Series: Frank Kozik Interview
- Frank Kozik Interview - Part I
- Frank Kozik Interview - Part II
- Frank Kozik Interview: Pt. III
Kozik: The toy thing is broader. Now I have these higher end fashion lines happening with clothes and shoes, doing furniture designs, I sell an exclusive line of clothing in Barneys, I just got a big contact to design a nightclub in Vegas, I have a TV show contract (details are hush hush right now). What’s really interesting about the toy stuff is that all those years, twenty plus years in the music biz, after a while your in this ghetto, “oh you’re that poster guy”. You get trapped in it and become your own nostalgia act. I didn’t want the people to buy my work to be creepy old fucks like me.
(Preview of the Draven footwear line designed by Kozik coming out this summer)
My new average customer is seventeen years old and is a really broad minded person, most of them are into fashion, most of them are into some kind of art. And these new jobs, some of them pay nice money, it’s more like well, I’m 46 years old I really don’t want to do another poster for some washed up garage band that’s been trying to make it for 20 years. My new weird shit is in an upscale boutiques, that’s awesome. And now I can still be a creative person, make a good living and be involved in some sort of cultural stuff, that’s growing and blossoming, and affecting the mainstream, and now I’m a big guy in this scene. It’s good for me.
(when he gets the chance, he also works on his paintings)
How many different companies are you designing things for?
I’ve pretty much done stuff for all the companies. Probably about 14 or 15 in the US, I work with a couple of companies out of China, I work with a half a dozen companies out of Japan. I have my own toy company too called Ultraviolence. We just started it a year ago, but finally the products are coming out. They’re also selling out and are already really successful.
So, with UltraViolence- is that going to purely high end stuff?
UltraViolence, the deal with that is Kidrobot has consistently taken chances. It’s hard for a company to invest $150,000 in something maybe they can’t sell, like one of these weird political things. No one can really do it, so I just started doing it myself. The UltraViolence stuff isn’t meant to compete with all the other companies stuff, I’m doing really experimental stuff, that’s really expensive. Like we just did a bronze, the Clockwork Alex Beethoven, so we’re going to make twenty. It cost us a lot of money, like 30 grand to make those, and I was like “we’re not going to sell all of those”, and we already sold out of them at like two/ three grand a pop. That’s what UltraViolence is about. It’s going to be the weirder, the more I think, interesting stuff, really limited, expensive. It’s more going to be like the art stuff. That way it’s not going to fuck up some small company if it goes south. Plus I won’t affect some other companies image, if someone gets pissed off about it. I am going to do a Edi Amin one and one of the next projects is a mechanical banana- a desk sculpture. It’s basically a banana but it looks like it’s all welded together.
(Ho Chi Mihn’s on display)
We made the resin Ho Chi Minh first, hand made here in the states. Then we made vinyl ones of those, made the vinyl Beethoven, making the bronze Beethovens with marble bases, like really traditional kind of thing, I made the big fiberglass Mao, which was the first UltraViolence project, even though it wasn’t marketed that way. I made an edition of 50. They sold out right away, that was about two years ago. UltraViolence is like when I want to do my weird like “oh look it’s Churchill”, stuff that appeals to me, but may not appeal to anyone else, if it’s a failure, it doesn’t hurt the company I’m working with. And if it’s successful, I make all the money instead of like 10%.
(STAY TUNED FOR PART THREE)
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