Every artist has their weapon of choice. For designer Sam Molloy of Caos Motē, that weapon is as unconventional as it is foundational: concrete and cinder blocks. Caos Motē isn’t just about building materials though; this design project spans clothing, candles, tables, and even belt buckles. With a focus on industrial and civic infrastructure, Caos Motē disrupts traditional design by playing with juxtaposition, such as creating cement-constructed items intertwined with lively objects such as flowers, fire, and earthy materials and scents.

“I just finished rereading Bobby’s This is Not A T-Shirt the other day,” Sam tells me during our Zoom call. To Sam, the The Hundreds by Caos Motē collaboration marks a full-circle moment. From POST in San Francisco where Sam is from to his move across the country to New York where the artist/designer would frequent the The Hundreds GRAND flagship to visit close friends. “I pulled various quotes from the book that tie into the project. I’ll email them to you after our call.” 

The first quote he mentioned (if you have a copy of the book, follow along on p.45) is Bobby’s “I wanted to play” sentiments from the early ’00s. Watching Alife’s fixations between design, product, boutique, and keeping the brand interpersonal inspired Bobby to want to dive into building a brand. Similarly enough, Sam emphasizes putting a face to the design project for the same reasons – which isn’t the easiest thing to do when the bulk of your products are reimagining the outputs of cinder blocks and concrete. So with every project coming from Caos Motē, there’s a personalized story of how the item came to be. It brought Sam back to Bobby’s cautious walk to work with “obscure sculptors because it’s not exactly a fruitful return on investment.” (p.68) “While this might be fruitful,” Sam says. “I might be the obscure designer here. I was very grateful that David wanted to collaborate.”

Sam gave The Hundreds’ Creative Director, David Rivera, a deck of ideas hoping to lure him into something other than concrete for the collab and to lean towards an idea that spoke of the countless memories made by hanging on the block of The Hundreds’ flagship stores. The collaboration’s main feature is an LED street-light-inspired lamp accompanied by a recycling bin, a finger skateboard complete with the grip and skate tool, and a charging cable for the lamp. The desk lamp also comes with a companion t-shirt. 

“A lot of what Caos Motē embodies is the ‘DIY and DIFY. Do it for yourself.’ (p.95) mentality. This whole project encompasses a DIY approach. From product design to 3d printing to marketing and the music (which we made specifically for this project). Also as mentioned this was in my archive/vault of ideas and something I would be so upset if someone else made before us as I believe it is on someone’s list in the collective consciousness.”

I delved into the mind of Sam during our Zoom call ahead of the release of The Hundreds by Caos Motē, discussing his origins with design, unconventional design materials, and defining the pillars behind the neverending project.

SANDY: Caos Motē stands for Constantly Accepting One Self More Often Than Ever, is that right?

SAM: Constantly accepting one self more often than ever.

Was there a period where you weren’t so accepting of yourself or did you always know who you were and what you were meant to be?

That’s the whole reason for the name. That is a process that is always happening, even the day before. And that applies to two things I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. The first one is art. Two years ago I didn’t even know how to make cement properly. I had to Facetime my friends who worked as contractors or in the union to give me pointers. I had to fail at this thing. Even with screen printing, I didn’t know how to do that either. It’s hard to say that I’m an artist in this space when you don’t do it and you get to the point where you finally see that. 

On the second end of things, it’s kind of what wearing a piece of clothing is. If you take a risk and buy a jacket that you don’t really know if the jacket is you and then you wear the jacket out for the first time. It can feel really weird. You just feel like, Everyone is looking at me, I know I’m not supposed to be in this jacket. Then you hit a day when that jacket suddenly makes sense for you. That’s how I explain it as a metaphor for the project and I think most artists go through it. It still happens, but it happens less in particular mediums as I get better at them.

How did you fall into design and artistry? Was it always something you did or did you stumble into it?

