A COURSE OR AN INTERSECTION ?
Mike Schmalz makes a rectangle with the thumbs and forefingers from his two outstretched hands and asks you to watch him find the art.
You hesitate at first. But Mike explains patiently and waits until you are ready for him to make you see. At first slowly, and then in a rosy glow of visual contrast and a balanced composition of objects against light inside a frame, Mike Schmalz shows you that art is everywhere to be found.
“It’s the complete opposite of doing art for art’s sake. It’s this gift to give to people and it makes you whole. If you can harness what you’re doing creatively, then it’s a job and a feeling of great joy. That’s not the hard part, that’s always been the easy part. ”
What’s hard, Mike says, is putting art to work in good design and then watching it make a client’s project self-propel into profitable and creative success. Over and over again.
“Many times clients don’t know how or what they need to get to their desired end goals. We do creation, design, art, whatever you want to call it, for clients to get their desired vision or outcome. We’re shepherds of a creative process to help our clients and we excel at the evaluation and creation of creative business solutions, and that is why we have so many capabilities. Sometimes executing the project is the least creative part,” he says.
Mike’s long work history and fundamental art education have served him for over 30 years and countless commercial projects, building out and manufacturing complex creative ideas into a manufactured, graspable reality for clients. His artistic talents are harnessed and employed in the collaborative service of others in order to achieve common objectives and he says it’s the cornerstone of his career.
“When you create things for other people it’s a delight, and what it means to others is loads more compelling than any of my own happiness. At home on my walls I have none of my own art, I made it all for someone else.”
THE LUXURY OF KNOWING
Mike Schmalz traces his first design impressions as a young boy back to the paint liveries on race car teams that he went with his father went to watch, sometimes at local dirt tracks, sometimes across the Mississippi at sprint races in Knoxville, and once in a while all the way up to the big, full days of NASCAR events. Schmalz found his interests compelled by a root level of design, based on objects of transport, on racing and automobiles
“As a boy I had an encyclopedia in my head for race cars and their team liveries. I used to make wooden models of cars as a kid and paint them with great precision.”
Schmalz grew up with brothers, parents and grandparents in and around the family concrete business, absorbing a strong work ethic that intermingles creative output with a rigorous technical and logistics regime. His grandfather owned the town dairy, delivered the milk, and was a self-employed milkman who ran his own business.
As a young boy, Schmalz says, “I could sneak handfuls of concrete out of the pour bucket to make toy car race tracks in the yard with my Tonka trucks. I could sweep the shop, clean the mixer, shovel the sand, bend hooks, brush the vaults—all to build up my extensive buying power for whatever I had my eye on at the time.”
The dairy and the concrete factory both served as mental models of the working world for Mike, and helped to shape his calling to see no divisions that would separate the practicalities of work from the fundamentals of living.
“From a young age knew I was going to be an ‘art person’, and the combination of knowing my life’s purpose and growing up with self-employment right out the back door of our childhood home made me what I am. One part creative and one part business. Both equal.”
Whether brushing frames, popping the moulds out of concrete forms or performing any of the non-stop tasks involved in running a concrete business, Schmalz says it never occurred to him that being taught to do “sculptural things” in a home studio was labor.
“I was surprised when my parents told me it was work. Oh that’s work? Life is work? Over time I became accustomed to the regimen, that a studio at home is where work happens,” Mike says.
“I always liked the graphics and paint jobs on trains, and these were the first drawings I ever did as a child; Milwaukee Road, Burlington Northern, engines and passenger cars. As it turns out, the best designers in the world came to design train liveries, way back when, because the project budgets and scale were so big and grand. Everybody wanted to design trains.”
Schmalz says his First Grade teacher Sister Carla Burns told him he would go on to work as an artist when she spotted his detailed drawing and sketches at such a young age.
“I have had the luxury from the age six of knowing what I was going to be, and the God-given determination to make it happen.”
DESIGN EXPRESSION ON TREND
In grade school Schmalz modified his red Montgomery Ward bike with a banana seat to transform it into a replica of 1970s era motorcycle champion Kenny Roberts’s Yamaha YZR500. The compelling race livery design completely fixed his young attention with strong, fast lines and an arresting black, yellow and white paint job.
“Good paint jobs are the best design elements. I only knew who Kenny Roberts was via the Yamaha livery and the pads on the handlebars. But I was picking up on the vibe of how impactful graphic design is. For me it’s an imprinted concept that reinforces the importance and worth of design, because we are visual people, we can see a visual road map through time. It’s the commercial application of art to make others gravitate towards a product.”
