Zuber On My Mind
5 Brand partnerships I want to see plus some juicy scoop on BR Home.
Hello Readers!
The summer months are when I am in my prime. Longer days make everything seem livelier and more accessible… in turn my spirits are high whether it’s due to dancing all night undaunted by long lines outside of the best dance halls, grabbing a breezy last minute brunch al fresco with friends I haven't seen in a while or the indulging in the sweet solitude of getting ice cream and admiring the architecture of my neighborhood during a twilight stroll. In the midst of this extended energy buzz, I find myself back in GoogleDocs, compiling the first 2024 entry of These Walls Talk. Here are 5 brand partnerships that I’m manifesting for 2024:
Yinka Ilori X Momentum Textiles + Publicolor
Ok I know that’s a mouthful to start with but hear me out: Momentum had a standout display at Neo Con this year. This was due in equal parts to Momentum’s tried and true contract products and Ilori’s absolute joyful rainbow of designs. Ilori’s ethos- creating playful designs for urban spaces and infusing dull, mundane objects with a new light- aligns perfectly with Publicolor, a nonprofit youth organization that uses design based programs to serve at-risk youth and renovate their public spaces.
This has been rattling in the back of my mind since Pierre Frey acquired Zuber last year. Zuber was founded in 1797 and Cire Trudon was founded in 1643. Both brands have lasted two revolutions and world wars, so they’re already in a different stratosphere together. But beyond that, both have a restrained brand presence. As Fred Nicolaus stated in Business of Home, there’s a “tightrope walk of revitalizing a heritage brand. Do too much, and you break what was special. Do too little, and you risk irrelevance and stagnation”. Currently Cire Trudon seems to be more adept at walking this tightrope (they have immersive social media campaigns, you can buy their product on Revolve using AfterPay, etc.) so this could be the perfect way to usher their design counterpart into the modern age.
While Zuber and Cire Trudon would be a collaboration strengthened from shared history, this one has exciting potential to move the Zuber and Harlem Toile de Jouy brands forward with nuance and purpose. Brand partnerships are not new to Sheila Bridges, who started Harlem Toile as a wallpaper- featuring “beautiful drawings of African Americans in the lush, historical settings that rarely featured them”- in 2006. Since then there have been multiple acclaimed collaborations with companies including Williams Sonoma, The Shade Store, and Wedgwood. However, I think that partnering with a heritage brand so closely linked to the original product’s inception (Bridges herself said that she is particularly influenced by the patterns from French pastoral motifs of the 1700s) would be special from an artistic standpoint and a historical one. Zuber even gets a shoutout in this 2022 piece on Bridges in reference to the genteel “Vues d’Amérique du Nord” and “Bay of New York” patterns that Jacqueline Kennedy installed in the White House.
The cloud-based security company Verkada closed Series D with $305M in funding last year and Eoin Harrington’s Mine, a home furnishings venture that turns luxury model homes across the US into shoppable furniture showrooms via strategic partnerships with top homebuilders keeps on expanding. While Verkada doesn’t offer products for single family homes yet, they are accomplished in security solutions for multi-family residential communities. I think this could be a match made in tech heaven.
Because Brat Summer can include dinner parties.
NEWS:
Cesarstone was outlawed in Australia. I wrote about this in my first letter. The side effects for laborers are nothing short of horrifying so I hope the US will follow suit.
Banana Republic’s president Sandra Stangl abruptly left the company in May “observers are speculating whether her aggressive plan to move the company into the home business was what pushed her out the door”. Sooo juicy! I do see the logic of Stangl pushing BR into the home space, but my problem was with the execution. BR Home added nothing to the market other than being a cheap knockoff of RH in terms of product, pricing, branding, store experience… and even RH has trouble keeping up these days. BR hasn’t released how its home assortment is performing specifically but overall sales at the company were down 2 percent while comp store sales dropped 4 percent.
Starbucks unveiled a plan to make their locations quieter . Yes! Shoutout to this 2018 article from The Atlantic (written by my queen of architectural criticism, Kate Wagner) that has been on my mind in every god forsaken noisy restaurant since it was published. With the longstanding prevalence of *Quiet Luxury* it baffles me that more restaurants and cafes haven’t adopted strategies like this. Maybe you can hear a pin drop in places like ZZ’s Club but I, being a humble civilian of a certain tax bracket, would not know. If anyone would like to change that and bring me as a plus one my inbox is open ;)
Business Insider published an A+ read about why those muddy gray wood floors that no one can find complimentary rug colors for are everywhere: Why New Homes Look so Ugly: Bad Design Choices, High Building Costs - Business Insider
The founders of Coming Soon are being featured in Feed Me’s Guest Lecture (AKA the savviest place on the internet) this week ahead of their first in-house product launch. It’s rare that Emily Sundberg covers the home space, so I’m looking forward to this one.
Ciaooooo xx