Hoop design: A family affair changing the face of flat-pack furniture

Hoop Design studio recently caught our attention at their Decorex Cape Town debut. We catch up with this design savvy team of siblings to find out more about their innovative products and where it started.

Who are you?

Hoop Design are South African furniture makers and kitchen builders on a mission to find new ways to design, make and sell quality products for the South African market. It consists of the three founders; Gina, Anthony and Patrick Whitaker, and our small team of furniture and cabinet makers in the Cape Town-based workshop.  

We launched part of our furniture range first, and will soon be releasing more furniture and our kitchen/cabinetry products — watch this space. As an organisation we focus on integrating sustainability, fairness and transparency in the heart of all our operations. As a small, newly established company we realise there are limits to how well we can execute this but are doing what we can and building on this as we grow.

Where did it start?

It started with three siblings who worked their 9-5s but dreamt of their own ventures. We had our own rough ideas of what we’d like to do, among them were furniture design and modular kitchens, and to build a brand that cares for people and the planet. We grew up with our dad running a carpentry gig out of his workshop at home so we were exposed to woodwork from a young age. Our mom did all the finishing work which gave us an all-round look at how homes were made from start to finish.

Roll forward to 2020 where we were designing, making and installing kitchens for our own homes — no better way to make a good prototype than doing it for your own place. Eventually we hit the eject button on our corporate jobs and jumped into our own venture, Hoop.

What’s the idea behind the name Hoop Design?

We weren’t looking for a name that would verbally describe our brand. Rather a name that was simple, looked nice and sounded it too. After far too long, “hoop” was what we felt most happy with and ran with that. Then a meaning sort of fell into our laps with our objectives of moving towards a circular model for the organisation. We often have people pronouncing it using the Afrikaans word for hope, which we like to claim is just as appropriate! 

What is the main aim behind creating this furniture collection?

All our furniture is carefully designed so that assembly is pain-free and durability of the product is not compromised.

The reason for the flat-pack direction is about sustainability. Damaged parts are easily repaired or replaced, and all materials can be separated for recycling. The smaller packed dimensions help reduce our carbon footprint and allow customers to transport their furniture with ease, whether it be from the shop to their home, or during a move to a new place.

Flat-pack furniture often has a negative connotation for being too laborious and even a risky investment. What makes Hoop Furniture different?

We considered this from day one. Most flatpacks have a bad reputation, if not terrible. Our solution to the sturdiness issue (that is when your flat-pack table feels like it’s standing on a house of cards), was to find the best maximum number of parts that can be joined and glued just like traditional wood furniture but still be able to pack the product away like a flat pack product. For example, instead of receiving all the legs for your table separately, we join and glue sets of legs to reduce the number of joins that are fastened. 

We’ve spent more time than we can remember designing, prototyping and testing configurations to find the best combinations.

Reducing the number of parts allowed for fewer a customer has to put together. Which makes the process of assembling our products easy and intuitive. We liken the assembly to a simple building block process that gives you the gratification of putting something together in a super simple way.

Which local and international designers inspire you?

Cecilie Manz (Denmark) springs to mind. Though it’s difficult to choose one of her designs, her Workshop range, starting with the Workshop Chair, represents a formal quality that is pared down right down to its core, as if designing by Dieter Rams’ 10 principles — unobtrusive and not burdened with non-essentials. However, in keeping with the Danish tradition, Manz filters these ideals through layers of personality and presence.

We couldn’t talk local without talking Pedersen + Lennard. Their collection is as expansive as it is impressive, but the recent Osaka range comes to mind. It somehow perfectly walks the tightrope between bold and delicate, striking this balance without any bother. It does this while also retaining an overall sense of playfulness. Their consistent and productive contribution to local industry over the past decade is hard to ignore. 

Tell us about the materials Hoop furniture are made of and what you want to experience with in the future?

We make our furniture from solid oak and ash. Ash is lesser known to most of our customers but it has beautiful, light properties and is physically harder than oak. We work with birch plywood where we require a more stable material that won’t experience seasonal movement like hard woods. Birch plywood is extremely durable and resistant, and is a healthier alternative to other engineered boards.

If you’re sourcing it correctly, making products from wood gives you a strong footing in creating a sustainable business.  However, we’re always looking for materials or components that are more sustainable than those we are using and especially materials that can be sourced locally.

We’re keen on using reclaimed materials where it’s a viable option. We’ve tested with offcuts from the leather industry to make furniture sliders, which has been positive, but we are looking for a vegan alternative to improve on this. A product that we’re wanting to get our hands on is linoleum, a surface covering material made from naturally occurring elements (linseed, pine resin, sawdust and other organic materials). It’s an obvious sustainable alternative to the products that are predominantly use for laminates or countertops in the furniture and kitchen industry.

Who would be the ultimate person or brand to collaborate with and why?

We’re going to skip this question — I hope that’s OK. Not only because it would need its own article, but there are so many types of collaborations we’ve thought of or discussed informally. Whether it be product design, manufacturing or even a marketing perspective. Each type attracts it’s own dream collaborators. Past our own thoughts and informal discussions we haven’t given it enough thought to put it in the public domain yet. 

Which furniture piece/s would you love to own the most and why?

Most things Jean Prouvé would be a bucket list possession. As an engineer/constructor his is an acutely functional approach to design. This approach resulted in some of the most efficient and beautiful furniture designs of his era. Think Chaise Tout Bois, Fauteuil Kangourou (lounge chair) or the EM Table, to name a few. The middle one happens to be a ‘knock-down’ wooden chair that requires no screws to assemble, designed for efficiency in material use and made entirely of wood due to the scarcity of steel after World War 2.

What are the challenges you face as designers and how do you work around it?

The main challenge is the design limitations that exist for a small start-up manufacturing business in SA. However, especially within the context of design, limitations ought to be seen as something to take advantage of — a head start in the process of designing a new product. Being entirely self-funded we are limited as to the tooling and technology available to us. Though a restrictive aspect of our operations, we use this to inform our designs and decision-making. Instead of trying to ‘fit a square peg into a round hole’, we use this as an opportunity for a ‘bottom-up’ approach to the design process in collaboration with our craftsmen form the outset so any concept is informed by its eventual makers. This will often lead to the designing of a new workshop process (or workshop mechanism) first to achieve something otherwise not possible by hand.

Other less contextual challenges are ‘self-imposed’, brought about by the design principles we set ourselves as contributors to the world around us, fully aware of the throwaway culture of the design industry. Rather than challenges these are seen as positive resistance that enable us to engage with the design process with focused and purposeful creativity. A Hoop product has to answer a number of questions that guide the development process, acting as guardrails so that the right problems remain at the centre of any design. This helps to ensure that a Hoop product is characterised as being useful, honest in materiality and form, thorough, durable and timeless, flat pack and a joy to assemble, easily repaired and/or recycled.

See hoop.co.za