Last week, two people asked me: “what's Fabric's sweet spot?” I love that question! It's easy to answer: We excel at innovation, digital strategy, and web product development. It's simple. We put together great teams to design useful digital products and cool online brands.

We're the people you call when you have an idea for a digital brand or product - but you're not sure how to get it to market. We look for passionate people with smart ideas. We love start-ups and underdogs. Over the past 8 years, we've built successful video sites, social networks, digital products, and applications for big corporations and small companies.

Can we work with your team? Absolutely. Everyone at Fabric has spent thousands of hours working closely with agencies, entrepreneurs, VC's, and senior management at leading consumer brands in the US and Europe. We collaborate. We're open (source). We know we can get more done - together.

What's your big idea?

It's been a rocket start to the year! Where to start…

Most important: New Fabric people: James Gregg joined our Product Group in LA and Elizabeth Lim joined us as Project Manager and task master extraordinaire. It's great to see the team growing!

We won the development work for Kia Optima Superbowl Interactive campaign which launched the week before Superbowl. The project was on a 5 week delivery time-line. This was a puzzle game with 5 releases in 5 days. Phew. Our development team in Las Vegas pulled it off, but it was a very stressful build. Many late nights. Ideally, not to be repeated ;o)

We recently finished a project for Disney and launched Figling a new consumer web start-up with loads of potential. Our teams in LA and Las Vegas are excited to be working on projects for Toyota and Yakult. Our Product Group in LA is working with Dubspot to develop and expand their online school.

Our Marketing Group helped get Dogasaur past 250,000 Facebook Fans and we're now gearing up for another IKEA campaign and a fresh Summer campaign for a consumer brand (can't talk about it yet).

We'd love to hear from you - give us a call!

Are you excited about next year? We are! We have a simple plan: Do more amazing projects with you!

I know many of you had a rough year. This recession has been a real bastard. But you know what? It's going to get better. Much better! If you're a talented experience designer, developer, or marketer and want to make a big splash in 2010 - come see us now. Let's get ready!

We are growing fast and looking for a UX/UI in LA. You'll be part of a small team working on web/mobile products for start-ups. You will be involved in all areas of the interactive development process. Your responsibilities will include working directly with clients on brainstorming, ideation, research, creating wireframes, producing complete screens, writing UX specifications, and leading our visual designers through execution. This is a full-time position.
More about you:

• Your experience has taught you that understanding the audience, the market, and the project framework is critical to delivering stand-out work. You're amazing at taking an idea and developing it into something truly special. You know UX and UI inside out and you know when to follow rules and when to break them.
• For years, you've been working in the interactive industry learning and appreciating the value of team work. You can run a project by yourself, but you'd rather collaborate. You communicate as if your life depends on it.
• On past projects, you've been challenged and found ways to deliver quality on time and on budget. You've managed relationships with clients and team members and they have loved working with you.
• You've failed a few times. It's part of the process. You keep pushing and changing and taking it all in stride. You love what you do. You're an advocate for quality and you're uncomfortable when you see work that is not up to your high standards.
• You get along with everyone. It's one of your key strengths. You can speak developer and designer and you know how to translate hard to understand language so that clients instantly get it.

Important experience you have:

• Proven experience working web and mobile products or social networking sites, preferably large-scale, dynamically driven ones.
• Proven experience defining, developing, and documenting UX design and interaction requirements/specifications
• Familiarity with HTML/DHTML, CSS, Javascript and other web technologies and their inherent strengths and limitations as they relate to UX development
• Experience developing UI and interaction pattern libraries is a huge plus.
• A strong portfolio that demonstrates advanced skills in user experience design

If you're looking to switch from advertising/marketing UI work to useful products and have endless passion to bring every day we might be the place for you!

Apply by Resume and 3 URL's to e-mail.

Fabric Interactive is looking for a passionate web developer with 3+ years of web development experience and PHP in particular. We are looking for an independent thinker and curious mind. You must be a strong team player looking for a challenge. If you get excited about process, yet still have a strong imagination, we want to hear from you! We offer a casual work environment, flexible hours, nice people, and great clients.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with design team to find optimal technology solutions during Discovery phases
• Assist interactive team in delivering accurate project documentation and development specifications
• Design database schemas and databases
• Write clean and structured PHP code
• Work closely with QA Lead through testing/QA phases

Required Skills

• PHP 5
• PostGreSQL/MySQL
• HTML, CSS, XML

Additional preferred qualifications

• Zend Framework
• HTML 5
• JavaScript
• Facebook Applications/Connect
• Drupal
• iPhone / Android SDK
• Server Tech (BSD/UNIX)

If you’ve been looking for that perfect opportunity to take your skills to the next level, this is for you.

