Interview: Of a Kind’s Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo on Style and Dandelion Dye

By Edith Zimmerman June 29, 2011

Have you been to Of a Kind? It’s a newish and wonderful fashion website on which co-owners/-editors Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo “support and promote on-the-rise designers … by giving you access to their unique products and stories.” What that means is — among other things — rising designers create limited-edition pieces specially for Of a Kind that you can buy and then brag about for the rest of your life. “Oh this? I got it from a website, but it was a brief … thing, and now it is … over.” Plus Claire and Erica, 27 and 28, are awesome and funny, so we asked them the nine most important questions we could think of about fashion and starting a business, and tried to make them look like a-holes in the process. Erica (on the right) responded without falling into our trap, that master a-hole!

“Of a Kind” is such a charming and poetic name, but what does it mean?
We came up with all sorts of terrible names before landing on Of a Kind. I believe at some point we owned exspedition.com, which was meant to express “extra-special edition” but really just conveyed ridiculousness. The concept behind the name we actually went with is that every product we release is limited-edition. So there are 20 of a kind, 30 of a kind … Also! There’s kind of a double meaning — like in a David Lynch film or something: We curate the site really carefully so that each of the designers we feature are of a certain type. They’re all really talented up-and-comers who you’re going to hear about again and again until you start complaining that you liked them way more when they were smaller and hadn’t sold out.

What should someone do if they went to your site and had never been there before?
In our dreams, you read the stories we post each week about our featured designer — right on the top of our homepage — fall in love with him/her, and buy the edition that designer made for us because you just can’t help yourself. But, you know, we’re cool if you click on the big, flashy image of the latest product and buy the thing. Or if you come to the site — ideally every day, thaaanks — to read the stories. (We do this feature called “In Character” where we pull together outfits suited for fictional fashion icons like Tess McGill and Angelica Pickles that we think you’ll like.)

Are you the best fashion website on the internet?
Are you trying to make us sound like a-holes? There are a lot of awesome fashion sites. We don’t have space to talk about them all. (Because you know how strict the internet is with space.) But we’ve had people tell us that they don’t usually like fashion sites but read ours, which is a pretty awesome compliment. We don’t take fashion so seriously. It’s fun. And so is getting to learn about designers who work in crazy wood shops or take inspiration from their grandmas.

What should someone wear to their own birthday party?
Whatever makes him/her feel good, duh. But no tiaras.

What are you both wearing right now?
Right now we’re working and eating cheese, and Claire is wearing an oversize chambray shirt with a white tank and leggings. It’s a look inspired by something she saw a woman wearing at Cafe Select (and also 1995 Gap ads). I’m wearing drawstring chambray shorts and a baseball tee. Something else we’ve learned: Using the word chambray makes everything sound a little chicer.

Are you both incredibly fashionable? Who’s more fashionable?
Anna Dello Russo is incredibly fashionable. We’re more like girls who know what they like and therefore have developed, cough, cough, personal style — but not in that, “Oh, I found this at a vintage shop in Belgium,” sort of way. I like borderline silly shoes but generally wear neutrals. Claire has better style. She mixes big gold jewelry from her great aunt Ruth with polished hand-me-downs from her mom (think wool cardigans with elbow patches) with, you know, 27-year-old-girl clothes.

And how do you start a company? Do you have to be insane or a genius or normal or rich or crazy or sleepless or drug-addicted?
You just do it. You have to be a little naïve. We always say that the one thing we’re confident about is our ignorance — we are afraid enough of F-ing things up to ask for help. In the beginning, when we came up with the idea, we didn’t say we were starting a business. We said we were working on this thing and would work on it until we hit a wall — it was like a fun little exercise. The wall we hit was realizing that we couldn’t keep working on it and doing our day jobs at the same time.

Let’s end this with a link to something amazing on Of a Kind. What should it be?
If this was a celebrity interview, I would tell you, “That’s like choosing a favorite child!” But it’s not. So you should go look at the necklace Erin Considine made for us. And when I say made I mean that she dyed the yarn with natural materials like onion peels and dandelion, wove said yarn into a seven-strand braid, and molded the brass piece that holds it all together. Oh, and girlfriend is in the process of starting a garden in Brooklyn so she can grow her dyeing ingredients because she really wasn’t doing enough.