It was always around. I come from an artist family, which was super important. My dad is definitely on the business side of things but he also makes oil paintings. He loves the Rolling Stones, he loves music. They’re from the 60s-70s era. My mom is a talented stained glass artist. My sister is a talented painter, illustrator, and UX designer. That was always in the house. I remember being very young and there’s something called Picasso’s four lines and it’s four lines that Picasso made. I would see it every day and one day my dad came up to me and said, “You know that’s a butt. That’s a woman’s butt.” I didn’t know and it’s four lines and I didn’t know what that was. But, art was always there since I was a child which was cool and I’m super grateful for it.

What did you first think it was when you looked at the four lines?

I have no idea. I think art is so silly sometimes and because it was Picasso and I knew who he was, I thought about how inaccessible art is that I didn’t understand what it was. Just maybe looking at it as “a Picasso” and the big names that are a part of this world that doesn’t make sense to me.

Even as a writer, releasing pieces to the world is the scariest part because once it’s out it’s open to many interpretations, sometimes different than the one you created. Art is so open to anyone’s interpretation when it’s really a woman’s butt.

Writing is sort of the same way. I just had this conversation with some friends about texting. My friends are in relationships, I’m not in one but if I’m texting a girl and I read what she sent me, I always read it in the meanest way. They’re like, “Oh no I meant that in a nice way!”. It’s all open to interpretation.

I find there’s a silver lining to using concrete and construction material within design. Construction is the act of building structures but you’re using the typical “construction” materials unconventionally – what sparked the infatuation with cement?

It comes from the DIY skateboarding community that I grew up in, in the Bay Area. Specifically, a project that I recently revisited with a friend of mine, his name is Snort. He’s a graffiti artist. At the end of East 8th Street in Oakland, there was a dead end next to a Home Depot and there was a water source there. So all these guys from different parts of my friend groups were building these different structures using concrete every day. I wasn’t really a part of it, I was skating and documenting it but I wasn’t doing much of the mixing of the concrete because a lot of the guys I was hanging out with were much more adept at it. But in my mind, I always knew it was a substrate. It’s something that I can get, it’s cheap, and it can make anything. Here we are every day patching holes or making a pole jam. Everyone was so excited when a new thing was made from this concrete. 

There’s another part too where it’s accessible and it’s cheap. The only downside that I find with concrete and cinder blocks is that while it is cheap, it’s very heavy. So the costs that you’re saving from this material, you’ll always spend on the shipping or the manual aspect of it. I live on a 4-floor walk-up in New York and the bags of cement are 55 pounds. An order of eight bags is a whole thing.

Is your studio also in your apartment?

Yes. I live in my studio. I have a two-bedroom which I’m super grateful for because for a lot of my life, my studio was in my bedroom. I have a two-bedroom in Brooklyn and that was the intention of actually getting this place, it was to have one place for work, one place to sleep, and a living room. It gets a little murky sometimes when some of the studio comes into the living room and then that becomes a photo studio. Then the only safe space that I feel like exists at home becomes my bed. Hopefully, at one point I hope there’s an outside studio but this works for now. 

During one of our meetings, you mentioned that the idea for the lamp came to you three years ago and you’re finally able to make it. I’m sure you had a ton of other ideas under your belt, why this one for the collaboration?

This is not a plug by any means and I hope they sponsor me one day. I use Milanote as a form of recording information or ideas. The ideas exist in notebooks and such. The lamp idea was sitting in Milanote for a while and I included it in a deck I put together for David. I had these ideas and a lot of them were concrete. I remember talking to my parents and saying, “I really hope this guy chooses the lamp.” I don’t want to be a concrete guy all the time. 

I always had the idea of bringing the outside-inside. So these cinder blocks outside-inside in ubiquity, meaning things that we see on the street such as cinder blocks and street lamps shown in a different light like being put on a desk instead of being outside. If you look a little bit deeper into how civic infrastructure is or how cities are built, there’s a lot of engineering and design behind the smaller things about cities from sewer caps to rebar. Going deeper into those things and asking those questions of why this exists and recreating it in a design way was always the most attractive part of most projects.

What are some things you wish people understood about the complexity of sustainability within a brand? I know that’s something that you push but even from a fashion perspective, it’s not the most cost-friendly because it’s not the norm. Is it the same for you?

