Amidst the hotbed of design talent originating from Brooklyn, the young firm Good Thing is making a distinct difference. The collaborative design studio and manufacturing company founded by Jamie Wolfond and Sam Anderson in 2014 has steadily claimed its place as a purveyor and maker of everyday design objects.
Working with a roster of established and emerging designers on their collection of products, the RISD graduates are equally focused on manufacturing the product designs themselves. Good Thing’s typical moda operandi involves isolating and exploring a material or a production process, and then determining the right type of product to make out of it. In addition to finding more innovative uses for these materials and processes, this way of working also results in minimal waste.
In the past year, Good Thing’s fun and functional home accessories have resonated with people around the world. ‘Good Thing’s ambition is to bring American design to a significant place on the world stage,’ says founding partner Jamie Wolfond. ‘We follow and admire the work of so many of the large European and Scandinavian manufacturing houses, and have realized that it is difficult to name forces of comparable quality coming from the US. Americans recognise the value of an object that is thoroughly considered, and we feel it is about time we made those kinds of things accessible to the general public.’
Good Thing unveils a new website and a product collection today (15 January). Some of the new additions include a pair of bookends created by the Taiwan-based designer Kenyon Yeh and the Gather vases by Sam Anderson. ‘One of our most striking realisations [in the last year] is that people respond to items that are available in a broad assortment of iterations,’ Wolfond says. ‘What our audience react to is the ability to pick and choose an interpretation of the product that is entirely their own – to be creative.’
To this end, Anderson’s vases are available in several different permutations in order to cater to different needs. Each form lends itself to a different type of blossom and can be used together to deconstruct a bouquet or as an individual.
Today, Good Thing’s products are manufactured in Taiwan, the USA, China and Thailand. Wolfond says, ‘moving much of our production overseas was a really difficult decision, but it was important to bring our customers the level of quality that they deserve. Our new suppliers have experience handling larger production runs and the technology to execute our products to a very high standard.’
