The Kinfolk Entrepreneur

In The Kinfolk Entrepreneur, author Nathan Williams introduces readers to 40 creative business owners around the globe, offering an inspiring, in-depth look behind the scenes of their lives and their companies. Pairing insightful interviews with striking images of these men and women and their workspaces, The Kinfolk Entrepreneur makes business personal. The book profiles both budding and experienced entrepreneurs across a broad range of industries (from fashion designers to hoteliers) in cities across the globe (from Copenhagen to Dubai). Readers will learn how today’s industry leaders handle both their successes and failures, achieve work-life balance, find motivation in the face of adversity, and so much more. (The book jacket was updated in May 2022; some customers may receive an earlier version of the jacket.)

Kinfolk magazine—launched to great acclaim and instant buzz in 2011—is a quarterly journal about understated, unfussy entertaining. The journal has captured the imagination of readers nationwide, with content and an aesthetic that reflect a desire to go back to simpler times; to take a break from our busy lives; to build a community around a shared sensibility; and to foster the endless and energizing magic that results from sharing a meal with good friends. Now there’s The Kinfolk Table, a cookbook from the creators of the magazine, with profiles of 45 tastemakers who are cooking and entertaining in a way that is beautiful, uncomplicated, and inexpensive. Each of these home cooks—artisans, bloggers, chefs, writers, bakers, crafters—has provided one to three of the recipes they most love to share with others, whether they be simple breakfasts for two, one-pot dinners for six, or a perfectly composed sandwich for a solo picnic.

New York Times bestseller When The Kinfolk Table was published in 2013, it transformed the way readers across the globe thought about small gatherings. In this much-anticipated follow-up, Kinfolk founder Nathan Williams showcases how embracing that same ethos—of slowing down, simplifying your life, and cultivating community—allows you to create a more considered, beautiful, and intimate living space. The Kinfolk Home takes readers inside 35 homes around the world, from the United States, Scandinavia, Japan, and beyond. Some have constructed modern urban homes from blueprints, while others nurture their home’s long history. What all of these spaces have in common is that they’ve been put together carefully, slowly, and with great intention. Featuring inviting photographs and insightful profiles, interviews, and essays, each home tour is guaranteed to inspire.

They’re often behind the scenes, letting their work take center stage. But now Nathan Williams, founder and creative director of Kinfolk magazine and author of The Kinfolk Table, The Kinfolk Home, and The Kinfolk Entrepreneur—with over 250,000 copies in print combined—brings more than 90 of the most iconic and influential creative directors into the spotlight. In The Eye, we meet fashion designers like Claire Waight Keller and Thom Browne. Editorial directors like Fabien Baron and Marie-Amélie Sauvé. Tastemakers like Grace Coddington and Linda Rodin. We learn about the books they read, the mentors who guided them, their individual techniques for achieving success. We learn how they developed their eye—and how they’ve used it to communicate visual ideas that have captured generations and will shape the future. As an entrepreneur whose own work is defined by its specific and instantly recognizable aesthetic, Nathan Williams has a unique vision of contemporary culture that will make this an invaluable book for art directors, designers, photographers, stylists, and any creative professionals seeking inspiration and advice.

The next book in the highly successful Kinfolk series, exploring the art of travel across five continents.

“In this gorgeous, aspirational work, Burns, editor-in-chief of Kinfolk magazine, collects ‘stories about nature as nourishment’ along with photographs from homes across the globe to inspire people to bring more nature into their own abodes. . . . Expertly evoking a mood of understated luxury, this stunning spread will have design junkies drooling.” —Publishers Weekly A gardener with a secret oasis on a Parisian rooftop. An artist making faux flowers to brighten Manhattan apartments. A family of ranchers rewilding the American outback. Anchored around the idea of nature as nourishment, The Kinfolk Garden explores lush gardens and plantfilled homes around the world and introduces the inspiring people who coax them into bloom. Through visits to friends old and new, the Kinfolk team learns the secrets to a good garden, and what good a garden can do for our self-care, creativity and communities. Though many of the people we meet along the way champion the idea of following natural instincts rather than a set of prescriptive garden rules, there are practical tips throughout the book that offer advice on everything from growing your own produce to foraging for artful arrangements to simply keeping your houseplants alive a little longer than usual. The Kinfolk Garden is an invitation to engage with nature—to care for it, create with its beauty and cultivate new relationships around it—and offers inspiration and guidance to anyone looking to bring a little more greenery into their life.

In To Be an Entrepreneur, Julia Qermezi Huang focuses on Bangladesh's iAgent social-enterprise model, the set of economic processes that animate the delivery of this model, and the implications for women's empowerment. The book offers new ethnographic approaches that reincorporate relational economics into the study of social enterprise. It details the tactics, dilemmas, compromises, aspirations, and unexpected possibilities that digital social enterprise opens up for women entrepreneurs, and reveals the implications of policy models promoting women's empowerment: the failure of focusing on individual autonomy and independence. While describing the historical and incomplete transition of Bangladesh's development models from their roots in a patronage-based moral economy to a market-based social-enterprise arrangement, Huang concludes that market-driven interventions fail to grasp the sociopolitical and cultural contexts in which poverty and gender inequality are embedded and sustained.

The Touch is a new collaboration between Nathan Williams of Kinfolk and Jonas Bjerre-Poulsen of Norm Architects that welcome readers into over 25 inspiring spaces where interior design is not only visually appealing but engages all of the human senses. Through beautiful homes, hotels, museums, and retail stores--from contemporary designs by Ilse Crawford and Bijoy Jain to classic cases by Arne Jacobsen--readers are invited to explore how experiencing elements such as light, nature, materiality, color, and community can deliberately bring us back to our senses and imbue every day with a richer quality. In addition to stunning photography and interviews with design industry leaders as John Pawson and David Thulstrup, the book also details philosophical and art history references that reflect the tradition of design and color theory. For a deeper understanding of the concepts explored, The Touch includes an appendix which profiles architects such as Lina Bo Bardi and Richard Neutra. Heritage design pieces that helped influence this movement are also listed in the book. The Touch--Spaces Designed for the Senses by Kinfolk & Norm Architects. Published by gestalten.

Why are Scandinavians the world's happiest people? How do you get more Scandi-style in your life? â??What is lagom and how do you use it? Whether you want your apartment to look like it belongs in Copenhagen, to workout like a Norwegian or to make cinnamon buns like a Swede, this pocket edition of North is the perfect introduction to the world's happiest countries. Full of inspiration and ideas, how-tos and recipes to help you experience the very best of Scandinavian design, philosophy, cookery and culture, this honest behind-the-scenes look at the culture provides an invaluable insight into the wonderful and visually stunning world of Scandinavia. Like her viking ancestors before her, Brontë Aurell left Denmark to explore the world beyond home shores and in her travels has come to understand the fascination with her kinfolk, as well as seeing the idiosyncrasies of the Scandinavian lifestyle that locals take for granted. With a signature wit and a keen eye for detail, she takes you on a journey through fjords and mountains, farmlands and cities to better understand these three nations and what makes each one so unique. So get outdoors, learn the life lesson that there's no such thing as bad weather (only bad clothing) and you may discover your inner Scandi sooner than you think.

There’s no way to predict when we’ll suddenly be confronted with a new pathway in life. For every positive gain attributed to the idea of change, such as self-improvement, bold adventuring or collective hope, there often follows the very human instinct to feel quite the opposite: fear, self-doubt and loss. The latest issue of Kinfolk explores how best to navigate the conflicting forces of change and stability.