As a boy in Sister Burns’ care, and later with his brothers in and around their hometown of Dubuque, Iowa, Mike came to see the influence of art on the physical infrastructure surrounding his childhood. In textbooks he came across the Hoover Dam’s smooth and powerful kinetic masterpiece of concrete and rebar steel. At home, it was the functional iron sculpture of the nearby Eagle Point Bridge. He found himself transfixed by the intricate locks and dams on the nearby Mississippi.
“Later, in art school, I learned that barrel vaults and curved forms don’t just look nice, but that they have been in use since the times of Roman architecture, to build everything from aqueducts to roads and buildings that helped conquer the known world. As a kid I could just walk up the street and marvel at the WPA-built prairie structures in the park that overlooked our whole side of town. I grew up with the awesomeness of how those were made and the power of construction.”
It’s a skill seemingly lost on people nowadays, says Mike. But knowing early in life that this was his calling set his mind on a course to be on constant lookout for compelling visual images, and then to sort the usable from the useless.
“I can figure things out before they are on trend, and at some point you keep gravitating to the things that center your life. You can put the dots together and begin to see that I was on this track in life, and that I kept meeting myself in the expression of this design,” Mike says.
SCHOOL DAYS
Mike and his brothers found inspiration in high school from the strong art programs they chose as electives every year. Led by committed teachers, Mike began to work heavily on his design portfolio to accumulate experience and practical skills in the completion of various projects.
Dead serious in his approach, Mike says that even as a teenager he was deeply committed to the practicalities of earning a living as a creative professional. The Schmalz brothers would present research concepts to their teachers, who would then carefully examine and then decide whether to approve going forward with the project, a direct replica of the ‘commercial pitch’ he later came to employ in his career.
“This was my first exposure to ‘communication projects’ with ‘client approvals’. We learned to dig in on preparation, execute the conceptual brainstorming and encyclopedic content research, render the feature illustrations and infographics, do page layout, font selection, sentence diagramming, spellcheck and proofing, and then produce a final product to fulfill the project’s scope of work.”
Eventually Mike found his strongest teacher advocates in his high school’s AP Art program, where energetic instructors could match his talents with a workload that sought to broaden and refine them. In time they would come to organize a level of exposure to get his work seen by art school recruiters with an eye for scholarship material.
In his senior year in Iowa, Mike leaned into his college ambitions, aiming for acceptance into the highly specialized educational training program at the California Institute for the Arts. Tuition was high for the private Bay Area college, and financial assistance was going to be important.
“Applying for scholarships, interviewing countless times with art schools, and getting acceptance letters was a huge experience, but nothing matches what I learned from Maria Viray,” Mike says.
“Maria was my recruiter and then my counselor my first year at CCAC. She told me that she went to bat for me to get my scholarship. When schools choose a scholarship recipient, they are ultimately choosing the person. Yes, your work plays a part and makes you eligible, but the school is staking their reputation on you and your ability to prove them right—that you deserve that scholarship and you will use it to the best possible end. It is the same dynamic in every walk of life—business, personal, charity, belief.
COLLEGE DAYS
California was a welcome change, and in his first year Mike fluorished under the trimester system and even saved money while concentrating on school as a full time student. But California living in the Bay Area is enormously expensive, and in spite of his success, the fees were too high to manage and Schmalz shifted at the end of the year to Missouri and its less-costly but no less rigorous Kansas City Art Institute.
“I toed the school’s line and proved to myself that I could do the work, that I have the talent. But what were the skills that I would need to get a job and become successful? Producing art for the sake of art, that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to get a job.”
Mike says he grew annoyed at the cliched trappings of “Art School”, where the stereotypical image of a lone, struggling genius out to overwhelm fundamentalist gatekeepers with his raw talent is an inaccurate portrayal of his experience, but not an unfamiliar attitude among some of the student body.
“In Kansas City the art institute was closely tied to the nearby Hallmark Corporation, headquarters of the largest design company in the world. Going to KCAI was a two-pronged approach for me. On the one hand, they were strongly concentrated on building a workforce for Hallmark, on the other hand I had always maintained plans on becoming my own boss.
Artists, Mike says, get their egos inflated by mismanaging their plans for the future. Art students washout, for instance, because they are heavily encouraged into majoring in sculpture, for example, when what an apprentice really needs is masterful skills training in all forms of commercial art. He points to Michelangelo as the greatest example of a successful artist who made his career doing art for others.
