High Performance Excellence
With a proud smile Dale Frommelt tilts his chair back on two legs and tips away from the award-winning multi-purpose table he invented for flexible meeting spaces. He interlaces his hands behind his head and describes himself out loud as a “professional 12-year old”.
“This concept of work or a career when I was growing up was never going to be just a job, just some profitable thing you do,” Dale says. He and his Fab+ co-founder Mike Schmalz have been best friends since kindergarten in Dubuque. They’ve been nailing up lumber ends into ships and airplanes and winding shingle snakes across the wood shop floor ever since. They were also roommatesthrough college in Kansas city and have spoken pretty much daily since the 1970s. They’re also cousins.
“In our minds these were perfectly detailed, absolutely realistic models, and down in that wood shop basement with my dad’s tools I learned to fabricate and create from out of my imagination. So I knew early on that instead of just working at a job, I was going to get people to pay me for what I created. I was going to be a high-performance person in an industry that prizes excellence.”
Fly Like An Eagle Scout
Dale is first to credit his high performance status to the passion for achievement he found in the logistical rigor of the Boy Scouts. On his way to earning the distinction of Eagle Scout, and further working professionally as a two-time Boy Scout Camp Program Director, he says he learned over time to describe himself fearlessly and with accuracy as an over-achiever, discovering along the way that over-achievement, when it finds a structured outlet like, for instance, the Pinewood Derby, is something Dale excels at.
“My cars never won. But that wasn’t what I was most into, and I think this was frustrating for my dad, because he was a tinkerer and a fixer and was really my first ever experience with being around a high-performance person who excelled at his life. But winning a Pinewood Derby is an enormous undertaking. It’s hard, and everybody there wants to win, and it can be really tense. And my cars weren’t exactly slow, but the way they ‘won’ was by style and allure. I could see in my head how I wanted my car to attract attention and capture eyeballs and turn heads. My cars were about a ‘look’, a ‘vibe’. I wanted something unique that stood out in a crowded, graphite thumbprint smudged Pinewood Derby world.”
Traveling along his journey to Eagle Scout, Dale also acquired a habit-forming collection of bicycles: modified, customized, rebuilt vintage, old school crate, fat tire, and whatever else he could hunt down from the early version of the internet, to the eventual tune of 30 bikes in various states of rolling mobility in his handlebar-skewed basement.
“I went a little bit nuts. But I had been a Cub Scout since 2nd grade, and the thing I had loved was you could see your progress checked off every day, get a list, get the chance to work through tasks, get your badges, get an award in a ceremony. In the Boy Scouts I could not wait for advancement, and I lived for those awards ceremonies. Bikes, on the other hand, were a kind of freedom and joy that ran completely parallel to all that structure. Bikes led to jumps, jumps led to design and design led to college. After college I kept that passion going and extended it to motorcycles.”
Kansas City Art Institute
Dale says he knew he wanted a higher education that would expose him to a crossroads of creative processes, and so in his senior year of high school with the encouragement of his guidance counselor and parents, he applied and was accepted into the Kansas City Art Institute, an elite and rigorously selective 4-year teaching college for 700 hard-working, talented students. Past KCAI pupils include Walt Disney, Robert Rauschenberg, performance artist Nick Cave, and the late actor/director/painter Dennis Hopper. An impressive slice from just a few of the many elite artists, designers, fabricators and creators trained at KCAI in more than a century of instruction.
“I started out studying Industrial Design, but Art School exposes you to creating work in a lot of different media. Where you’re learning creative and industrial processes in order to express an idea, so you really have to think through and define the parameters of the idea itself. And it taught me that each work is 100% different, even if on the surface it looks absolutely the same. Eventually work for me came to be defined as the opposite of a job. Work for me is a lifestyle, never just what I do, but more who I am. A human being, not a human doing.”
Dale graduated in the 90s, quickly opening his design own shop and moving into a local warehouse studio with enough space for him, a growing cafe racer motorcycle collection and a production team fully engaged in creative design processes.
“At the end of four years most of my classmates packed up their portfolios and moved out to start in the art and design world in bigger cities around the country, sometimes paying crazy money just to apprentice in a busy and usually hostile business environment.”
