Coming Soon – The Goods

Design

What’s Mycelium Got to Do With It? Inside a Lamp Made from Mushrooms

April 5, 2018

*Editor’s note: The Mushroom Lamp is coming soon to our assortment. Get it first by pre-ordering here.

The Mushroom Lamp | pre-order now, only at UncommonGoods

Imagine, if you will, a mushroom. What do you see in your mind’s eye? A red cap, flecked with bits of white? Or the spongier look of the prized morel? We’d bet anything you don’t picture a lamp, but maybe—just maybe—you should. And along with designer Danielle Trofe, we’re here to tell you why.

It may seem like there’s somewhat of a leap from mushrooms to your living room decor, but we swear, the connection’s relatively linear. The key? Mycelium, otherwise known as the network of subterranean “roots” that helps petite ’shrooms gather nutrients from their surroundings. In 2007, Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre—co-founders of a company called Ecovative—set out to expose mycelium’s potential by using it to craft eco-friendly alternatives to stuff like polystyrene foam (yuck). It didn’t take long for Danielle to take advantage of Ecovative’s fun(gal) creation, incorporating mycelium into the design of an object you can now get only at UncommonGoods. You guessed it: It’s a lamp. The Mushroom Lamp, to be exact.

Design

Give Your Favorite Fruits a Boost with the Just Ripe Fruit Bowl

February 12, 2018

Just Ripe Fruit Bowl | available only at UncommonGoods

Thousands of years—that’s how old the concept of a fruit bowl is. In Pompeiian frescoes and the Met’s collections (and many places in between), you’ll find evidence of the delightfully basic vessel’s time-honored place in our kitchens. When something’s been around so long, though, why tweak it? We’ll let you in on a secret: Your beloved fruit bowl could be better. We’re talking way, way better. And with a little help from designer Myles Geyman, our Product Development team set out to make it so.

First, if you’ll permit the indulgence, allow us to set the scene. It’s a sunny Saturday morning, and you’ve just hit the farmer’s market in search of your favorite summer fruits (hey, it’s February—we can dream): peaches, cherries, plums, and nectarines. You arrive home with your tasty, tasty spoils, plop them all in your favorite fruit bowl, and wait for each to achieve maximum ripeness. But you’re foiled when one of your peaches turns mushy, unleashing a sea of sticky peach slop, and when you attempt to lift your spirits, you reach for a plum—only to find it’s neither soft nor sweet! If only you had some way of organizing your fruits, pushing the tough, unripe ones along, and keeping such disappointment at bay…

Enter the Just Ripe Fruit Bowl and its partner in crime, a little thing called ethylene.

Design

Coffee Brake: The Manual Three-in-One Coffeemaker

October 21, 2017

Coffee can be a complicated thing. Unless you’re drinking decaf, it signals speed and gulp-and-go morning motivation. It’s no accident that many American offices provide a steady stream of java, as if to say coffee equals productivity. But the slow food movement has put the brakes on preparing this fast-lane beverage. “Slow coffee is really asking folks to consider coffee as something more than just a caffeine jolt,” says Manual Three-in-One Coffeemaker designer Craighton Berman. Brewing methods like pour-over and French press that predate auto drip and K-cup coffeemakers have made a comeback. You could easily end up with a cabinet full of coffee paraphernalia, but Chicagoans and slow-coffee devotees Craighton and his wife and design partner, Emily, have a solution: a brewer that combines two manual methods with an insulating double-walled design.

Design

Functional Fashion:
The Tulry Utility Necklace

October 9, 2017

Tulry Utility Necklace

“A lot of everyday products are designed with a male-centric audience in mind,” says designer Nate Barr. He admits that he hadn’t really thought about that until his wife, Bryn, challenged him to think from the perspective of people who aren’t always empowered to speak up. Bryn also inspired his latest invention, the Tulry Utility Necklace.

Bryn said she loved the functionality of Nate’s tools, like the Multi-Tool Box of Wonders, but had no way to carry them. “She pointed out that dresses don’t have pockets. Jeans pockets are too tight, and a purse is never big enough,” Nate explains. She encouraged him to create a unique way to solve this problem. The result marries an elegant jewelry design with a highly functional piece.