“Artists need to create, there’s no getting around that, and you can spend a lifetime making your own art but wonder why none of it sells or why you can’t make a living. This is called ‘Art for Art’s Sake.’ It’s part of a commercial culture of self-absorption and selfishness that has fully infiltrated society, especially art. Art education tells us to be true to our vision and style, but the creation of our art centers around us and our self exploration. We’re disgruntled when people don’t necessarily ‘see our vision’ or ‘just don’t get it’,” says Mike.
“Why should they? They were never part of the process in the first place. Artists become self-loathing when their art is not accepted by patrons. They can feel their vision is absolute and that patrons should just accept and support it. Well, Michelangelo was a really rich commercial artist who got really rich accepting commissions and embellishing other people’s projects.”
POWDERCOATED MTB
Meanwhile in California, Mike sought out an old hobby and satisfied his wanderlust by riding everywhere he could in the hills of Marin County on a curiously innovative bicycle. It was a Cannondale racing bike, fitted with oversized aluminum tubes, designed and manufactured in America, with the most eye-grabbing design Mike had ever seen. The girth of this bike’s downtube, the sloping part of a bike frame linking handlebars down to pedals, was wider than a five-dollar beer can and crafted from the same lightweight aircraft grade aluminum used to make metal baseball bats.
“It was like nothing else on Earth I’d ever seen before. Oversized tubes, a paint job that stood out and looked fast in motion, Shimano components and click pedals. No one would have been able to tell me about the future, but I saw it and right away knew it was the future. For some reason I could pick trends out of the crowd and run with them,” Mike says.
Later in life Mike kept the worlds of bicycle design and bike racing alive within him by pursuing the next step in two-wheeled evolution with his own custom-painted MTB. The exciting and adventurous offroad mountain bike world for Mike, in the years before he married, was as much a business-oriented conversation starter as it was a canvas for his creative design.
“When mountain bikes came out though, that was the real rocket engine for my creativity. I bought a Klein frame, also aluminum, unfinished, straight from the factory. I wanted to design the bike and ordered the frame without paint. I wanted to design it myself.”
Klein at the time were America’s most respected and forward-thinking mountain bike manufacturers, with skilled welders in exotic metals and stunning factory paint jobs that sparkled and shone for proud owners who could afford the brand’s output. Everything was done in America, by talented industrial artisans with very specific skills and experience.
Ordering a Klein without paint was unheard of, and factory workers were reluctant to send Mike a raw metal frame.
“The factory said ‘Well, ok – but we need to press the bearings in first at the factory.’ So I found powder coaters in Indiana who would do it after the bearings were pressed in, and I had it powder coated matte black, and then gloss black on parts with a portion in gloss red. What the bike company called ‘mission control’. The forks, head tube and handlebars. The rest of the components in gloss black and the name in reflective. With this graphics combo in the daytime the bike was gloss black, but at night the name reflected light.”
Mike’s custom painted Klein MTB turned heads everywhere he went. He painted intricate flames on the front Rock Shox forks in a style reminiscent of hot-rods from the 1950s. Crowds flocked to his bike at races to take a look at the exotic beauty of Schmalz’s Klein race livery. He says the bike’s skyrocketing popularity didn’t exactly catch him off guard, but he did learn some useful instruction in how to present and discuss a design project in clever but simple terms for a curious public.
“Why was I able to do sales? Because people stopped me all the time to ask about the MTB and I rode that bike everywhere. Why can I explain things when I need them done? Because of common sense, and the fact that I can sense what others are confused about. I can see the art and see the things that folks tend to miss. Little did I know that in one form or another, talking to everybody about that bike would become the rest of my life.”
WORK DAYS
The Schmalz family instilled a work ethic in Mike and his brothers that boils down to a simple concept. Don’t sit around and wait for a job, get up off your duff and go make work for yourself. In Kansas City Mike joined brother Dan and his childhood best friend and cousin Dale Frommelt at KCAI and soon found himself enmeshed in a community of art school students all working to pay their tuition and fees.
“When I got to Kansas City, I bussed and waited tables at a five-star restaurant, worked as a doorman, a DJ, a lighting tech, a barback and a bartender at an extremely popular live-band bar. Once I saw Soundgarden play on a Tuesday night with something like six people in attendance. I even painted professionally,” Mike says.