Work projects in this period for Dale included rebuilding a BSA cafe racer motorcycle from scratch, constructing installations for hands-on kids’ science museums and blowing the minds of industry jurors at the annual NEOCON furniture design competition and trade show with his modular meeting table and its genius-sized power bar for cable outlets that sits above the back edge at easy to insert angles. Dale also found himself repeatedly commissioned to concept and build commercial architecture office spaces that went beyond mere interior design capabilities.
“Art school specialized in teaching me design, using creative tools like computer technical drawings to achieve industrial projects, and I stayed in Kansas City and opened my own design shop because I could afford to buy a building and start making stuff.”
The Other Nick Cave
By staying in town Dale did himself more favors in the future, as when in 2010 a colleague consulting for his Alma Mater asked him to come along and sit in on a meeting with Nick Cave, also a Kansas City Art Institute graduate and Head of Fibers at the Chicago Art Institute, who at the time was in talks to stage one of his elaborate sound suit performance installations at KCAI.
“Nick Cave is the pinnacle of the art world right now. Not the musician. This is the other Nick Cave in a meeting. And so we walk through the project and you can tell he’s not quite satisfied with what the Art Institute Director was proposing and he turns to me in the meeting and asks ‘Dale, what would you do?’.”
“So I’ve got no skin in this game, I was there to examine the proposal and then politely criticize in my limited capacity. And so I told him what I thought, who I would get rid of, what I would build, how it might get done given the time and the space and the tools to get it to look the way he wanted it to look.”
Dale left the KCAI meeting with no expectations, said goodbye to the colleague who invited him along and made his way home in the evening. He was surprised to get a call the next day from the Art Institute Director who said Cave wanted Dale alone to produce the performance. Dale gladly accepted and immediately got to work. Later the director sent him a warm letter from the Kansas City Art Institute’s 125th Anniversary Gala, thanking him for “saving the day”.
Specialist in Making Things Happen
Dale tips his chair forward and lets it fall flat onto the studio floor, both arms out across the remarkably stable rolling Allo table he designed on spec to revitalize a client company’s product line, with a proprietary pivot point that allows for the lightweight, sturdy office furniture to be ganged together in chained networks from a stacked and folded-up profile.
He points to his outstretched fingers and begins counting off reasons why he saved the day, listing the things he can do, the experience he has and the work practice he maintains.
“Coming from an Art School background I can do it all. I can weld, I can do work in wood, I can mold fiberglass, I can work with plastics and carve stone. I’m a problem solver, no matter the idea.”
“I’m a Specialist in Making Things Happen. A Jack of All Trades. I’ll figure it out, put it on a truck and make sure it gets to you on time.” Fists balled, arms folded across his chest, Dale tilts the chair back again. The table remains solidly in place.
The Year of Oversized Insects
Blessed with enough square footage to handle just about any kind of work ordered, design projects started coming in: Space ships and dinosaurs, furniture and sculpture, interiors and museum installations, trade show stands and customized motorcycles.
“One time I researched the bejeezus out of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton, every bone, every vertebra. Made it all out of foam and produced it for a commercial shoot. Made it so good that I fooled a university paleontology department into thinking it was a real T-Rex fossil, and because it was a rare type of T-Rex fossil, that it was THEIR T-Rex fossil, and ‘How on Earth did I come into its presence in order to photograph it?’,” Dale smiles again, nearly beaming.
“It was a pleasure to show them my research, and I have a copy of their dropped lawsuit on the wall of my office.”
In his professional design career Dale was commissioned once in a collaborative photography project to create a giant, posable housefly that has cratered into a suburban lawn. Lots of research on fly anatomy, photo-realistic materials and practical fabrication methods later led to a surge in work orders for more of the same by impressed clients.
“It was the Year of Oversized Insects after that. A mosquito, a tick, a flea. The bugs we made were all really life like, really disgusting. You know, I learned that flies are hairy like little bears.”
