Fries & Zumbühl
Assigned to a joint project during our course at Zurich University of the Arts, we quickly discovered our complementary talents. The result of the project was the first of our creations to enter production.
Loose arrangements for joint projects, on which we worked at separate sites, grew inexorably into closer cooperation.
Kevin Fries and Jakob Zumbühl are different people. We think and work differently. That is the key to our success to date. Our approach to work is complemented by our early educational backgrounds and varied interests outside the world of design.
Since 2009 Fries & Zumbühl has been based in an old factory building in Winterthur. This offers us ample space for new ideas and experimentation.
OUR DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
We understand design as a balanced interplay of technological, aesthetic and cultural factors. These form the basis of our oeuvre.
The design process confronts us with requirements of content and form, while production and the market contribute their own demands.
Consumer, idea, aesthetics, identity, originality, emotion, function, ergonomics, production, logistics, materials, innovation, ecology, economics – you need to be at home with these notions, know their boundaries and possibilities, in order to go on and innovate.
We reprioritise this set of factors in each project. Toys and rules of play are ours to choose. We are both umpires and players of the game. We stake out our pitch, then halve it at half-time. Making the most of this room for manoeuvre, we invent and achieve thoroughly positive results. Those results are our products.
We see furniture design as the crowning discipline of all design work. Work in this field brings the industrial designer very close to artistic creativity.
Every piece of furniture has its own identity. It flaunts characteristics which deliberately elicit emotional bonding from its users.
Nothing in the realm of furniture has not already existed in some form or other. For this very reason, one of our greatest challenges is to create a new object with its own identity, which still satisfies the users’ functional and sculptural aspirations.
MILESTONES IN OUR SUCCESS
We celebrated our first successes at Inspired by Cologne, the international talent show for young designers.
Three of our products made the grade there in 2004 and 2006 (our pachific.minimal lounge, our Tischbein table and our Häkeln clothes hooks).
In 2009 we won the iF Gold Award for our Darling bed by Moobel. Other iF and Red Dot awards ensued for our Tetris shelves (Eternit), Häkeln clothes hooks (Authentics) and the WH01 lamp (Wald-Haus Switzerland).
The success story of the Darling bed culminated in nomination for the Design Preis Schweiz.