Make it sing, make it fly (off the shelf)
Sunday, November 1 2009
Make it sing, make it fly into people's hearts
By Elaine Bellezza
For more than 15 years, Elaine Bellezza has helped bring fantastic home décor and fashion accessories products from West Africa to world markets. She's trained hundreds of artisan business people, building their capacity to produce "fabulous" products, as she puts it. Two words express the key to success in the fiercely competitive handcrafts market: Product and Pricing. Innovative, interesting and captivating products ultimately win consumers’ hearts and minds, selling them at the right price captures the market. As the Trade Hub’s new home décor and fashion accessories advisor, Elaine will work with hundreds of companies across the region to help inspire and produce new products geared to target markets.
Design and product development are crucial for ongoing success. But It all starts with an idea. Being able to find inspiration requires us to tap our creativity, to look at the world differently, to challenge our set ideas and test new ones.
And it starts by looking at something you might see everyday – like a zipper – and thinking about it in progressively new ways. Here are a number of products that use zippers, essentially a utilitarian closure mechanism, as a design element. These products below are creative uses of zipper as a closure.
Next we move beyond the essential utilitarian nature of zippers, though they are still a closure mechanism. Below, the zipper is still a closure element, but now the closure aspect becomes the design itself.
Moving even further beyond the original use, now we have zipper not at all as closure. Now the zipper is transformed from closure to a design element that is essentially fabric and metal, using the metal teeth as the catching aspect.
Now, voila, the zipper becomes a full-fledged design element with no relationship to its utilitarian usage, bent and twisted and sewn in highly creative ways.
All of these products are by different designers, each building on the creativity of someone who came before them, pushing zipper to its extreme. In all our designs we gain inspiration from what we see around us, and what others have done before us. A designer has the responsibility to push an idea further, to take it to the next level and make it his/her own.
We will soon start an interactive design forum that will allow you to ask your design questions and share ideas. Send your ideas and thoughts for this new feature to design [at] watradehub [dot] com.
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