To apply, just e-mail erlend@fabricinteractive.com.

1. Impact. Focus on big impact and positive change
2. We are Startup. Do more with less and move fast
3. Active Communication. Prioritize open and frequent communication
4. Community. Help others grow and develop winning teams
5. Fun + Energy. Have fun and bring positive energy
6. Performance. Measure what matters

Relax. We would never ask that question. Why? We just don’t believe in writing business plans – especially not web or mobile products of any kind. The reasons are simple:

• Your plan will be full of assumptions. Most of which will be wrong.
• Any time you spend writing a plan is time that could be better spent working on your product or customer development.
• Even when you try to raise money, the plan doesn’t really make a difference to investors.
• Planning is not doing. That’s not good when you have limited time to spare (we all do).

A few other things we don't care about:

• A great logo doesn’t matter and neither does amazing visual design.
• Feature lists are – usually – boring. They don’t tell us much about how you think about what’s really important… and that is: who is the customer? Why does she really need your product? How are you planning to deliver a BETTER product?

So, what kind of documentation can be useful when you come see us? We like to see wireframes or concept drawings focused on the core user experience. So, if you are a “mobile coupon start-up” – we’d really love to see how you think about the core user experience. How does an actual customer move through the application? What are the exact steps you lead them through? How does your product clearly solve the problem? Those things are important to us.

It’s also nice to see the core business model – in visual format. All that stuff about how you will make money and some ideas on how you will convert customers.

Passionate entrepreneurs: Send us your napkin ideas. Let’s get to work!

Come on - you think you can handle it? You want to be our new PHP / SQL Developer – Full time. Why don't you submit your resume right now. Let's see what you can do.

This is an onsite position. No outsourcing. No telecommuting.

Interactive agency seeks a developer with PHP and SQL experience to participate in team based and independent development of new and existing projects. Recent CS graduate a plus.

Requirements:

• Strong work ethic with diligent follow up
• 2+ years of PHP programming
• Ability to hand code with compliance to standards and existing procedures
• Familiarity with SQL queries and functions; preferably PostgreSQL / plpgsql
• Mid-level HTML / CSS / Javascript. (Cross browser experience a must!)

Responsibilities:

• Provide production estimates based on technical and / or functional specifications
• Manage own development process for multiple concurrent projects
• Develop unique web products and admin tools based on existing code library
• Testing and Quality Assurance

Some end user documentation and technical support required

This is a career advancement opportunity for the right candidate.

Compensation: $40K+ DOE

Please include resume, code samples of PHP and Javascript, why you prefer your browser of choice, a limerick and three references.

* Job location is Los Angeles

Screw the recession. We're hiring. Here's the job posting:

Fabric Interactive is looking for a passionate internet marketer with two-three years of experience with social media, interactive, search, and/or advertising. This a unique opportunity to play a leading role in developing strategies and programs to drive measurable marketing results for our clients.

You must be a social media fanatic with high energy and deep curiosity about the interactive field. You’ll need to have great analytical skills and be a superb team player. We're looking for someone who understands that this is not a regular pit-stop gig before you go on to big agencies. We want an entrepreneurial mind and independent thinker with a desire to take this opportunity and run with it.

Your objectives

• Develop marketing services business unit
• Increase marketing services revenue and improve profitability
• Develop product launch marketing programs
• Position company as a leader in social media marketing services in Los Angeles

Responsibilities

• Analyze existing marketing services for Fabric clients
• Develop and propose new marketing programs
• Develop online marketing strategy for clients
• Work with clients to identify the most appropriate blogs and social media
• Establish relationship with key bloggers in industry verticals
• Monitor social networks for specific clients and verticals
• Leverage social networks to build affinity with product or brand
• Leverage video sharing sites to advance a client’s message
• Conduct online research to identify Web sites and online influencers for outreach
• Conduct one-to-one outreach to site editors, writers, and other influencers
• Develop and manage online strategic partnerships for client projects
• Concept and manage paid placement opportunities, including sponsorships and search engine and banner advertising (organic and paid search engine marketing)
• Proactively introduce new ideas to improve Fabric’s offerings
• Improve effectiveness of marketing services cross all clients
• Maximize service growth from existing marketing services client base
• Propose and execute Fabric marketing program to attract new business
• Build social media marketing team

