We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Benny Guzi a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Benny, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I have always been a creative at heart. My journey with creativity and art really started at a young age, and I have dabbled in all sorts of creative skills/hobbies. From when I was 12, starting out learning spray paint art and having my mom go with me to the hardware store to buy cans, to now, where I have my own clothing brand and am a full fledged designer, my journey is definitely convoluted, however, I can say without a doubt, i would not be in the position I am today if it was not for that. But I will go back a bit and outline the path of my creativity from then until now. At the age of 12 I got really into art and painting, however, I was never any good with sketching or traditional painting, and I still am not, and so I wanted to try and do something different. My mom was into painting at the time and she had some blank canvases lying around and so I started dabbling with spray paint art, kind of like what you see on the street with the artists selling canvases of the moon with city scapes. I was not the best at it and granted, I probably didn’t give it much of a chance to flourish and develop into a skill, but I was young and at that age the attention span is not there. By 14-15 I started getting influenced heavily by the music I was listening to at the time and music took over my life, I dabbled with playing various instruments such as guitar and drums, but what really captivated my focus from then until my mid 20’s was music production. I spent thousands of hours producing music and DJing, and that was really my passion for over a decade. I always wanted that to take off but it never did. Coming into my 20’s I had began upcycling and tailoring my own clothing, it was mostly out of necessity and my own cheapness of not wanting to throw away old clothes, and so naturally being handy with a sewing machine, I quickly found an outlet for that skill. I am not sure about the exact moment, but sometime around 25 I said to myself “I should just make my own clothes instead of upcycling”. And around that time I taught myself the skills to draft patterns and proof them, and little did I know that would be the skill I would need to build my brand. At the time, building a brand was not even on the agenda, these were just patterns I could make and use for myself, but slowly the concept of BLAN grew and the vision started coming together to form an actual brand and aesthetic.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I was not professionally trained, nor did I learn through any of the traditional channels. I am most proud of learning everything I know about the industry and about garment production all by myself and with trial and error. For this industry, there is no blueprint to build a brand, and there is a lot of gatekeeping involved. But with getting started you must be a problem solver, no matter the industry. Every time you cross one task off the to do list, 3 more get added, and it is never ending. The bigger the business gets, the bigger the problems, however, the more experience you have the better you can cope and tackle those problems. If there is one thing I want people to know about me and the brand is that, we did not just appear out of nowhere, a lot of effort and a lot of hard work went into this. There were plenty of sleepless nights and many times where the business was struggling with cash flow and I contemplated continuing, but through all that, you push through and eventually it grew into something which I could not have imagined 5 years prior.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The risk. With every piece of art and with every garment I design, I put a piece of myself into it, and I do so at the risk of it being rejected and torn apart by others, however, there is always the hope that it will be accepted and loved by the audience.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

You need to create, create, create. And that your first go at anything will be shit, I dont care who you are, nobody gets it perfect the first time. You have to accept and understand that since once you overcome that it will allow you to build on new skills and see your work objectively rather than through your foggy lens of “this is perfect” mentality.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://blannyc.com
• Instagram: @blan.nyc