The Quality Makers: Lisa + Michael Fine of Quiet Town
Founders Lisa + Michael Fine of Quiet Town
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After living in NYC for 20+ years, Lisa + Michael Fine relocated to the Bay Area. Their new hometown provides an endless amount of inspiration, both environmentally and visually. The showers are faster (in the name of water conservation) but their lives are slower as they’re taking in the nature surrounding them.
When Lisa + Michael first launched Quiet Town six years ago, they identified as a Brooklyn brand. It was all hustle and buzz and energy as they built this business on nights and weekends. But really, their trunk was packed with beach gear 365 days of the year as they endlessly dreamed of perpetual blue skies and warm sun. So here they finally are, in their own little quiet town. California has and will continue to influence their photo shoots, color stories and visual references. But their mission to create sustainable, thoughtful, functional things for your home and life is stronger than ever. Take a deep dive into this couple’s colorful journey as you read below.
Credit: Quiet Town
Tell me about yourselves.
Lisa: I'm from Miami, Florida. My background is in the fashion world – I was working as an editor at a few magazines when I first landed in Manhattan. I was the director of styling at Madewell for about 11 years. That was my first experience working in the brand world, understanding how to launch a new project, how to market it and most importantly, how to introduce it to the world.
Michael: I'm from New York. Lisa and I lived there together for 22 years. I actually worked in advertising sales, funnily enough in magazines, back in the day. I’ve also been a photographer for the past 15-17 years before starting Quiet Town, and now I basically shoot the majority of our content.
What led you to choose Quiet Town as the name of your brand?
Michael: There's a song by an artist named Josh Rouse, which is called Quiet Town, and that’s an artist we both really admire. When we would drive to our weekend house in the North Fork of Long Island, we found ourselves casually throwing out name ideas. In the midst of us joking around, one of us threw out Quiet Town. I don’t even think the song was playing! But we both fell in love with it because after living in the city for so long, I realized that deep down, I'm more of a quiet, nature person. I need solitude and space and fresh air.
We’re both very warm weather people, hate the cold. We would always dream of getting to our quiet town. Every weekend we found ourselves planning our next adventure outside of the city – hiking or going to the beach, we just wanted to escape the noise and chaos. So we thought: how do you find your quiet town? Well, maybe by creating this solace in your bathroom, especially when you’re living in that crazy city environment.
Credit: Quiet Town
What sparked your interest to start a bathroom accessory brand? How are your personal journeys related to that creation?
Lisa: We both equally love furnishing a home – from art and architecture to design. We’ve always gravitated towards colors and textures and would buy piles and piles of it when we would travel. But then we’re walking down the aisle at Bed, Bath and Beyond, thinking: is this really all that’s out there? Especially for people that are deeply invested in creating a home that feels unique, personal and well made, it struck me that this could be a creative project of mine.
Mind you, I was deep in the weeds at Madewell, working crazy hours. We'd also just had a baby who didn't sleep, but I simply couldn’t shake this idea. I would be up in the middle of the night, and my brain would drift into the world of shower curtains. I started to slowly assemble little bits and pieces together but I was sleep deprived and working full time, so I only did this at night and on the weekends.
Michael was a freelance photographer at the time and saw me struggling, so he eventually stepped in and did all the heavy lifting. What got him interested was the imagery, creation and branding of it all. The first shoot we ever did, I wasn’t even there because I had to go to work, Michael took all of these shower curtains to the beach with an assistant and some ropes. He shot our first campaign on his own, which we ended up using as our opening / coming soon page on the website. He really built the structure of the business. We didn’t launch until about 6 years after I had the initial idea.
Credit: Quiet Town
Tell me more about this move from Brooklyn to California. Did that shift influence the design and aesthetic, maybe even the philosophy, of your brand?
Michael: The move was 20 years in the making. I had fallen in love with San Francisco a long time ago, and I convinced Lisa to move with me. We moved there around 9/11, spent about a year there, but then moved back to NYC. I still felt the need to get back to California though, and finally in 2022, Quiet Town was at a place where we felt like we could do it on our own terms. Somebody told us to check out this little town outside San Francisco, which we did and we fell in love with it. It just made sense from a lifestyle perspective. Lisa can speak more about the design, but the truth is that our brand has always had that California, laid back, sunshine feel.
