Visitors to Susie Frazier’s workspace/showroom at the 78th Street Studios — whether her old cubbyhole off the building’s main event space or her current more spacious digs at the first-floor entrance — have felt a sense of tranquility and groundedness projected by what she calls her “earth-minded” art.
Created largely from natural materials she’s collected — branches, bark, seedpods, stones — and more recently, industrial castoffs, her work is pleasing to the eye. But she has a larger purpose to what she does. The sustainability aspect of her art has been much noted — that she repurposed found materials. But it’s bigger even than that.
“The undercurrent of all this is that it is an opportunity to reclaim some aspect of myself,” she says. “It was a therapeutic process to dive into things and find stuff that was broken and mend it and make it OK. I do this to find strength in myself.”
Frazier says she’s noticed how often people will purchase one of her pieces, whether it’s a wall art, jewelry, a candle holder or one of her popular mantra blocks which feature words like “evolve,” “believe,” “create,” “imagine,” “awaken” and more, and tell her that it spoke to some life change they were going through at the time.
And while she’s been successful in marketing her own work, this past year she felt the need to expand her reach, with more product lines, more relationships with other artists and craftspeople, and more partnerships with like-minded businesses such as yoga studios.
So she hired Julia Toke as managing partner, a job that brings Toke back to where she started: at the 78th Street Studios. She worked for artist Derek Hess and his manager Marty Geramita a decade ago when their gallery was one of the building’s first — and only — galleries. She then moved on to do p.r. for Cleveland-based Jakprints and worked as studio manager for photographers Barney Taxel and then James Douglas.
“I spent many years in real life training in different capacities of business, from running national ad campaigns, large-scale pr to managing studios,” says Toke. “When James moved here, I was charged to set up his business and introduce him to northeast Ohio. As we were going through the movers and shakers of northeast Ohio, I of course called Susie. She’s never shied away from helping build the community.”
When the job she was tasked to do for Douglas started to wind down, Frazier told her, “If you are interested, let me be the first one you call.” So she did.
“I felt from the moment I got here, Susie has shaped my path,” says Toke. “I saw that her company and this brand had the capacity to advance. We had similar outlooks, similar ethical values.”
The pair immediately started looking at things they could do differently to expand their potential. They started to keep regular hours during the week to augment the 1,500-2,000 people who pack the building every Third Friday evening. They also began to showcase the work of other designers, such as furniture makers, whose ethic felt sympathetic with Frazier’s. And they’ve started to redo the space regularly so that visitors will discover new things in a new environment.
“There are areas of focus we are looking at, like more deeply aligning ourselves with like-minded artists, designers and architects, licensing in a way that allows the thinking behind my design and aesthetic to live in other categories,” says Frazier.
Toke says Frazier’s work has been popular with those who visit her studio because people plug into the values behind it.
“The reason Susie’s fine art and products resonate with people is there is a deeper level to it,” she says. “The order she creates out of chaos helps people identify aspects of their own life. They’re specific to a person but also universal. Susie talks about her story but as she’s telling her story, she’s telling everyone else’s stories too. By being so vulnerable and truthful Susie is able to connect and help other people on their path.”
The two feel that 78th Street Studios is an ideal platform for launching Frazier’s work into the wider world.
“I feel like this is an amazing incubator,” says Toke. “The team that works here continues that legacy and builds a foundation for people to move on and do great things.”
“This building has been one of the most awesome entrepreneurial experiments,” says Frazier. “It’s sort of like a sandbox to put a business model out there. We’ve launched a lot of things out of this space, out of my old space too. We’ve launched a fine arts business and several product lines. Now we’re looking a how this space can be a hub for a movement we’re starting. And Julia sees beyond Cleveland and the property to see what we can do regionally and nationally.”
“The possibilities are endless,” says Toke. “Right now the next phase for us is just exposure in every facet of this business. Susie has the spirit and has spent an endless amount of time building this beautiful space, and it’s up to me to make the rest of the world aware of it.”
Susie Frazier Showroom’s showroom is open Monday-Friday @10am-4pm, and until 9pm on Fri 11/20. It will also be open Black Friday 11/27 @10am-7pm and Sat 11/28 @12-9pm.
