Christian Birky
• – • Ponyride
About the speaker
Christian Birky started Lazlo after graduating from Princeton in 2013, where a stint tutoring at a prison led to a thesis on prison policy. He has a background in social innovation spanning from youth-led grantmaking to a pony-powered, emissions-free lawn service he started at age 11 with his sister Kathryn.
Local partners
Heather Saunders Photography
Heather is the proud mother of 3 BRILLIANT kittens (a.k.a kids), a midcentury design devotee, a Jonathan Adler collector, a DWELL magazine subscriber, a Todd Oldham worshipper, a lover of pop culture + modern art.
She is profoundly inspired by graphic art, typography + architecture.
A nature lover + tree hugger, hiker + cloud watcher, pug owner, AMAZING dancer and a good singer (at least she thinks so) + hopeful world traveler.
So it only makes sense that the love and passion she has for her craft transcends the obvious capture. She is commited to photographing real, meaningful and powerful images. With a sense of humor and a genuine appreciation of family bonds, her vibrant imagery aims to reveal your authentic self + your amazing celebration, moment by moment, frame by frame.
Her work has been described as thoughtful, modern, cinematic + timeless. (+ a little “out of the box”). She aims to live her life in a sea of these same adjectives!
She has been a professional photographer for 18 years. Her work has been featured in/on The Knot, Theknot.com, Metroit Detroit Bride, HOUR Detroit Magazine, StyleMePretty.com, Love+Lavender.com, The New York Times, Carats + Cake.com, The Detroit News, Metro Times, The Food Network, My Modern Met, This is Colossal, The Washington Post, Vogue Portugal, Huffington Post amongst others.
Kind Bars
There’s healthy. There’s tasty. Then there’s healthy and tasty. KIND believes you deserve both. That’s why you’ll find all of their snacks are pretty much the nirvana of healthful tastiness. What began with just 8 bar varieties in 2004 has grown to over 22 bars and 6 Healthy Grains snackable clusters, and a multitude of new recipes being perfected and refined to their standards in the KIND kitchen.
Anthology Coffee
Our mission is to source, roast and serve the best coffee with uncompromised quality. It means more than craft and passion. We never stop challenging ourselves to produce coffee that is distinct, while constantly seeking improvement in all that we do. We start with the best small-lot coffees of the season and roast them to fully develop complexity while preserving the delicate intrinsic characteristics of the fruit. We then test each batch for quality using both traditional skills and contemporary tools.
Additional details
Doors open for coffee and mingling at 8:30. The talk will begin at 9:00.
February’s theme is ethics. Our speaker is Christian Birky, founder of Lazlo, a t-shirt producer who sources American-grown cotton and employs former Michigan inmates in its studio in Corktown’s Ponyride.
From Christian: “I plan to talk about what it means to be an ethical business in every sense of the word. I’ll talk about the lack of infrastructure in place to support ethical businesses, and why I see this as a tremendous opportunity, especially in Detroit. I’ll share some of the challenges we’ve faced in starting Lazlo and the framework we use to make decisions on everything from wages and pricing to fabric sourcing and product design.”
Location
Hosted at
Ponyride
1401 Vermont St
Detroit, Michigan United States 48216
When
–
Photographer Heather Saunders