The experience of working to pay his college tuition was instrumental in finalizing a life-long approach for Mike. He took what overt instructions his parents had given him and meshed them with the practical lessons he was learning in and out of the lecture halls to begin a very deliberate process to build his own business skills.
“My parents always knew that I would ‘do art’ for a living, but my Dad was cautious at first to send a kid to art school. Ultimately he came to appreciate it, but my Dad is a ‘macro’ kind of guy, he loves the hunt, the process of identifying goals and going after them. For him, the satisfaction is not in the completion of goals, but in the process of getting there,” Mike says.
“My Mom, on the other hand, is very micro. My Mom sees the value of process and precision. Every aspect of her life is a honing of process and precision. It is hardwired into her.”
As a high school student, Mike would collect his AP Art assignments for presentation to Art School admissions boards, a focused and intense process that examined his growth and potential. By looking at a young student’s previous work, these Art Schools are able to form an educated opinion about a prospective student and generally assess whether they are teachable and if the student will be a good investment and not a washout.
“Portfolio Days at an Art School when you are a high school freshman or sophomore are a massive undertaking. If you don’t have a visible, high-caliber work history you aren’t even going to be considered. Hearing you were admitted based on your work before even applying was extremely helpful,” Mike says.
Mike credits his parents with teaching him an abundance of fruitful life lessons over time, shouting out to his grandparents and own wife and kids for their contributions to his character as well. Their complementary personality traits, goal-oriented achievements and strong love for family all come shining through in Mike’s own personality.
“The most important life-lesson they taught is the amount of self-worth you gain from just working, and how it shapes your perception of yourself,” Mike says.
“For me work and career always intersects with being creative. I am never just ‘working’, I am always creating, no matter the task. Whenever I meet with clients I’m overjoyed to show them exciting work, but I’m always very serious when I explain the different concepts and design the business plan and then execute it all in order. When clients sit down with me they immediately think ‘This guy knows his stuff’.”
WYSIWYG
Mike’s cohort generation of designers is split between the pre-computer days of hand-drawn projects and now, when many if not most of the creative presentation tasks can be masterfully presented on a computer. Over time he has witnessed the successive leaps in technology and programming that have allowed ideas to flourish.
“When I first arrived at art school, Apple had just rolled out the Macintosh Classic, and I found myself right there at the beginning of a new chapter of technology. I geeked out,” Mike says.
“What I mean is that I embraced all this technology to become a power user. But then it hit me: These computers are just today’s version of a brush. Just a tech tool to a creative end. And I needed to figure out how to execute all my fine art techniques using this new brush.”
Mike graduated with honors and a plan for the future, and he also won a prestigious, paid internship at the nearby Hallmark headquarters. For KCAI graduates, there was no greater distinction. Business, he soon found out, was fully committed to technology and innovation, with new improvements rapidly clearing the way for professionals to move in and use both software and hardware to push at the boundaries of what was possible.
“I was just toiling away at MacWrite and MacPaint’s rather crude capabilities, and then it happened, WYSIWYG ‘What you see is what you get’. I distinctly remember arriving for my first day of my internship with Hallmark, and they had just deployed QuarkXPress to run on their Macintoshes, and now you could see exactly what your design would print like,” Mike says.
More important innovations followed, including Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and the FreeHand and Pagemaker software from Macromedia. In fact Mike says the technology began to grow so expansively that he could return to Dubuque after his Hallmark internship and get started on the career he had envisioned since Sister Carla Burns encouraged his artwork.
WRAPPED WINNEBAGO
In their adulthood, the Schmalz brothers continued their boyhood pursuits into collaborative labor, first as Mike worked for an Iowa design firm, then later when they formed their own company.
“Before my brother Dan and I started our company in 1996, I worked at McCullough Creative as a designer and then later creative director. I followed the principle that a lot of design is intuitive art, and that a 1967 Winnebago R19 turned into a mobile studio could be used as both a solution for the bandwidth challenge at the time as well as a live exhibition of what wrapped graphics could be,” Mike says.
Wrapped vector graphics, in 2020 a widely-spread computer design trend, were in 1993 a completely unknown phenomenon. So much so, in fact, that when Mike’s intricate panels of colored vinyl were assembled and applied to his restored mobile studio, it was quite literally the first time a full commercial vehicle had been wrapped in America.
“Getting the RV done was truly a design challenge, but it was as much an investment as it was an innovation, with such a high level of care and attention to detail that just the ‘Cool Factor’ was enough to get clients and people out to meetings.”
