Eleanor Grosch credits former boyfriends for design success

Eleanor Grosch, 31
Designs fabric, stationery, sneakers, bike helmets, skate decks, and wallets.
www.justeleanor.com.

Eleanor Grosch owes it all to her ex-boyfriends. There was the one who suggested uploading the band posters she was designing for free to gigposters.com, the massive online gallery of rock poster art. The exposure landed her a T-shirt for Wilco. The next ex told her about Flatstock, a poster convention where she caught the eye of a writer from Nylon magazine. Keds, in the midst of transforming its brand from sensible to cool, saw the article in Nylon and called. That relationship lasted three years and resulted in skimmer after skimmer decorated with Grosch's bold, playful owls, giraffes, frogs, camels, and bluebirds.

Of course it's not all about being in the right place at the right time. Talent, accedes the humble designer, plays a role. Grosch's clean, graphic animal illustrations have been compared to the work of Alexander Girard and Charley Harper. The designer traces her preoccupation with animals to the plush harp seal she carried around as a kid. She'd already begun working in her modernist style, paring animals down to the point of abstraction, by the time she entered high school.

Since Grosch's first line with Keds launched in 2006, her designs have graced stationery, sneakers, bike helmets, skate decks, mugs, wallets, and fabric yardage - although, as she counsels her students at the University of the Arts, she has experienced more licensing failures than successes. And licensing deals, she tells them, require design compromises. Grosch considers the limited-edition screen prints she hand-pulls in her basement studio and sells online to be the truest expression of her style.

Grosch's latest collaborations include designing cards for the online stationery company Tinyprints and two collections of fabric yardage (sold at Spool, 1912 South St.) with Free Spirit Fabrics. Pheasant, Grosch's latest fabric line, is released this month.

Her lucrative relationship with Tinyprints was another case of being in the right place at the right time with the right talent. Grosch decided to design and print cards on her own dime after e-mailing her portfolio to a Tinyprints rep, who replied, "No, thanks." She took them in May to a stationery trade show in New York, where a different Tinyprints rep saw and commissioned her work.