SETTING SAIL FOR NEW ADVENTURES S
the page out, and ideas come.
“I take every fashion magazine, always have,” he says.
New colorways can be inspired by what he sees. He saw a picture of a woman wearing a cheetah-patterned coat in beige. He tore the
page out. MFANO already had a cheetah pattern in black and beige, and Trull introduced it in other colors, including a vivid blue.
“We can’t keep it on the shelves,” Miller says.
A colorway is any of a range of combinations of colors in which a style or design is available.
“Most have five colorways,” Miller says. “Our Prisma pattern has 15 colorways; that is unusual. Trull designed Dupoine for Glen Raven.
It comes in 23 colorways; it is their bestselling fabric.”
Prisma became his big show in Las Vegas at the Casual Furniture Show in the World Market Center in July.
75
TILL WORKING IN NEW YORK, Trull moved back to
North Carolina in 1995, settling in Wilmington to
be near the water. His latest boat, a 52-foot Hatteras
motor yacht, the R Holland, which once carried
Trull between New York and Florida, is docked in
Southport. He chose Southport because of its
proximity to the number of locations that are a
short trip from home base.
Trull set up a European antique shop, Classic Designs
of Wilmington, around 2000. He then added textile retail.
He sold the shop earlier this year to devote more time to MFANO. However, Classic
Designs is still is a showroom for Trull’s fabric line. Customers include local interior
designers and homeowners shopping for decorating project materials, says owner
Matthew Lappin. Most of the fabric displayed is Sunbrella.
“It’s soft enough for inside, it’s tough enough for outside,” Lappin says.
Meanwhile Trull and Miller are growing MFANO and Pender Creek Design Workshop.
“The way his mind works and the way he’s able to come up with things that we can
translate into textile design, it’s like nobody I’ve ever seen,” Miller says.
MFANO offers about 200 items of its own proprietary line of Sunbrella fabric designs,
as well as more than 1,000 items of stock open line Sunbrella, Miller says.
Six decades into a career marked by creativity, Trull still looks at what for him are the trades. He routinely peruses fashion and home-furnishing
magazines to keep up with style trends, which can lead to creative sparks of his own. When he sees something he likes, he tears
Top: Trull’s latest
pattern, which will
go out to buyers in
October 2017, is Prisma
inside a polka dot, and
the fabric is reversible.
Left: Employee Diana
Marquez sews samples
at Pender Creek
Design Workshop.
RIght: Chiara Pringle
and Sarah Sutton cut
samples of Trull’s fabric
designs.
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