Mike says that years of hand-lettering commercial vehicles in his childhood, in addition to working in his father’s concrete shop, cutting grass at the local cemetery and even stocking shelves at local convenience stores, had taught him valuable manual skills, as well as opening his mind to the potential of storytelling.
“Of course, the RV was old but after the MTB this was the perfect project. It was only 19 feet long, and had no bathrooms, so it fit in a normal parking space and the windows wrapped all the way around. Pre-marriage, when I had more time, I gutted the RV, brought it up to state-of-the art and then wrapped it in a football-field’s worth of light grey vinyl that was visibly seamless. And I drove to meet clients in it, and held design meetings in the 1950s diner booth I installed inside,” Mike says.
Meetings led to projects, projects led to more visibility, more visibility lead to even more projects. Mike’s Winnebago, nicknamed ‘Atlas’ for the giant map of the USA it was wrapped in, became a figure of fascination as well as a message board for his own work skills.
“The RV had a 50/50 chance of breaking down and so I incorporated red dots into the USA map design wherever we reached a successful destination, and a black dot for breakdowns. Over time the whole thing became an interactive performance piece as well as a conversation starter.
BANDWIDTH CHALLENGE
In the era before ubiquitous broadband internet, with uploads and downloads unable to handle the computer projects he was being assigned, Mike used the ‘Atlas’ to deliver drawings and concept pitches in person. In the years after he left McCullough Creative and formed a business together with Dan, the concept of ‘remote work’ soon normalized the Schmalz brothers’ approach to business.
“Dan was working in Connecticut and later moved to the Bronx. Looking back at it, we were pretty innovative the way we worked remotely from ourselves and our clients. We did everything by phone, fax, FedEx, and email,” Mike says.
In the third decade of the 21st century, as global pandemics shift workers out of centralized offices, the concept of working remotely has become widespread and even dominant in many industries. The ubiquity of reliable internet connections, even mobile broadband, allows for workers to remain in sync with core work responsibilities like deadlines and meetings from the comforts of home.
Mike welcomes these latecomers to his world.
“We have always worked that way, it is probably why we are able to onboard so many co-workers in so many places. We have close to twenty people in three different countries, and we have strived to be creative even in how we do business. Back before we had acceptable internet bandwidth, we had an antique RV we converted to a mobile office that we would drive to our clients to work remotely and do jobs at their workplaces.”
Atlas was eventually featured in ‘Sign of the Times’ magazine, a design industry trade publication with a deep and large subscription base. Stock photos of the iconic R19 soon began to filter into completely unconnected ad campaigns around the world as designers saw the unlimited potential of a wrapped Winnebago, and were immediately smitten.
“What resulted is a long string of awards, sponsorships, and authoring of technical articles that were published all over the world. I was one of the first people to do this, and my work was even featured on websites and in manuals that came with software from Adobe and Macromedia. I was sponsored by Wacom Tablets, and was one of twenty experts featured in the international first edition of Photoshop Masters.”
DON’T JUST STAND THERE, BUS-A-MOVE!
A local ski bum in Crested Butte, Colorado invited Mike up to snowboard one winter, and so he drove Atlas into the Rocky Mountains. The RV withstood the trip, and a red dot was added to the map. While there, a new project to wrap a local city bus came whistling down the wind.
“Most people paint the side of a bus or offer up a sign that gets affixed to the side. My buddy told me ‘We hire artists to design our public buses’ and so I drew up a proposal to wrap the whole thing. On one side was a snowboarding scene, much like what my friends and I had come to Crested Butte for, and on the other side was a mountain bike scene, for the summer,” Mike says.
The proposal to wrap the Crested Butte city bus was accepted with the ski town’s administration covering the cost of materials and a modest stipend. But the exposure and dynamic portrayal of the city’s tourist industry would last long after the bus deployed into regular service.
“That bus ran for 20 years in Crested Butte, won all kinds of design awards and came to symbolize the town,” Mike says. He named his project for the Mountain Express Shuttle Service ‘Bus A Move’.
Later that year, the MacroMedia design software company invited its relationship partner Mike Schmalz out to their annual conference and asked him and other artists to submit gallery work for the tens of thousands of visiting attendees to vote on. Design studios all submitted their best representative work for consideration, but it was Bus-A-Move that won the day.
“All the people voted for Bus-A-Move, and I thought that was cool. I don’t put much stock in awards presented by juries or academies, but the bus won a MacroMedia People’s Choice Award, and it’s the only award I covet. The only one I think is worth a damn.”