Qualifications

• Minimum of two years of experience in a similar role at an interactive, public relations, or advertising agency; or equivalent transferable experience
• Strong understanding and past/active use of search engines, discussion boards, blogs, video sharing sites, etc.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills (strong copy/editorial writer a plus)
• Able to build strong relationships with clients
• The ability to define solutions that will generate measurable results for clients
• Ability to develop solutions that integrate performance metrics and analysis
• High standards for quality and professional integrity

Come on. Let's do this!

Every day, we answer questions about how we work - our process. While our process has been adopted from our work with start ups, it's a process that has been proven to work with all kinds of digital projects - from small websites to major apps built for global brands.

At Fabric, we use a process that mirrors the “Lean Product Development” methodology. There are several core concepts at the center of this methodology that frames everything we do:

• Identify the hypothesis or assumptions that the client has made about their customers needs, desires, and wants - this is part of our definition work
• Design a test of the most critical (leap of faith) assumptions and execute tests with the least amount of waste possible (Minimum Viable Product)
• Enter into Build, Measure, Learn loops where the goal always is to learn if assumptions are correct by actually putting the product in front of real customers
• Get the first version of the product in front of customers as fast as possible

So, how is this approach different than what we've seen used at most agencies?

• First, most digital agencies spend months in the lab before they put the first version of a product in front of customers
• Second, most of the agencies we've worked with have built their assumptions of what their customers want entirely without actually testing their digital product with real users

(An important note: I'm not saying that they don't perform research or hold focus groups during early stages of product development. I'm saying that most agencies we know spend too much time and too much of your money working in their shop on tons of features that they do not know users want or will use. After 12 weeks, they launch the app or the website with 90% of the budget spent and then realize that users don't use most of the features they built).

What we do is quite different. Fabric sets aside the (often long) feature list in RFP's from clients and identifies the specific assumptions and the core hypothesis that the project is supposed to test. After we define exactly what we want to learn, we enter into a short (as short as possible) loop:

Build > Measure > Learn (return to build)

For each loop, we build the minimum of what we have to build: wireframes, designs, HTML, of dynamic product/forms - to TEST with customers. Only when we have data - either direct customer feedback or metrics do we move forward into the next loop.

Every process, every task, every bit of code we do is entirely focused on learning. We should never design or code anything that does not allow us to learn something. This means we have to always have to clearly define what we want to learn before we build.

While most digital agencies will push you into this linear workflow. (Hey, we used to do that too.)

Phase 1: Define
Phase 2: User Experience
Phase 3: Design
Phase 4: Develop
Phase 5: Test/QA
Phase 6: Deploy

Fabric's teams will go through these steps in fast motion. We compress work into numerous cycles with intent to learn in each cycle. Each cycle of learning should be days not weeks.

Why do we do this?

Because we've found that it is the best way to build outstanding products, websites, and apps that customers will actually use and LOVE.

What's your opinion on this process? Do you think this is the right track for your company?

We're looking for a passionate web/mobile app developer with 3+ years of experience and PHP in particular. Straight out of school with raw talent is fine. We are looking for an independent thinker, problem solver, and curious mind. You must be a strong team player looking for a challenge. We offer a casual work environment, flexible hours, nice people, and interesting projects. (We work with start-ups in the areas of geo-location, real-time-web, SaaS, mobile lifestyle, and data aggregation.)

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with design team to find optimal technology solutions
• Assist in delivering accurate project documentation and development specifications
• Design database schemas and databases
• Write clean and structured PHP code
• Work closely with QA Lead through testing/QA phases

Required Skills

• PHP 5
• PostGreSQL/MySQL
• HTML, CSS, XML

Additional preferred qualifications

• Zend Framework
• HTML5
• JavaScript
• Facebook Connect / API’s
• iOS/Android SDK
• Server Tech (BSD/UNIX)

Come on! Call or e-mail us.