THE CHECKERED KITCHEN TOWEL
It all started by Hege, our commercial director when she asked for stripes. To begin with, I will admit, I said “we-are-not-really-a-stripe-company” however after a bit of thought the idea became a fun challenge.
And then this little journey started
Perhaps you know already, we have a set of resource principles which we apply to all of our designs. Not for the sake of rules, but for the sake of our planet, we believe that there is too much crap out there. We only want to bring good and necessary products to the market, products that match our company DNA and the rest of our collection. So we only introduce a new product after careful consideration.
First decision to be made
Firstly, we had to decide on the fabric, a plain weave would give fine lines and an easy base to work with whilst designing stripes. The issue was that our existing kitchen towels are made from a herringbone weave, these have won tests for absorbency and design so we didn't want to compromise the functionally of the product by changing the weaving pattern. It was decided that we should continue to use the herringbone weave. Although herringbone isn't really suited for stripes due to the V-shaped structure we made sure to take this into consideration when designing the pattern.
Then, what expression to go for?
I admire Paul Smith and his recognisable stripes, I like unpredictability, minimalism and balance. Inspired by the unpredictable approach of Paul Smith and balanced with the minimal expression of our existing product collection we developed the design from this foundation.
Constructing the design
Selecting colours, making stripes and finding themes.
The first trial of the design was with a stone coloured background and stripes of various widths, this test enabled us to work out the width of the stripe that would best suit the herringbone weave. Whilst the striped worked well the stone colour didn't so we decided to focus on some more colours.
In parallel design projects, themes such as FLORAL, OCEAN and EARTH were in the making, and this made sense for our kitchen towels too. The rest of the process was fun and here we go, the checkered kitchen towel is part of our organic collection.