After the 1999 MacroMedia annual conference, Mike’s design went on permanent display at the MM HQ until Adobe bought out the company in 2005.
SPLITR
Mike has completed hundreds, likely thousands of design projects for clients throughout his career. The intricate connection he sees weaving through his life between the unvoiced design fascinations of his boyhood and the full-throated industrial projects completed under his watch best culminate in the creation of his dream car.
“My first car was a 1966 Mustang Fastback, in high school. I always thought ‘that’s a cool car, and it has always been my favorite car. In college I had to sell it and got rid of the car, but then later I had the idea to come back to it,” Mike says.
And so sometime in the new century Mike found a 1965 Ford Mustang shell somewhere in Charleston, South Carolina and brought it back home to Iowa on a flatbed truck. The inkling of a design was percolating in his head, something that would revolutionize what custom restored Mustangs could look like, while at the same time paying deep tribute to what they were.
“I did conceptual drawings and waited 10 years until I had enough money and time, once my kids were older, and then got in touch with the Ring Brothers in Wisconsin about collaborating on SPLITR.”
The Ring Brothers in Spring Green, WI, are world-famous in their niche, and have spent their whole lives tinkering on custom hot rods, specializing in aftermarket improvements for American muscle cars and Italian mid-engine Italian sports cars, among others. Mike was able to communicate with the builders his intricate vision and shepherd his SPLITR project through to completion.
“It goes back to being able to envision and communicate an idea clearly and then execute. Imagination is the front door to commerce and creation,” Mike says.
In time for the 50th Anniversary of the Ford Mustang’s entry into commercial production, Mike and the Ring Brothers took SPLITR to SEMA, the preeminent Las Vegas trade show for custom hot rods, short for Specialty Equipment Market Association.
“SEMA happens in Vegas every year, and is the largest car show event in the world. In order to enter a car, you have to be in the industry, either as a body shop or a parts distributor. It’s an industry insider event for industry insiders, but wide open to the public through and through.”
Mike’s custom red, white and black Mustang was displayed adjacent to the Ford Motor Company’s own booth, and when the iconic motor car company finished its own stage presentation in front of ten thousand industry insiders, the public address announcer asked those in attendance to turn around and watch the curtain drop on SPLITR.
In 2016 at its unveiling, SPLITR earned sustained applause. Whooping and hollering led to loud tribal chanting. All the noise that a car-crazy crowd could make over a custom V8 Mustang Fastback, the car-crazy crown made over SPLITR. At the 2016 SEMA show in Las Vegas, SPLITR turned everybody’s head and made them stop and stare and take notice.
“Not a single original part of the car remained. Maybe two percent. Normally the Ring Brothers only ever do their own designs, but they saw my renderings and made it reality. And from that single unveiling we must have had 10 international magazine cover stories on SPLITR. Hundreds and hundreds of articles in car aficionado magazines. Mustang experts wrote things like ‘SPLITR might be the most beautiful Mustang, ever!’.”
For Mike, the success of SPLITR brought him right back to the Montgomery Ward bike he customized in grade school to look like a Yamaha MotoGP bike.
“Have I been on a predetermined course my whole life? With each project leading to the next as an accumulation of my skills? Or has my whole life been an intersection with design and art, gravitating into place over time? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that I have been able to see things about 10 years ahead of their time in the design world. And I know that seeing things ahead of time is what sets Fab+ apart from the rest.:
WHY WORK?
Mike and his colleagues built the Fab+ shop in Kansas City in the model of a Formula One production facility, capable of taking a project from drawing to design to testing and eventually production, finished in custom paint and ready for delivery under one roof. His work world has accelerated into the fulfillment of a lifelong dream and the beginning of a new kind of total design company.
“Most people are a little intimidated by me because I don’t get rosy about things. I get down to business, I pay attention and listen, I don’t interrupt. I only ever add validity, I’m a serious person. I’ve always been that way,” Mike says.
Clients find Mike because they are looking for the work he does. And Mike chooses clients because they want his design team and his expertise, not the other way around.
“We bring more to the table at Fab+ than anybody else, but we choose our clients based on the field they work in, because we want to work with companies that help people feel better. That’s why we work with Credit Unions, because finances can be intimidating, and Credit Unions need help,” Mike says.
“Craftsmanship, aesthetics, the last little 10 percent of a construction project that we do as the higher expression of design, it’s all creative work for us. We do the work because the joy of picking the right projects never ends.”