Design

In Praise of Sound Design: Introducing the Public Radio

July 25, 2017

*Editor’s note: The Public Radio – Single Station Tuner is coming soon to our assortment. Get it first by pre-ordering here.

Pre-order the Public Radio – Single Station Tuner

Modernity can be a little overwhelming. Don’t get us wrong, of course; the internet is an amazing tool, and smartphones make virtually everything easier, from navigating the wildlands otherwise known as the subway system to finding out whether it’s going to rain in fifteen minutes or if that cloud’s just looking a bit more angry than usual. We agree: These are all good things. But sometimes an escape from the wealth of information our era provides seems awfully luxurious. Sometimes you just want to turn your phone off for like, one second. And sometimes you’d rather not wonder which one of the hundreds of thousands of podcasts out there you should listen to today. You’d rather flip a switch, hear one thing (and one thing only), and move on with your life, complex as it already is.

Spencer, left, and Zach

Enter the Public Radio – Single Station Tuner, brainchild of media and sound technologist Zach Dunham and his childhood friend Spencer Wright, a manufacturing strategist. A breath of fresh air among the seemingly endless streaming options in today’s digital landscape, the Public Radio – Single Station Tuner radically simplifies your listening experience. Tuned to a single FM station of your choice, it has only one knob, for volume control. And while lowercase public radio (or, y’know, Hot 97) devotees will appreciate the ease with which they can tune into their favorite station, design aficionados will take to the gadget’s thoughtful construction, which allows it to fit into any wide-mouth Mason jar—not only the cute, compact half-pint variety it ships with.

Design

A-Side Design: Jeff Davis’ Vintage Vinyl Bluetooth Speaker

June 16, 2017

*Editor’s note: Jeff Davis’ Vintage Vinyl Bluetooth^® Speaker is coming soon to our assortment. You can be among the first to get this design by pre-ordering here.

Side A

Fresh from its triumphant world tour on Kickstarter, Jeff Davis’ Vintage Vinyl Bluetooth^® Speaker puts a new spin on old LPs, letting reclaimed vinyl play music in an innovative way: as the speaker itself. With a bemused smile, Jeff points out that you can’t drop the needle on these reshaped records, but they will play your entire digital music collection in analog-inspired style. It’s a cool way to give your smartphone an audiophile upgrade.

Design

Wash Your Pet without Getting Drenched (Thanks to the Aquapaw)

May 22, 2017

Have you ever given a dog a bath? She probably squirmed around a bit. OK, that might be an understatement. It’s more likely that that she wouldn’t hold still, splashed around a whole lot, and then did one of those full-body doggy shakes that sent a shower your way. Almost everyone who’s owned a dog has had a similar experience. Product designer Daniel Lentz certainly has, and it got him thinking that there had to be a better way to get our furry friends squeaky clean.

The Aquapaw Dog Bathing Glove lets you keep one hand free to hold your dog’s collar or reach for the pet shampoo, while the other hand wets and scrubs. The whole time your dog is getting the spa treatment, he’s also getting a good petting. It took Daniel years of thinking about the product, piles of prototypes, and some time spent scrubbing dirty pups at a local dog shelter, but now his design is ready to make bath time easier for pet parents and their pets. The Aquapaw is coming soon to our assortment, so we asked Daniel to tell us more about his development process and why he thinks every pet owner should have an Aquapaw.

Aquapaw Pet Bathing Mitt | UncommonGoods

Pre-order the Aquapaw Dog Bathing Glove here

Continue Reading…

Design

Nobody Puts Peanut M&Ms in the Corner: Meet the Candy Convertible

April 24, 2017

Perhaps you’ve never thought of the snack journey: That epic pilgrimage certain foods make from their cabinet confines to your coffee table. Find comfort in the knowledge, though, that Houston-based designers John Paul and Roya Plauché have.

“We were exploring the relationship of food and the snack journey from the kitchen to the living room,” John Paul said about the design process, which was a collaboration with the UncommonGoods Product Development team. “We had initially tried to identify the typology of foods that would be common for this type of transition, then build around them and their possible groupings.” The “typology of foods” they landed on: Sweetus Snackae. Street name: Candy.

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