Page 4 - AIT0421_Ranzenmacher

r Many business ideas are born out of a shortage. This was also the case for you?! pical of an architect” – especially by textile- or industrial designers. Not last, it is the ten-
In late summer 2004, we were sitting in our favourite corner café in Zionskirch-Kiez ha- dency to noncompromising self-exploitation which is immanent to us as architects al-
ving a quick morning coffee when Illka suddenly said – and I can still remember the exact ready starting during the first semesters, this motto of “persevering is more important
words – “You know, I have been looking to buy a school satchel for Cord. Well, if there is than sleeping”. But this as well has become better. I always say: I am very pleased with
one product which should really be further developed, it is an attractive, lightweight sat- my regular 50-hour week.
chel. I simply could find nothing of the kind.” I myself had so far not even given the issue
any thought, it was still almost a year until the enrolment in school, after all. At first, I r Parents also place much value on the ergonomic aspects when buying satchels. You
could not believe it, but it turned out to be true: leather satchels were too heavy and have significantly reduced the empty weight of the kundschafters …
everything apart from genuine leather was too ugly for us. Since our son, as a passionate Yes, we do in fact place much value on the low empty weightof our kundschafters since
fan of the Werder Bremen football team, had specific ideas regarding colours which could this was exactly an essential motivation for us to get into designing school satchels. In
not be found anywhere – at the time, Werder footballers played in green-orange shirts – this regard, we actually notice two approaches. Some people think: “Weight plays a sub-
the idea quickly came up to have a go at satchels ourselves. Fortunately, we still had a ordinate role as long as there is sufficient ergonomics.” And other people say: “If my child
whole year for the development. The first prototype was finished the night before the first in first grade takes a pencil case, two exercise books, a primer and the sandwich along
day of school. It sounds perhaps kitschy, but this is exactly how everything got started. and the school satchel then still weighs four to five kilogrammes, I cannot responsibility
for this.” We belong more to the second group and try to achieve a good coefficient bet-
r You are both architects. How much architecture thinking is contained in your satchels? ween padding and minimal empty weight. And I have to say that our experience to some
In my opinion, it is difficult to define something like “architecture thinking”; everyone extent proves we are right. We see relatively many switchers from heavy “ergonomic
probably sees it as something different. But I shall try it with a few aspects that come to monsters” to our lightweight products.
mind. First of all, there is the impulse and the chutzpah to even venture into something
“outside our subject area” at all and not to say “We cannot do this, we were not trained r How has your company developed economically in the course of the years?
for this.” In my view, this has a lot to do with the kind of thinking my studies imparted For ten years, kundschafter has been financially more or less a zero-sum game. The
to me. Not to understand architecture merely as putting up houses houses but also as money to live was coming in through the agency jobs in the media sector. We didn’t want
structural, systemic thinking and a creative process of design, function and profitability. to take out loans and we probably would not have been granted any. Everything was too
This abstraction has, by the way, also helped me a lot in the media sector into which I small and too crazy for this to happen. As of 2014, however, the demand as well as our
had digressed when, at the beginning of the noughties, there were no suitable jobs in ar- productivity developed in such a way that one could seriously think about kundschafter
chitecture. Then there is the courage to omit, the search for clarity. This “less is more” as a source of income. 2016 was a decisive year when we had to move out of our old
DNA of the modern age is what we have naturally integrated. It not only assisted us for workshop premises and rented our own small shop. Suddenly, the rent was more than
the design vocabulary but also for the inner organization and the compartments of our twice as high. We made use of this as the opportunity for jumping in at the deep end and
school satchels. This has also already resulted in one or the other comment such as “ty- concentrating professionally on our independence.

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Kollektion Shishu Stitch, Tokyo Texture und
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Das Ergebnis: unsere ersten CO -negativen
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