Ann Ringstrand

The family sewing factory launched life as a designer
In recent years, designer Ann Ringstrand has worked with fashion and interior design,and her creations have been inspired by yoga. She will soon be releasing Markslöjd’s firstever textile interior decor collection.

As a child, Ann regularly visited hergrandfather and father’s sewing factory in Borås. As she got older, the seamstresses at the factory helped her with her own sewing projects. Now Ann is a designer and over the years, she has designed fashion for her brand HOPE and interior decor.Ann notes a difference between designing fashion and interior decor–unlike interior decor,fashion should work immediately on the body, and designing a fit for a body in motion requiresspecial expertise. When it comes to interior design, there are higher demands for sustainabilityand stability. But this is changing, she adds, because fashion is also shifting to more sustainable processes.
Ann explains that she is inspired by art, architecture and dance. She is also inspired by the work,life choices and workprocesses of creative people, especially women like Georgia O’Keeffe, Hilma af Klint, Ana Laguna, Louise Bourgeois and Pina Bausch. Another major part of Ann’s lifeis yoga. She explains how yoga has influenced her designs through the insight that everyone shares the same need for good functionality and clear communication. This helps her understand the relationship between herself and the people who use her designs.

Yoga also helps her visualize the environment and mood in which her products will bloom to their fullest. She adds that she wants to be one with the customer, whether that is with a pair of pants or a warm blanket.
Ann will soon be releasing the first textile interior decor collection for Markslöjd. She says it has been an honor to be part of creating a new business area for one of Sweden’s strongest lighting brands. The design process for the collection has been incredibly fun and has involved abundant creative freedom, adds Ann. When she was asked by Markslöjd, she had already starting sketching designs that she was keen to see as textile patterns.
 She printed the patterns in New York at her studio at that time, and when she moved home to the studio in Stockholm, she developed and finished the design especially for Markslöjd. The textiles are designed for the social spaces of the home, like the kitchen, dining room and living room. To set the mood for the collection, she explored societal tendencies in art and culture. Based on what she found, she created three color themes, each inspired by the senses of taste and smell. Cooking and serving food and socializing were major sources of inspiration for this collection, Ann adds.

The collection is called Unite and the first theme is Warm Cinnamon Terra, with warm colors like cinnamon, earth, terra cotta, clay, brick, powder pink, burnt red, rust brown and a cheerful bubblegum pink. The second theme is Green Cardamom Earth, which takes us out into nature, with inspiration from the queen of spices: cardamom. The hues also include greens like olive, khaki and a cool forest green, as well as vibrant mint as an accent color. The third and final theme is Neutral Salt and Pepper, with neutral colors like white, off-white beige, gray and black.

Ann jumped between the color groups when coloring the patterns of the collection’s various themes, in order to give customers a sense of how to combine the patterned and solid textiles. As for the collection’s materials, Ann chose high quality and a tactile focus, incorporating contrasts like wrinkled linen, a soft cotton-linen blend, pressed cotton and a wool-cashmere blend. Ann considers it important to use materials that last over time in both style and quality. Sustainability includes not only materials and shipping, but also respect for time, resources, people and use. She explains how working with digital instructions, samples and prototypes can minimize shipping and streamline the selection process to prevent the need to develop more variations than those offered to customers. The materials in the collection are OEKO TEX certified, Organic Cotton certified, and include EU Flax. The producers in India, Portugal and Italy are high-quality manufacturers with high demands for a sustainable environment for their employees, concludes Ann.

NAME: Ann Ringstrand
PROFESSION: Designer
LIVES IN: Stockholm
COMING UP: Markslöjd’s first textile interior decor collection