"The distractions are OK. They're enriching distractions," Mike Dacey of Repeat Press said with a laugh when asked about the social atmosphere of his work.
If only everyone could say so much.
Dacey runs his one-man business out of a warehouse owned by Fringe, a far-from-conventional design and arts collective based in Somerville's Union Square. How many people can say something so positive about distractions, much less mean it? More importantly, who depends on distractions for their livelihoods? The answer: the men and women of Fringe.
In the summer of 2009, Dacey, painter Autumn Ahn and a small collection of creative folk learned about and started renting the empty 4,400-square-foot floor of a building that had been used as a woodworking shop. With the help of other like-minded people, including filmmaker Steven "Stebs"Schinnerer, they cleaned the space, put up some walls and began attracting the people who would comprise the first incarnation of Fringe.
After months of backbreaking work, Fringe transformed from a "disturbingly gross" place, in Schinnerer's words, to an eclectic host for a collective of small businesses.
Fringe is proving itself to be a powerhouse of more than a dozen artists and businesses. Currently, its areas of expertise include beer brewing, creating green roofs, printmaking, bicycle building and web design. Even without a storefront, Fringe's online presence, combined with word of mouth, has brought the collective no shortage of customers or publicity.
"There's momentum. We keep getting really good people, talented people," Dacey said. "We're getting stronger and stronger."
Fringe exuded energy and creativity even on a lazy Sunday afternoon. The warehouse building is only loosely partitioned into offices and workspaces, which leaves the inner workings of businesses accessible and open. Paintings and prints adorn most of the walls.
Fringe's so-called conference room is little more than a raw wood table surrounded by chairs. The building's past life as a woodshop is easy to imagine given the pipes snaking along the ceiling. The place practically oozes inspiration, and that's even before people come into the picture.
Schinnerer, 25, is one of Fringe's original members. He was homeless and broke when he found the collective and has now been in professional film work for the past year and a half under the name Paper Fortress.
"I just hit the ground running when I had this place. I started getting a lot of attention just from stuff on the web," Schinnerer said.
Like many other Fringe members, he credits Fringe's atmosphere as influential in impressive productivity and success.
"This is a place you can come to and just be incredibly inspired. Anybody who is ever in here is working their asses off, building something that they want to build," Schinnerer said.
Furthermore, Schinnerer believes that Fringe is unique as a business arrangement.
"People come here and say, ‘this is so New York, this is so Brooklyn,' but I actually think it's something completely original," he said.
Dacey — also a Fringe member from the very beginning — owns Repeat Press, a full-scale printing press studio that can accommodate a huge variety of printing needs with its combination of photopolymer platemaking capabilities and vast collection of vintage wood type.
He said that, unlike many studio spaces, people don't use Fringe as complements to their primary jobs.
"[Fringe] isn't an extracurricular," he said. "It's a place for people who [are] looking for something longer term, and who have more of a budget for it."
In addition, Dacey said that Fringe is business-friendly to artists, which sets it apart from many other artist collectives.
"I've tried to put spaces together before, but Fringe really worked because it was business-focused, rather than artist-focused," Dacey said.
He believes that Fringe's loose business structure helps foster cooperation and support among Fringe's members.
"Other places are based off a business model because you're a client of a space. There's a certain level of expectation. Here, we're all just kind of in it together," he said.
Fringe members often share contacts with and garner clients for one another, realizing the favor will eventually be returned. Members also help each other with the economic and financial aspects of their businesses. This "web" of knowledge-sharing has created a sense of strength and unity at Fringe.
"We [Fringe's founders] started out part-time, but within six months or so, we were able to transition to full-time. We can directly attribute that to the networking and the people this put us in touch with," Dacey said.
Mark Winterer, director of operations and one of the two co-founders of Recover Green Roofs, LLC, echoed this view of Fringe.
"You meet people who will expand your network; you never know who you could meet who could be a springboard for something else," Winterer said.
In fact, one of Recover's current projects exists solely because of a serendipitous meeting with the owner of Casa B, a soon-to-open Somerville tapas joint.
"The owner was doing business with someone else in Fringe, and then she saw us," Winterer said. "She said she really wanted a green wall for her restaurant."
Winterer also mentioned how helpful it is to have other creative minds around him to collaborate with. Recover has undertaken 15 vastly different projects to date, and he emphasized the importance of input from others in Fringe.
"[The other people] definitely make it fun to come to work every day. It's easy to spend a lot of time here," he said.
One of Fringe's newest additions is Natalya Zahn, an illustrator and designer who has worked with clients including National Geographic, the Harvard Museum of Natural History and McSweeney's under the moniker studio/animaux.
Zahn has been commissioned for a wide range of projects, but she said her passion for animals is pushing her to "try to shift her career into more of a natural science illustrator."
She discovered the collective when she was participating in a nation wide experimental publication, Longshot Magazine. When she saw that Fringe — one of the magazine's satellite offices — had an opening, she applied immediately and got the spot.
"I had been working out of a home office for three years; I realized I was a bit starved for creative influence and community," Zahn said.
Fringe had both the community, and the atmosphere she was looking for.
"Everybody's so passionate about what they're doing. I felt that energy the moment I walked in and started checking things out," she said.
Zahn added that working for herself — like everyone does at Fringe — is both more time-consuming and more rewarding than working for a conventional boss.
Despite her recent arrival, Zahn never felt like an outsider at the collective. Instead, Fringe's supportive members and personalized spaces quickly had her feeling at home.
"I just got plugged in. There was no getting to know people slowly. That's just the feel of the place, and the kind of people it attracts," she said. "All the spaces are so customized; it's whatever you want it to be. You really have control over your own square footage," she said.
In addition to its unique environment, Zahn also appreciates the fact that Fringe consciously makes itself more marketable to clients by hosting as wide a distribution of professionals at the collective as possible.
"We try not to have a whole lot of overlap with the people who are here. We look for people who complement each other — that way, there is more to appeal to each client," she said.
It is this lack of overlap that leads to situations like Winterer's, where chance encounters end up benefitting both clients and designers.
So, save becoming an intensely self-motivated designer or a client looking for some creativity, how could one go about getting involved in Fringe?
Fringe hosts a "co-working" day every Tuesday, where anyone can spend $10 and hang out at Fringe all day — plus, they'll get free coffee and Wi-Fi. The collective also has a monthly cocktail night at Atwood's Tavern in Cambridge, where distractions would, no doubt, be welcomed.
