Affairs

Proper Mag­a­zine is a men’s mag­a­zine based in the North West of the UK. Sure, they add to the cur­rent wide bunch of menswear mag­a­zines out there, but quite unlike the oth­ers, the good guys at Proper are not tak­ing things (or them­selves) too seri­ously. The witty gags and on-point com­men­tary tossed around with a healthy atti­tude make Proper a pleas­ant excep­tion among the rest of the pack.

Fea­tur­ing Ian Paley of Garb­store, Takeshi Ofuchi from Post Over­alls and the British heavy­weights Mikkel Rude among oth­ers, the new issue # 10 is out very soon and avail­able for pre-order at the moment through their web­site. It’s over 100 pages in full color, bound but not sta­pled. And oh, it seems they’ve got some­thing of a fea­ture of our lit­tle project with Fredrik­son up in there as well… Take a look!

www.propermag.com

FLOW­mar­ket is a store that mate­ri­al­izes our imma­te­r­ial needs. It’s funny how an empty sealed can can con­tain such poten­tial — take a 45g/1.5oz of silence, emo­tional expres­sion, imper­fec­tion or sus­tain­able vision and there you go!

Please visit them at www.theflowmarket.com.

Pod­cast num­ber four by Mag­nus Blomkvist.

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Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow

Del Toro is a small com­pany run by three stu­dent friends who have taken a bold step into man­u­fac­tur­ing clas­sic vel­vet slip­pers. Hail­ing from Miami, Florida, the com­pany has been in oper­a­tion for a few years now and has found its mar­ket by ratio­nal­iz­ing this usu­ally very high end related (and overtly expen­sive) item with­out com­pro­mis­ing a bit on the qual­ity. The shoes are hand­made in Spain and the embroi­der­ing is done in-house in South­ern Florida. The com­pany founder Matthew Cheval­lard shared some of his thought about Del Toro just a while ago.

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Photo by theselby.com

Rick and Michael Mast are the Mast Broth­ers, the only bean to bar choco­late mak­ers in New York City. In a rel­a­tively short time, Mast Broth­ers choco­late has become very pop­u­lar. The whole process of mak­ing choco­late by hand from sourc­ing the beans to hand­wrap­ping the bars surely sounds like a chal­lenge for just two guys, but the chal­lenge is in fact the rea­son that excites and moti­vates the broth­ers the most to get­ting their hands dirty every morn­ing. As they sharply note them­selves, their approach is a new way of hand­craft­ing food, or more pre­cisely, an old way that is (per­ceived) new again.

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Our pod­cast series con­tin­ues. Num­ber three by Fummer.

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Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow

Oh my! We’re get­ting Nordi­cal next Sat­ur­day. Dølle Jølle will be there from Oslo, Mag­nus sort of from Swe­den and Jaakko, you, me from Fin­land! Get involved in Face­book too. More info to fol­low and maybe a con­test next week. Mean­while enjoy our new pod­cast with Dølle Jølle. See you next Saturday!

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow

We bumped into the mys­te­ri­ous world of London’s Secret Cin­ema some time ago. Although it is not the lat­est news, we decided to share this imag­i­na­tive con­cept with you in the hope of see­ing and engag­ing in some­thing alike here in Helsinki in the future… Some­thing to def­i­nitely look for­ward to for film enthu­si­asts like ourselves!

Secret Cin­ema is a monthly series of secret film events in undis­closed loca­tions. Hints about the upcom­ing event, usu­ally the date, time and loca­tion but scarcely any­thing else, are sent out to Secret Cinema’s newslet­ter sub­scribers and social media fol­low­ers a few days prior to the show time. In most cases the par­tic­i­pants are also encour­aged to dress up along the theme, which is intro­duced with vague, mind-boggling word­plays and quotes.

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We’re work­ing on a series of pod­casts where we invite our friends to play some jams for us. If you’re lack­ing music at the office like we do, please tune in. The first episode by Toni Halo.

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Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow

The pop­u­lar­ity of bicy­cling as a way of com­mut­ing and also the whole cul­ture around the sport has been ris­ing enor­mously dur­ing the last five years or so. It seems, sadly, that pub­lic decision-makers and city boards in many cities (with some excep­tions like Copen­hagen and Paris) are not respond­ing to this change as rapidly as they should, and the grow­ing need of essen­tial improve­ments like addi­tional cycle lanes and park­ing spaces is not taken seri­ously enough. Quite on the con­trary, pri­vate busi­nesses and inde­pen­dent entre­pre­neurs around Europe have stepped up on many lev­els to offer new ser­vices and prod­ucts for the urban riders.

Look mum no hands!, a com­bi­na­tion space of theme cafe, bar and bike work­shop in Lon­don, is a great exam­ple of the kind of new ser­vice not prob­a­bly fea­si­ble until recently. This nicely reshaped ex garage space offers a con­ve­nient pit stop for the city’s cyclists where it’s really easy to take your bike inside, relax and have a Square Mile espresso while get­ting flat tires fixed. You can also enjoy locally pro­duced sal­ads, pies and cakes and pop some Bel­gian micro­brews as the Tour and other cycle races play on the big screen.

We had a quick chat with Lewin Chalk­ley of Look mum no hands! to find out a bit more about this beloved new space.

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