Daylight and Bob Smith: creating a throwback open house for Portland Design Week

Daylight is proud to bring Oregonians and Californians together through good design, your favorite sweatshirt and a little help from Bob Smith.

We’ll be hosting our annual Daylight Open House on April 28th in support of Design Week Portland, a weeklong, citywide series of programs exploring the process, craft, and practice of design across all disciplines.

For this year’s DWP Open House, we will be showcasing Bob Smith and his ORE-CAL^© Sportswear brand by turning Daylight HQ into Bob’s teenage basement.

After getting his first real job as a graphic designer in the Nike Sport Graphics Department in the early 90s, Bob began his pathway to design in the service of storytelling. During his 11 years at Nike, he had the idea to create a premium throwback collection that would tell the Nike story. Beautiful apparel pieces of the highest quality. His concepts and designs gave way to the “re-issue” apparel collection, which evolved into the wildly successful Nike Sportswear line. As a creative consultant and troublemaker, Bob has pitched and designed projects for Pendleton Woolen Mills, Dehen 1920 and New Balance Tennis to name a only a few, leading the way for him to use his best design and storytelling concepts in the creation of his high-fashion apparel brand, ORE-CAL^© Sportswear.

With ORE-CAL^©, Bob wanted to create a story that felt both “venerable and inevitable.” He loved the West Coast sportswear brands he grew up with in the ‘70s—White Stag, Pacific Trail, Pendleton—and became obsessed with building the perfect garment dripping with that Best Coast aesthetic. In Bob Smith’s words, ORE-CAL^© Sportswear is “Almost generic. It’s has always been around. Except…it hasn’t. The history of ORE-CAL^© lovingly references the beautiful, oddball design language of the great brands we grew up with and long for now.”

For Daylight’s Design Week Open House, Bob will be turning our office into a vintage-inspired Golden-Pacific basement featuring the ORE-CAL^© Sportswear line. Come, if you dare, step into Bob’s head and basement, and get a first-hand look at the spaces that inspired his design aesthetic and throwback sportswear lines. He’ll also be sharing his insights and expertise on design in the service of storytelling.

For Daylight’s part, will be featuring some of our best design work and projects, giving our team an opportunity to share what we do and passion for design with the local community, clients, partners, and friends. So please, drop by our office on April 28th from 4:00-7:00 pm to experience Bob Smith, check out the killer ORE-CAL^© swag and enjoy a beverage or three with the Daylight crew.