
The third design from James is “based off the work of Austrian artist and architect, Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Hundertwasser saw architecture and design in the world as a chance for humanity and nature to coexist perfectly: man reaped the maximum benefit from nature, and made the minimum environmental impact possible. His designs are famous for either being built around existing trees, or introducing trees and plants into buildings as much as possible, whether inside, on the roof, windowsills, etc. The desire to appreciate nature, care for it, and live submerged in it is one which I share with both Hundertwasser and Onetribe. I figured taking a few cues from his work couldn’t go amiss!” We loved this design’s brightness and selected it because we noticed we were lacking a more free, whimsical design in our lineup.
Our last but certainly not least winning design comes from young artist Mike Tribby, who illustrated this gorgeous ‘one world’ image that will look absolutely beautiful on shirts. Mike writes of “Culture United,” “A geographical representation of Earth illustrating the unity of many years of body modification culture through the work and products of Onetribe. The Lotus symbolizes a bridge physically and metaphorically making a connection from places of modification origin to modern places of such practices. Simple yet aesthetic piece accompanied by a traditionally themed compass rose embedded with none other than a small lotus.” Mike is 18 and a recent west coast transplant from Chicago, where he hopes to continue his studies in product identity design and graphic arts, with hopes of running his own independent design studio someday. We think he’s well on his way. Mike does freelance work and can be contacted at ‘MichaelTribby at hotmail dot com‘.
Thank you so much to everyone that submitted! We hope to do this again next year and keep the lineup fresh with great new designs contributed by our own wonderful customers. You guys are rad! 
We need your sweet skills! Onetribe is inviting artists to submit designs for new Onetribe t-shirts to be sold via our website. Since we started printing shirts years ago with our logo and other simple designs on them, we have had a lot of demand from our customers for some more rad new threads to help show their love for Onetribe and body modification culture. We know we have customers from all over the world with amazing skills in illustration, photography and design and we’re putting out the call for great work to print for our 2010-2011 t-shirts.
We were talking about this the other day and decided that it really isn’t a contest. Why you ask? Because we are going to give rewards for every design we’d like to print! If we get 50 amazing entries that we think would make incredible shirts, that’s 50 prizes (and we’ll probably have to start another company to handle them all.. haha). Submit five designs and we pick all five? You’re getting some serious goodness from Onetribe, buddy!
So here’s the deal:
We are offering a couple of things as a compensation package for good work.
In order to make this as easy as possible for everyone involved, we need to set a few ground rules both in terms of the physical design as well as the file format aspects of this project.
Here are a couple of things that our customers have expressed interest in over the years:
To get started all you need to do is send an email to Jared, Onetribe’s owner (jared at onetribe dot net) with the subject “Design Contest Request” and he will send you the logo file and a copy of the art release form. He will begin replying to requests starting the morning of June 9th, feel free to email beforehand. Thanks and good luck everyone!
In addition to standard round plugs, it is also possible to make plugs in a teardrop shape from nearly any material we offer. Teardrops provide an interesting aesthetic, in that it elongates the lobe beyond how it appears naturally (especially at larger sizes), and makes the bottom wider than the top. It provides a bit more of a streamlined visual effect than round plugs at large sizes as they do not protrude from the side of the face as much. There is no additional stretching or any preparation needed to wear this shape of jewelry beyond having well healed piercings and a well made piece.
The pieces below are blue tiger’s eye teardrops at 1.5″ (38mm).
Teardrops are tricky to make and can be uncomfortable to wear if the top portion is overly pointed. We have seen pieces looking almost like triangles from some vendors and can’t imagine how uncomfortable that must be to wear. Sizing is also an issue, as teardrops cannot be measured with calipers or ‘averaged’ by taking height and width measurements and dividing by two, which does not take into account the curvature of the sides. They must be made using the circumference measurements (distance around the piece, as opposed to across it as with measuring diameter with calipers) and wrapping an object around the piece to continually check the size of both the saddle and each flare – we generally utilize a marked natural fiber string that doesn’t stretch.
Onetribe can produce teardrop shaped plugs from 0g (8.2mm) and up from most materials. Teardrops are also an option for materials that have odd dimensions – we may not be able to carve round plugs from a given piece of material, but the tapered shape of teardrops may enable us to squeeze a set of jewelry out of it. Teardrop shaped pieces can be short and chubby or narrow and tall, depending on your personal preferences or the shape of the material itself. When making pieces without direction we aim for a balance between the two and an aesthetically pleasing teardrop shape, taking into account the texture and color of the material. Flare sizes are the standard 1.5mm of our round plugs but can be customized to your tastes, including doing Mayan flared faces. We can carve teardrops as concaves, with inlays, etc. just as we do any other style, but there is a major difference in cost associated with these options over doing them in standard round plugs due to the extra time involved in working in a non-standard shape.
1.5″ (38mm) Teardrops in Green Fluorite
Ebony Hollow Teardrops with CZ Inlays.
1″ (25.4mm) Rutilated Quartz Teardrop Plugs
0g (8.2mm) Labradorite Teardrops (they both flash light or dark blue depending on the angle)
1.5″ (38mm) Obsidian Concave Teadrops and 3/4″ (19mm) Concave Labret with 23k Gold Leaf
5/8″ (16mm) Aqua/Blue Labradorite Teardrops
2″ (51mm) Maple Teardrops and Assorted Friends
If you find yourself intrigued by this shape of jewelry and interested in having some carved in wood, stone or any other material (amber teardrops? Sure!), please feel free to get in touch with us, we’d be happy to make something special and unique for you!
If you have ordered a set of wood jewelry from Onetribe within the past few years, chances are Marshall was involved in the production of it.
He produces the majority of the wood plugs, concaves, Mayan flared wood pieces and wood rings that come out of our Richmond, VA workshop. Marshall was let loose in our workshop alongside Jared (the owner) as our secondary wood jeweler and eventually worked his way into the primary production position where he manages the day to day production of all of our standard wood products.
