GG2G has helped forge a niche for contemporary American Art with an environmental conscience... was this a goal that you two began with or did it happen naturally?

This was the goal. We started the company with this intent. Staying eco-conscience and green is what gives GG2G it's structure. The interesting thing for us is that we are constantly learning and reevaluating how we proceed as the business grows. While there are many things one can do to help the environment, it is not always that easy to maintain a green business. We are presented with challenges almost weekly. It keeps things exciting.

Do you ever find yourself in a situation where your artistic and environmental values are at odds with one another? Does one usually win over the other?

Only for a few seconds as a matter of our artistic process. We might like the look of a material or notion but once we try to source it as either recycled or U.S. made it becomes clear to us if it is viable or not. So, in this case environmental wins 99.9 percent of the time. It comes quite naturally to us as it is how we both live our lives on a daily bases and is not limited to our company philosophy.

Tell us a bit about your artist process. How has it been shaped by your respective educations & past experiences in the art world?

Luckily, we share a very similar working process and have backgrounds that resemble each others in many ways. Our past experiences and life style choices have everything to do with our working process. One of the major forces in shaping our creative process is keeping green. Often, we are challenged by our materials and the choices that we need to make to stay "Eco-friendly". Lots of artist function with self-imposed limitations as a means to create, so we are not dissimilar in this respect. Our material limitations make the design process... well...fun!

Aside from producing eco-friendly fashions, what environmental efforts does GG2G undertake?

We have successfully sourced all of our "notions" to be made in the U.S. with the exception of zippers (we are still working on that). We use two contract sewers right now as we are no longer able to keep-up sewing on our own. Both of our contractors are located within 6 miles of our business and employ fair hiring practices. We use recycled paper for our office supplies, use only recycled boxes and packaging for our shipping and donate a percentage of our profits to a local environmental group to help preserve the Sound (the body of water that we live on or near). At our present location we buy energy from Connecticut Clean Energy (energy from wind, solar and landfill methane) and recycle everything from our shop that can be recycled.

What inspired your unique ReVinylized line and how did the idea come about?

We started our business utilizing recycled, salvaged or vintage fabrics. We were constantly faced with fabric "shortages". While there is plenty of viable fabric out there to be recycled we were trying to maintain a particular "look" which made some of those fabrics unusable to us (Don't worry we have found a number of sources for recycling those fabrics). One afternoon as we were driving down interstate 95 we noticed a billboard that read "I Wage Peace.org" and we thought it would be fun and challenging to make handbags out of that material. The sheer size alone could help solve our fabric shortages. First we were drawn to the message on the billboard then the billboard itself. As we were to learn later the owner of that billboard was also the owner of the outdoor advertising company and come to find out Day's neighbor. It was synchronistic.

Any big plans for the future of GG2G?

We are always looking towards the future. We will be introducing three new bags to our line in Feb. 08, and have a number of projects lined up. Right now we would like to keep those quiet until all the details are worked out.

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