Best of CH 2012: Cool Hunting Video
From venus flytraps to premium denim, our favorite pieces this year
With the holidays upon us it’s once again that time of year when we look back at Cool Hunting Video content in 2012. This year was a real gem with some fantastic pieces ranging from the world’s largest carnivorous plant nursery to the wacky International Banana Museum. Below is a list of some of our favorites from 2012, and here’s to more great videos in 2013!
California Carnivores
Earlier this year we trekked out into the beautiful farmland outside Sebastopol, California to visit California Carnivores, North America’s largest carnivorous plant nursery. We spoke with founder Peter D’Amato about his personal history with these hungry plants, their cultural significance and what it takes to raise up fantastical plants from seed. Taking in the active plant life, we watched Venus Flytraps chowing down and a got a peak inside the stomach of an American Pitcher Plant.
DL Skateboards
It’s well known that hiding behind the facades of many buildings in Brooklyn are an endless array of companies producing artisanal pickles and locally designed clothes but rarely can you wander down a street to find a product being made out on the concrete. We caught up with DL Skateboards, a unique young company that makes custom skate decks by hand on the sidewalk outside a Greenpoint apartment building and in a retrofitted box truck acquired in New Hampshire.
Photobooth
We took a trip to the Mission District in San Francisco to talk to Michael Shindler, co-founder of Photobooth. Photobooth serves as a retail space for classic camera gear, a gallery and, most interestingly, a tintype portrait studio. We talked to Shindler about the ins and outs of the tintype process, and the old school methods used to create the stunning portraits.
International Banana Museum
There are many interesting and odd things to be found off the shores of the dying Salton Sea in southern California but maybe one of the most unique is the International Banana Museum. Recently transplanted from Culver City, the museum occupies a squat building on the side of the Highway 111 in Mecca, CA, a relatively short drive south from Palm Springs. Housing the largest collection of banana paraphernalia in the world, the museum is a fascinating catalog of all the different ways the iconic fruit can take shape. For our latest video we stopped in and spoke to Fred “Banana Mon” Garbutt, who owns the collection and curates this curious collection.
Roy Denim
Hidden on a back street in Oakland, California in an unassuming warehouse lies what may be the pinnacle of denim craftsmanship in the US. Roy Denim is actually just one man, Roy Slaper, whose obsession with making jeans has driven his small business into the consciousness of denim heads everywhere. In our video we learn about Roy’s machine driven approach in creating his jeans, the birth of his business and how his obsessive attention to detail results in some of the toughest, nicest looking denim around.
