Joseph Joseph’s technicolour kitchen equipment has shaken up the British worktop. Absolutely meets the London design duo
Words Pearl Boyd
It all started with a chopping board. How did it come about?
Design has always been in our blood. We grew up in a family manufacturing business and spent summers as kids designing new products in our shed at home. In fact, we both started out on career paths in product design, and came together in 2003 to design and sell our own collection of innovative products.
Our approach was, and still is, all about solving everyday problems through intelligent product design. Basing our brand on a simple idea that we could improve everyday items or solve everyday problems with intelligent design is really what drives us forward.
Your products are about solving kitchen problems that we didn’t know we had. How do you identify what to address?
It’s different with each product we develop. Sometimes we’ll identify a problem through testing and other times it’ll be noticing an everyday problem we’ve come across ourselves and we’ll know exactly what we want to create the solution. With all the product ideas we come up with we build lots of prototypes and test them thoroughly to make sure our ideas work.And your aesthetic. Can you define it?
Functional ideas are the core of what we do. We believe if you’re going to take the effort to design a product from the start there’s a great opportunity to design it with a considered aesthetic.
If good design is about combining practicality with beauty, your products certainly fit. Which ones are you most proud of, and which ones have been hardest to get right?
We’re probably most proud of our first award-winning product, the Chop2Pot; our first folding chopping board but also our Nest 9 stacking bowl set which is a great space saving storage solution. Totem, the waste and recycling bin is another one we’re extremely proud of, but that was also the hardest to get right. It was a departure from what we had done before and was our biggest launch to date so it took a lot of development time.
You have launched a lot of recycling-related products. Was that due to demand? Or what made you think of it?
It was through extensive research. We found that each council has different recycling requirements, especially in London (each borough is different) so from personal experience we knew that there wasn’t a “one size fits all” solution. And with storage space being a problem in most kitchens we recognised the need to combine waste and offer recycling options in one space-saving unit.Joseph Joseph – josephjoseph.com