Pride of place sent Dale all in for the bugs, giving him the joyous over-achiever task of not only designing, creating and then fabricating the giant posable fly, but also letting him create secure giant posable fly travel cases, with custom-cut foam anti-shock inserts and even snug, leakproof pockets to hold the jars of touch-up paint he wisely thought to include.
“There was a year we seemingly did nothing but dinosaurs. Another year it was space ships. Then giraffes or unicorns. Ad styles and photo shoot themes come and go in waves, and we surfed from one project to the next, always moving from strength to strength.”
Urban Pioneer
Dale’s network of like-minded, high-performance professionals in the Crossroads Art District is something he began cultivating at Kansas City planning meetings in the late 1990s.
“A studio is just a building, but it’s centered around a community of people, and I had a group of tire-kickers and hangers-on in my studio who all started moving into within 3 or 4 blocks of me in the 18th and Vine District,” the home of Kansas City’s jazz music scene and now a listed neighborhood in the National Register of Historic Places.
For more than 10 years, Dale worked out of a refurbished auto-shop, patching the semi-dilapidated walls and ceilings left behind by a wide selection of previous tenants. A glass manufacturer had left blast furnace holes in the roof. Hardware supply storage left floor-to-ceiling steel racks in place. Dale says he targeted his studio for purchase after city planners made clear their intention to emphasize the arts in the 18th and Vine District.
“Moving into the part of town that was once industrial was something I wanted to do almost immediately after I graduated. For being an Urban Pioneer I was honored by the Historic Kansas City Preservationists Society, but the real reward was just being in the right place. It’s a thriving and vital creative community now, a like-minded quorum that sprang up around me. A neighborhood of sculptors, designers, painters and musicians. Over time the bars and restaurants followed, and after 10 years my garage bay doors opened to a 5,000-seat music venue.”
Gear Head Space
The aesthetic of Dale’s own studio started to attract clients looking for his style from among professionals impressed by the depth of his production skills as well as his artistic choices. Multi-disciplinary architectural firm Pendulum sought him out to showcase their headquarters in Kansas City.
“From a high-rise office with expansive views to a 2-story bombed out shell, Pendulum moved into their new space with a strong desire to tell their story. From me they wanted to make sure that whoever walked through their front door would find themselves in a lifestyle office, a gear head space,” Dale says.
Dale built the interior around an industrial look of wood and steel, featuring a mechanic’s motorcycle work stand and a display arena for the owner’s collections. On the main wall in the Office he painted a giant motorcycle mural.
“You walk in there and the first thing you see is a vintage motorcycle painting and the words ‘Speed Shop’. You have no idea you’re in an architect’s office, but it tells you everything you need to know about the people who work there and what they stand for,” Dale says.
Another industrial space Dale converted for commercial use is the KC Guild, a public event space he refitted from an industrial building, wisely keeping the polished concrete floors, exposed brick walls and 12-foot windows to create a stunning 6,500 sq. ft. indoor venue suitable for weddings, corporate events, exhibitions, fashion shows and more. He lined walls along the custom bar with floor-to-ceiling subway tiles and hung a 10-foot chandelier from the 20-foot ceiling.
“There’s a thing I like to keep in mind when designing a public space or an office, because whether it’s the reception lobby of an architectural firm or part of the Science City museum at Union Station, if you walk in off the street and see a giant motorcycle and you aren’t immediately confused and wonder if you’re in the right building, then I have designed the wrong building.”
Selfie-Zone Phenomena
From scaled renderings to fully-constructed final projects, Dale and his design team run a busy production shop turning out projects weekly – all are approved, completed, packaged and shipped to any destination for customers anywhere.
“Art runs through all of my work. I am first and foremost an artist. I work everyday as an artist and designer. My furniture and interiors are functional sculpture, always pushing the boundaries of traditional objects.”
One recent production campaign: Retail grocery store Price Chopper’s sports arena media space, with giant branded commercial products for attendees to take photos with in a selfie zone.
