About

An invitation, a menu, a guest gift, an object made for the room — the best ones don't feel designed. They feel inevitable, as if the thing could not have come out any other way. The material is right because the idea required it, the form is right because the story asked for it, and what you are holding carries something the photograph of it cannot.

Alex + Mima is a design studio. The material follows the idea. Paper is where our craft vocabulary runs deepest — letterpress, foil, bookbinding, gilding, laser cut — but the question at the start of a project is never what the piece should be made of. The question is what it needs to be. If the answer is a wooden crate, we make a wooden crate. If it is a stainless box, a cardboard tube, a hand-bound dossier, or an object that belongs to no existing category, we make that. For Ford's Supermodel of the World, the answer was a laser-cut case and 1,200 original New York subway maps — a piece you read before you read it.

Alex + Mima opened in 2015 as an extension of Co11ective, our brand studio, serving as our own fabrication floor. Design and production by the same pair of hands — so the answer to how do we build this? lands in the same room as the question.

We are serious about the difference between decoration and meaning. Nothing we choose is there to register as luxury — it is there because the idea required it. The thinking extends to the trip: protection is engineered into the object, not wrapped around it, so the piece a guest opens weeks later, a continent and a freight journey away, is the same piece we signed off on at the studio.

Our work has been designed and built for Cartier and Christian Dior; for Condé Nast, Bloomberg, The Economist, CNN, and Michelin; for the September 11 Memorial & Museum, the American Heart Association, and the RNC; for Ford Models, for galas of fifteen thousand, and for the kinds of private celebrations that never appear in press. Planners we admire bring us in. So do clients who have been quietly building their own folder of references for a year.

What we make

Three kinds of work, all of them serious and unboring.

Events, private and public. Weddings, galas, openings, fundraisers — the occasions that end up in someone's archive. The invitation suite, the physical narrative of the night, and the object a guest accidentally keeps.

Brand activations and objects. For hospitality, retail, fashion, and institutional clients. The concept of the campaign, pressed into a thing you can hold — guest gifts, branded objects, fabricated pieces that carry a brand into the room.

Day-of assets at table scale. The table is the most important real estate at the event. Menus, place cards, programs, name cards, table-top signage. Table-sized, never bigger.

About the studio

Our studio sits in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, within sight of Manhattan. Under our roof: bookbinding, box-making, laser cut, foil stamping, casting, engraving, woodwork, embroidery. The specific craft is ours, and every piece begins in our hands in prototype. For runs at a scale no boutique floor can hold, we direct a trusted production network from our specs.

Planners find us clear, punctual, and good on the date. Clients find that the object we make tends to become the piece they keep. If you are building a folder of things that move you, we would be glad to be in it.