Yeah, I think the first thing and this goes for any consumer out there that tries to engage with a small brand that tries to be sustainable, is that we do not have the infrastructure or the systems that larger brands do. It always comes down to costs. You begin to wonder why sustainable things are so expensive. Especially in the case of textiles, you’ll find that friends who make sustainable-based textiles aren’t making that much money. It’s a labor of love type of thing.

You do the research and all the work only to find that the easiest route is the poly shirts and things like that. We do run into that. There’s also the question of whether concrete is sustainable. It can be in a lot of ways depending on how it’s made and the intention is that these items will last longer than we will be alive, which can also be said for some clothes out there. We struggle with that, but there are also parts where you wonder if it does feel sustainable. Sometimes it’s not fully sustainable and it can’t be for the whole idea to be realized because that would require me to be as big as Google or something big of that scale.

There was a time when we tried to create a lot of sustainable products but you find that most factories don’t see the demand for sustainability to make it easier to create. There’s definitely room for growth and progress within sustainability. 

I think that’s the unfortunate thing because there’s always a system that’s already in place, the way that everything works is based on so many things that aren’t sustainable. All the costs that we save go to this ethereal place that’s taken on by the planet. We have that tax and there’s not a line sheet that tells us how many things we’ve destroyed in this carbon tax. 

What does this collaboration mean to you?

It means a lot. It’s very full circle. I remember The Hundreds being a part of my life growing up. I remember The Hundreds on POST St. in San Francisco. I remember Odd Future talking about The Hundreds when I was younger and being very inspired by that. The reason why I moved to New York was because I was seeing someone who moved there to work for a designer named Danielle Guizio, who used to work at The Hundreds store in NY. It’s a weird full-circle moment and I’m grateful for the whole thing.

That’s so cool. Do you foresee yourself recreating other parts that are often overlooked in city building?

Thank you, I talk about collective consciousness a lot. There are a few ideas on that Milanote board that I didn’t make that were later made by someone else. I believe Only NY made a pen holder that looks like a trash can and I’ve always wanted to make a small trash can. There’s a small trash can included in the collaboration but for a different reason. 

There was a project I wanted to make with shelves where it was a fire escape and I get an Instagram ad from Amazon for that every time. There are these ideas that you record but you only have so much time to execute. I was just rereading Rick Rubin’s book recently and he talks about how if you don’t act on that idea it’ll wisp away to someone else and they’ll act on it. There’s probably someone somewhere that’s going to be like, wow they did the street light. 

How many samples did you go through before reaching the final version?

I have two studio assistants that I really need to shout out, Brian & Ayman. I am not as technical as they are. Ayman really made a parking lot. The amount of different street lights there were, it looked like a mall parking lot. He lined them all in the same file, like about twenty of them. Then you get the twenty and then you’re 3D printing them all to see how they feel and the scale of them. And then we went through buttons and lights which is its own world of “I don’t like how that button feels” or “that light is not bright enough” and “that doesn’t fit”. All the fun things that come with product design that I don’t think we knew going into it that we now know coming out. So it gives you a new perspective whenever you go buy a small lamp on Amazon or wherever, and you start to think of these small details.

All the small things that make such a difference in customer experience.

Totally.

I called Caos Motē a brand earlier but is that what it’s supposed to be? What do you classify Caos Motē as?

Thank you for asking that. I always say it’s a project because as much as I don’t like putting myself out there, I also think it’s necessary. I don’t like faceless brands. I feel like that’s where everything is going these days. I think that’s why we love Bobby so much because you know it’s Bobby Hundreds and there’s a person behind it. That’s why I loved Huf so much, I still do. Rest in peace Keith Huf. Same with Benny Gold. I think that’s why with bigger brands, you see Pharrell and the late Virgil behind the creative heads. We want a person and we want personality. For a while, I didn’t own Supreme because you couldn’t tell who owns Supreme so I didn’t own it. I think the guy’s name is James Jebbia, I don’t know much about Supreme. I didn’t like the idea of not knowing the person behind it.