Tiipoi a product design studio based between Bangalore and London that launched it’s first collection of products during London Design Festival ’14. India fascinates and inspires us.
We think that there is more to Indian design than just sticking an elephant on it, and that Indian craft has more to offer than simply repeating the past. India can seem a pretty chaotic place.
But sitting there, quietly are some really incredible, super functional designs. The “designers” of these objects if they can be found at all, aren’t celebrated in the same way as they are in other countries.
Tiipoi believes in good materials, and that good design is often invisible. Rather than adding to the exploding world of designed products, Tiipoi adapts from existing classics in order to champion lesser known design concepts from the Indian subcontinent.
By working with small scale workshops and semi-industrial units, or independent craftsmen and makers, the studio creates design that brings together handmade and industrial production in India, always aspiring to keep a human element in the making process.
Spandana Gopal is Tiipoi’s Founder and Creative Director. “We’re talking about a common sense attitude to consumption – a design ethos from India – where nothing is wasted. And innovation, though often frugal or homespun at first, comes from a lack of something rather than an excess of it.
” says Spandana. The word Tiipoi comes from ‘tiinpai’, a 3-legged stool that has its colonial origins from the British Raj in India in the late 1800’s. It is assumed that something was lost in translation, as it later came to be referred to as a ‘teapoy’ used as a tea caddy.
There is a suspicion that it is because of the ‘Tea’ sound in the word.
