Poma/Olera - the road to the Dutch Design Week

A sustainable solution for the everyday

It all started with a phonecall in June: ABN AMRO was looking for designers to come up with a sustainable solution for everyday situations, and if we could pitch an idea in July?

Since our House of Thol slogan is 'Durable products for easy green living' of course we had to participate!
We had a few ideas up our sleeve that could perhaps impact a marker like Earth Overshoot Day.

Move the date: Food waste

We took a close look at our own day-to-day and found plenty of things that we still can do better.
​One of the things that's a real problem, is food waste: with two young kids with fluctuating appetites in the house, we can't help but throw out food ever so often.
Such a waste! Not only because of the money, but also because of the resources we waste.

And this goes beyond our household: in the Netherlands we throw out 34 kilograms of food each per year, and globally one third of the food produced is wasted.
That's about 1.3 billion tons!
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If we could save only a quarter of that amount, we could feed every hungry mouth in the world (source). 

Poma/Olera: keep your food fresh

Bringing it back to our own small household: what can we do to avoid food waste in our daily lives?
We noticed we often have trouble with fruits and vegetables: what is the best way to store them, so they stay fresh for longest and we don't have to throw out wrinkled bell peppers?

Turns out not every fruit and vegetable plays nice with others, so keeping them all together in one large fruit bowl might not be such a great idea: the ethylene coming from fruits like apples can negatively impact the taste or ripeness of other fruits in the bowl.
Anyway, learning about the best way to store fresh food involved a whole lot of research (spreadsheets, seriously) that deserves its own blog post soon.

The go and the process

Back to the process: We presented our plans in Amsterdam in July and the day after our meeting with the jurors we drove off to the Schwarzwald in a 42°c heat and two eager little boys in a car without airconditioning.

We spent two blissful weeks of summer break, and got the phonecall with the final go for our Poma/Olera project while en route.

These past months, ever since returning home from our break, have been all about Poma/Olera. 

The design changed somewhat from the first drafts and we created a series of round vessels specifically designed to store fruits and vegetables in a better way.

The making process involved a lot of sketching,computer drawing, 3d printing, mold making, clay casting, finishing, failing, doing it again, changing the molds, recasting, firing the kiln, glazing tests, new glazing tests, production, production, production.
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Well, your typical design process, really.

See you in Eindhoven!

We're super happy and proud to be able to showcase the first prototypes of our Poma/Olera series at the Game Changers Pavilion on the Ketelhuisplein during this Dutch Design Week.
We'd love to see you there!

read all about game changers here