Meet Oleg Mikhailik and Roxanna Salceda of Project Rotate

Today we’d like to introduce you to Oleg Mikhailik and Roxanna Salceda.

Hi Oleg and Roxanna, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Project Rotate takes its roots in a warehouse subdivision in Vernon back in 2018. It emerged from an urgent itch to make things by hand. Both Roxanna and I come from the world of architecture (which we’re still very much into this day). While we feel a sense of belonging in architecture as a field, we found ourselves at odds with the sit-down nature of our desk jobs at the time and decided to try our hand at building something together. This was fueled partially by our obsession with fabrication tools and served as a long-standing excuse to acquire and operate laser cutters, 3d printers, drill presses and all sorts of other contraptions designed to make stuff. Our flagship product – the topographic wall clock – was conceived as a gift from Oleg to Roxanna for New Year in 2017 and shortly after, garnered enough interest among family and friends to be a viable custom offering we could hand-make in our shop. So we did. And now, five years and three relocations later, two collaborations, one pandemic, and countless design and craft festivals later, we’re still in the running. We are continuously improving, fine-tuning, and updating the original design while at the same time expanding our product line with new items which are either in the shop or on the prototype bench as we speak.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It definitely had its ups and downs. And frankly, we didn’t expect it to be a smooth upward trajectory. Starting anything is the hardest part of doing it. The setup and running costs of a business in LA, particularly an LLC can be steep when it comes to taxes. And since our product is 100% custom and made to order, it’s somewhat feast-or-famine when it comes to orders coming in.

Project Rotate is also not our sole commitment professionally. Both Roxanna and myself teach architecture part-time at Pasadena City College and co-run an independent architectural design studio. So as you can imagine being able to consistently commit hours of daylight to all of these can be hard. As such, a lot of ideas, prototyping, brainstorming, and even production at Rotate happen after midnight. Although we don’t mind – we’re both night owls by nature and I guess our combined 12 years of architecture school is a clear testament to that.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Project Rotate?
We are Project Rotate. We’re based in Lincoln Heights, we have two creative brains onboard and we’re not afraid to use them!

…No, but really, we believe any success that has come our way to date is 100% a yield of us working well together. We both hail from architecture, with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in the field, along with over ten years of experience working in different firms. Not that degrees themselves really make or break a professional, but just to be clear for those uninitiated – B.Arch is five years long, most of which consists of studio classes where you, as a student, constantly make, break, prototype, draw, create and discard good ideas for better ones. Admittedly it’s a bit polarizing – half the people graduating from architecture schools will never want to think about this again, the other half wouldn’t have it any other way for the rest of their careers. We’re the latter. And the fact that we hand-make everything in our shop ourselves is not only a point of hyper-local grass-roots pride but also somewhat in our blood as the way to operate.

This is part of the reason why we don’t plan to outsource our production. On the one hand, it’s a bit easier to do QA/QC, but mainly this is because we want to actually do this work ourselves. I would say this is one of the things we’re most proud of, and at the same time, it’s also something that sets us apart in the field of product design.

Probably the most exciting time in our shop is when we prototype new products. It’s an iterative process, and it gets frustrating. But there is always a moment, and sometimes it’s way into the night, or even outside the shop altogether, when a really great idea or a solution to a long-standing design block, just clicks into place, and you want nothing more than to lock yourself in the shop and test it, and flush it out into a functional prototype.

We could write ad-nauseum about what we do and how we do it, but we think the best way to see what we’re up to is to find us in person at Renegade art fair in LA or Long Beach every fall or any number of other design fairs happening around the same time and see it in person!

How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
We’ve done some collaborations in our brief running history, and they range from co-developing or branding our products to teaming up with other makers that have equipment which we may not. Within the last year or so, we were in dire need of a print shop that could do high-quality, large-volume prints for our packaging, and happened upon a studio a block away from where we live – Paperleaf Press! They’re great. The unsung perks of being located in post-industrial parts of Los Angeles is you’ll sooner or later find that you’re surrounded by others like yourself, working on something cool, and constantly on a lookout for opportunities to expand and grow their operation. And who knows, you may just have the capabilities they desperately need in-house – and vice versa!

One aspect of our operation which we take quite seriously is our carbon footprint. As a business that does a lot of work with acrylic plastics, we’ve explored ways to recycle and minimize our leftovers. To do this, we’ve reached out to a really cool network called Precious Plastics, who have chapters all over the world – and what they do is build and operate open-source machinery for recycling and repurposing different types of plastics to keep them out of landfills, and instead make stuff people would want out of them. It’s really quite brilliant.

Pricing:

• CONTOUR WALL CLOCK: $160-200
• HAND RAKE SET: $38
• LA HOLIDAY ORNAMENTS: $ 22-45 (sets of 3 or 6)
• MAILABLE WOODEN POSTCARDS: $7

Contact Info:

• Website: projectrotate.com
• Instagram: @project_rotate
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/projectrotate

Image Credits
All photos ©Oleg + Roxanna Mikhailik