In the souvenir booklet visitors to Esprit’s headquarters could purchase, Doug Tompkins wrote that “As most of our visitors already know, we are a clothing manufacturer; and fabrics, color, texture and shape are ingredients found in both our products and in quilts. Workmanship also plays a big part in the final product. Our interest in quilts really emerged quite naturally from this close affinity. We have found that living among such masterpieces of design, color, and workmanship has inspired designs, tuned all of our senses to design and left us all a little bit, if not a lot richer.” Here is Esprit’s design room in the mid-1980s, with Tompkins’s motto hanging on the wall: “No detail is small.”

Title: 
Tumbling Block quilt in design workroom, Esprit Headquarters
Maker: 
Sharon Risedorph Photography
1989