Foreign.
You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio.
Brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs.
The show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business.
I'm Tom Edwards.
Frank Roop is an interior designer and the founder of the Textilion project, a direct to consumer platform making high end, 100% natural textiles accessible to design conscious individuals.
After years of curating textile schemes for private clients, he saw a gap in the market.
How do people without a designer find and combine the best materials for their homes?
This led to Textilium, which simplifies the process by transforming exclusive trade only fabrics into ready to use design schemes, removing the guesswork from selecting colors, textures and finishes.
So how do you take these once exclusive textiles and bring them to a new audience of creative.
Well, here's Frank with more on how the journey began.
So the Textilium project was something I thought about many years ago when I was working with a client in my interior design business.
And the client mentioned, how do you come up with all these textile schemes, you know, specifically for my home?
Because I was describing the trick of finding all these materials and there's, you know, literally hundreds of thousands that you cull through just to come up with schemes for a client.
And then you just said, how do you come up with that?
And I said, well, it's a ton of work.
And it made me start thinking about, you know, how do normal people that aren't working with designers or architects have access to those materials and if they did, how they even put together schemes, it's almost impossible.
So that's what made me think about how to come up with a system or a new type of business or way of looking at textiles in order to get it out to a lot more people.
So that's how the Textilium project started.
And also an equally as important thing as I'm very attuned to all natural materials and fibers and how they can bring joy into your home and making it something beautiful to live with.