“A raw space for 3rd-party vendors at a municipal arena to interact with customers. We came up with the concept, prototyped the design, and then manufactured a giant Oreo cookie package, a giant Heinz ketchup bottle, and a giant standing hot dog in a bun. We did giant Adirondack chairs, even bigger sized projects. With the means to execute and keep everything in house, right now the trend for over-sized consumer product brands in selfie zones is scaling phenomenally upward.”
No Purple Rain
Global Hip-Hop superstar Eminem exploded into popularity on MTV in the 90s, and as his career grew, the entrepreneurial branding possibilities of his rags-to-riches story, as told in the Oscar-award winning movie ‘8 Mile’, turned over new business possibilities and their supportive marketing campaigns at seemingly every corner. So then did a delegation from Eminem visit Dale’s studio to inquire about fabricating a photo shoot set in a graveyard for the rapper’s newest clothing line.
Dale etched the symmetrical patterns printed on Eminem’s line of hoodies and boxers into gravestones that he formed out of green florist foam and submitted the drawings for inspection. He impressed the rapper’s crew, so they expressed an interest in hiring Dale to accomplish the art direction and set construction for the photo shoot. To get further acquainted, they asked Dale, no rap savant but also no Hip-Hop slouch, what he thought of the rapper otherwise known as Marshall Mathers and the recent film about his life.
Dale cleared his throat honestly and turned to the folks who had flown in to sit around his table, eyeing him from behind stylish apparel and rakish headwear and said, ‘Well, it’s no Purple Rain’ to a few collective gasps and earnest swivel eye turns around the meeting table. Then a bubble of silent pressure burst upwards into gale force laughter at Dale’s clear-eyed cheek, and a new sense that, yeah, this project is going to be fun, and we’re going to like working with this guy.
Crowd Goes Wild
Kansas City is a global hub for sports stadium architectural design firms, and so it goes without saying that municipal stadium projects and events, not to mention design and construction, are more closely scrutinized by local industry veterans and insiders when they happen in town. So when the MLS Wizards sought to reveal their new team name and logo as KC Sporting and wanted it to stand out in a field they knew would be crowded by scrutinizers, the soccer team’s management turned to Dale to produce their first and most important new brand moment.
“They wanted to drop a curtain from in front of the new logo forty feet across, twenty five feet tall in downtown Kansas City. It’s a good idea. It’s dramatic and it was going to happen in the biggest, most popular public space in the city.”
Dale was summoned in to brainstorm the logo reveal portion of the Wizards transition to KC Sporting, as well as the direction that the new name would soon take the team. As with Nick Cave and KCAI, his only task was to respectfully criticize their idea, then seek to freshen and spice up the plan.
Dale’s fresh spice put KC Sporting team players on stage in the flesh in brand new home and away player’s and keeper’s team kit, in front of a leashed curtain drop, only now, as per Dale’s brainstorm, there were 2,000 pumped up regulation soccer balls printed with the new KC Sporting logo in team colors bouncing down from out of netted curtains over the gathered attendees. Crowd goes wild. The recently-renamed Wizards were chucking collectible edition soccer balls into an ecstatic mob of brand new KC Sporting fans.
Powerbar Pivot
Now on the cusp of expansion, Dale looks out into the new Fab+ studio space, a ten-fold increase in square footage from his old studio, a new shop building “on steroids” he says. He stands up behind his Allo table and swivels a laptop connected to the data port in the power bar. On the screen are images of the construction plans lined up to finish the new studio.
“There’s 22,000 square feet now to work in. Room for whole modeling shops. A steel-working shop. Room for an even bigger wood shop, and a central assembly room for everything to come together fully before we wrap it up and ship it out.”
Production processes will also expand in the new studio space, bringing on more full time employees and a shop manager to keep commercial projects on schedule.
“The challenge? Making art more accessible to everyone,” says Dale.
“You never know what’s happening in a studio. But the perfectionism of doing it right is what appeals most to me. We take the ad campaign on paper, sketch up the story boards and recast our drawings back to clients based on their concept. It’s giant cookie props and giraffes on a unicycle one week, Mt Rushmore garden hedges and a fast food restaurant newsdesk for a TV commercial the next. It’s like being a professional 12-year old kid and creating fantastic imaginary stuff every day that I’m here.”