Twelve years is long enough to have made real mistakes and real decisions. What follows is an honest conversation with both founders, answering the same questions separately, in their own registers.
The decision you'd make again without hesitation
Marke: Employing Adrame. He runs logistics, quality control, product assembly. He has been on our side from the beginning, genuinely supportive of the project and the family behind it. Through everything, he has been our one constant.
Eva: Realising early that adults wanted our products as much as children did. The brand started as something for kids. Then we watched adults reach for the lamps, and we understood that what we were actually doing was waking up something in people — a childhood joy that doesn't go away, it just gets buried. Once we saw that, we changed how we talked about what we made. That shift opened everything up.
The thing you got wrong, or did the hard way
Marke: I took the back seat when I should have been driving. There were moments where I stepped away from leading and let the direction of things drift. I know that now.
Eva: I'm not sure I believe in mistakes the way the question implies. If someone had told me what was coming, I might still have made the same choices, because you don't really learn something until you've lived it. Every difficult thing taught us something we couldn't have learned another way. I'd rather have the knowledge than the shortcut.
The moment it almost didn't make it
Marke: Financially, there were many moments where it almost failed. Many. But as a brand, as an image, it never failed. The image was always strong. The product was always iconic. When things went wrong — suppliers, technology, partners who didn't work out — we reacted immediately, found a solution, and kept going. And through all of it, we had a core group of suppliers who stood by us, who believed in what we were doing. That mattered more than I can say.
Eva: It happens more than people think. Growth requires risk, and risk requires spending. Moulds cost a great deal, and there is always a chance the market doesn't accept something as quickly as you need it to in order to pay back what you borrowed. We've been through a pandemic. We've had sales partners who didn't work out. We've had a container stuck in the Suez Canal. Somehow, through all of it, the continued support of our customers carried us through. That's not a figure of speech. It's literally what happened.
Who you thought your customer would be, and who they actually are
Marke: I design for myself. I always have. I'm very selfish about it, actually — I make things I want and things I like, without knowing whether there's a market for them. I'm fortunate that when people discover these objects, some of them say: that's for me too. But I'm not designing for anyone in particular. I'm designing for me, and then with time and luck, other people become interested. That's the only way I know how to do it.
Eva: Same answer, different angle. We started making things for children, and discovered we were making things for everyone. The customer turned out to be anyone who still has a child inside them — which, as far as we can tell, is most people.
What surprised you most about building a design brand
Marke: How little difference there is between the design world and the art world. They're the same thing, really, except the art world has more hype around it. More fluff around what you're selling, more mythology around what things are worth. In the design world, you make something and it goes directly to many people at once. What I love is that our customers are getting both things at the same time: a genuinely original piece of art and a functional design object. They can keep it as a sculpture or use it as a lamp. That duality was always the intention. I'm still a little surprised by how well it works.
Eva: How much the continued support of real people — customers who collect the work, who write to us, who bring our lamps to hospitals and weddings and pools on holiday — turns out to be the thing that actually sustains a brand through hard times. Not strategy. People.
The product you almost didn't make, and the one that taught you something the hard way
Marke: I'm glad they all exist. Every single one of them is completely original — none of these shapes existed before we made them, which means every one of them was a risk that might not have worked. But they did work. They're all strong pieces. They're all genuinely iconic. And what I've learned from making them is that good things take time. A long incubation period is actually important — it's how a product is born correctly, how it comes out as a perfect baby rather than something half-finished.
The most recent example is the SHEEP. I'm really glad it exists, because it taught me about furniture design, about combining art with something functional, and about what it means to work with fully recycled materials. It was our first 100% recycled product and it opened a door I didn't know was there.
And the Duck. People look at it and think it should have taken two seconds. It took six years to perfect. Six years of different iterations, different materials, different technologies, and the specific challenge of getting something that would float perfectly balanced on water. It was, honestly, a royal pain in the ass. The simplicity of the duck hides its actual complexity. Getting it exactly right was one of the hardest things we've ever done. I think we did it.
Eva: The SHEEP took a very long time and is now one of my favourites. The Boleti lamp is probably the one we should have reconsidered. The reason we made it was wrong: we thought we should make a classic-looking lamp with a solar panel because that's what the market seemed to want. In the end, there is too much competition in that space and it wasn't really us. The lesson was to trust the instinct that makes our work unusual, not to follow what seems expected.
What the brand knows now that it didn't know at the start
Marke: The brand has become more self-aware. It knows that it has been continuously putting out iconic designs for over twelve years. It has been through a pandemic, a container stuck in the Suez Canal, multiple worldwide retail shifts, the move from physical shops to online, trends that came and went. The brand knows how hard it is for small people to make an impact on the world. And it knows, more than ever, how important the community around it is — the people who collect the work, who support it, who come back. We valued that from day one. We value it even more now. We're making real pieces of art, by humans for other humans, and our goal is simply to keep doing that. To keep sharing joy and positivity with people who feel the same way.
Eva: Twelve years on, the brand knows itself. That's not nothing.