Lisa: We've always been in this West Coast, California mindset. We would visit my brother who lived in LA, and the light, the smells, the flowers… between the jasmine and the eucalyptus, we knew we were coming back. Our design aesthetic hasn’t really changed that much in terms of the move. I know California is changing how we do things, but for the most part, this has always been who we were deep down. I feel like we’ve finally landed in our quiet town. It was always esoteric, we were always searching for it, but now we’ve settled in Marin County, in our little town called San Anselmo. Right before this call, we walked our dog down in the town of Fairfax, which is this dreamy, little, Western, California town where they have live music venues, awesome restaurants and everybody knows each other, so you run into friends all the time, AND it’s surrounded by hills and mountains.
What does creating thoughtful and functional things for your home mean to you?
Lisa: When we launched Quiet Town, we wanted to make sure that people were going to use our products on a daily basis. There were already so many beautiful, ephemeral additions to the home that we knew were covered in the market. Shower curtains was something that was banal, but simultaneously and intrinsically linked to your day to day life. We thought: we could redesign and reconsider shower curtains, and bring them to someone in a more thoughtful and responsible way. That ended up being our guiding light for the brand in terms of the categories we wanted to create within.
The other product I had on my list was Bath Rugs. At the time, the only option was a glorified, really heavy towel, and I knew we could create something better. We ended up creating all-cotton rugs which would dry really quickly, but we got creative with the patterns and colors. It felt like a rug you would put anywhere in your home, so that’s how we married function and design.
Credit: Quiet Town
Michael: For me, it's just the creation of something that really brings people joy. We actually have a little pop up shop going on at our friend’s really beautiful local clothing store, with a little coffee shop in it. Another friend went to check it out, and said: “When I look at your products, I think these are happy people. These are people who have a lot of joy.” To hear somebody say that felt so rewarding, because it can be challenging getting people excited about a shower curtain.
We've always considered ourselves a lifestyle brand, and we hope people notice that we’re more than just a single product. That’s why we made the content creation portion of our brand the most important part. We've never done things in a traditional way. We've never thought that photos have to be shot in the bathroom. Unlike other brands that sell shower curtains, we just wanted to do what felt good, because if it makes us feel good, maybe it'll make the consumer feel good too. We want to do something that feels aspirational, because this is exciting to us. Otherwise it just gets stale and boring really quickly.
How do sustainability and environmentalism play a role in your brand?
Lisa: From the very beginning, one of the first commitments that Michael and I made was that we wouldn't work with a factory that wasn't willing to save all of our scraps and remnants. We wanted a factory that didn't throw anything away from our production. We produced an ongoing, collaborative project called Re:Canvas, where we partnered with designers and artists, and reused all of our canvas scraps. It's something we enjoy, but we also just love our canvas so much. It took so much time to develop it and we couldn’t imagine just throwing it away. There's so many possibilities in terms of the beauty we could create with it.
Our Sun Shower Curtains are made out of plastic. They’re EDA approved, but we decided to use plastic because we wanted the curtains to last a really long time. People have been using the same sun shower curtain for 3 or 4 years because it's durable and you can clean it. We actually have a lot of information on the site on how to clean it and the products that we like to use to do so. We’ve also been working on a research and development project for our Sun Shower Curtains that will be launching later this year. We partnered with a sustainable design company to create a circular product, meaning that they never hit the landfill.
Credit: Quiet Town
This model obviously goes against normal business practices, where you try to convince people that they need to buy something new, even when they don’t. We really tried to encourage people to hold onto all of our products for as long as possible. We would never make anything that doesn't last a long time, and isn't made in the most responsible way possible. We move really slowly so that we aren't making fast decisions that we're not proud of, because at the end of the day, we worry about our planet just like everybody else. We have kids, we want to be in nature, and we want to live responsibly both in our personal lives and in our business.
In terms of our factories: all of our towels are made in Portugal, all of our rugs are made in a family-owned factory in India where everything is hand-woven, our shower curtain hooks are made in Missouri at a wire-bending company, and our canvas curtains are made in our original Brooklyn factory, as well as in another family-owned factory in India that I visited recently. And lastly, our Sun Shower Curtains are produced in a factory in China. It's the same factory that’s made our material from the very beginning.
What would you say differentiates you from other brands in the industry?
There aren't a lot of brands like us. We are still focused on this one bathroom category for now. We really respect that category and treat it with a forward thinking design, a lot of product integrity, and a lot of consideration on all details, aspects of production, packaging and more. Although we are bringing more products into this world, we hope people notice that we’re trying our best to do it in the most sustainable way possible. At the end of the day, we hope people appreciate the thoughtfulness, the design, the aesthetic and the quality of our products. But most importantly, we aim to continue to become even more sustainable, and we strive to lighten and bring color and joy into the spaces and the lives of our customers.