Q&A: Meet Mater – a conscious and ethical design brand

While sustainability used to be something of a marketing buzzword for brands, used off-hand or without any real meaning or in-depth research, there’s some brands in the design industry that are really thinking deeply and meaningfully about our impact on the planet and the scarce resources it gives us. They’re considering not just where materials come from, but how they’re made and if the waste from production can be put to better use.

One such company is Mater, a conscious and ethical design brand ‘with a strong design philosophy and great emphasis on craftsmanship’. Founded in Copenhagen in 2006, Mater collaborates with established and fresh design talent, such as Space Copenhagen, Eva Harlou and Todd Bracher, to create high-end furniture and lighting, with working methods that support people, local craft traditions and the environment. The aesthetic is Scandinavian minimalism – each design is simple, considered and made from sustainably or ethically sourced materials.

Mater is on a mission to rethink dubious practices and create design that minimises adverse social and environmental impacts. They reuse unwanted materials, such as recycled aluminium from old bicycles and tyres as well as wood fibre from making chairs, used plastic and glass. They support old traditions and forgotten craft techniques such as ancient sand casting and wood turning in India. And they’re also researching exciting new ways to create strong, durable materials from waste, looking into ocean plastic waste, food waste and even elephant poo!

Last week I headed to the Mater Earth Gallery in London’s Clerkenwell to chat to founder of the company Henrik Marstrand.

Opened in May to coincide with Clerkenwell Design week, this new space designed by Earth Studio, headed up by Eva Harlou, is both a concept store and a showroom for the Mater brand. As well as showcasing the brand’s furniture collection, it’s also a place to learn more about the design process behind the products – how things are made and the eco-friendly materials that go into production. This is a brand that is really asking the ‘why’ – why should a new piece be launched, why is this material of importance, what is the ethical value behind it – and not just producing for the sake of pushing something new all the time.

It was an eye-opening conversation with Henrik and I hope you’ll enjoy this insight into the Mater brand.

How did Mater come about and what is the meaning behind the name?

Mater means mother in Latin. My background is commercial – I’ve been in chocolate companies and coffee – and I have a business degree. But being Danish, furniture is so much part of our DNA. So when I wanted to start my own adventure, back in 2006-7, I was looking at the trends coming from eco foods, from cosmetics where all the bad things are stripped out; a trend for more sustainable choices. And I said let’s do a brand from scratch that has an ethical value tied into every product that we do; and that’s either the people that make it, like upholding old craft techniques, or a material choice such as waste wood.

Then the word responsibility comes in and then the word mother comes in. I was also becoming a father.

Knowing the side effects of production and the way we treat the scarce resources of the planet, what would a responsible mother do knowing these things.

Originally we wanted to call it mother – that reflects back to the values of a responsible mother or material coming out of Mother Earth – but that was impossible to trademark. So we sat down with some Italian friends and they know Latin very well and they said why don’t you just call it Mater – that could be trade marked and become the brand ethos. 

We originally started out with an accessory collection with glassware and porcelain, then we had one chair in the collection and quickly after launching it became transparent to us, ‘oh there’s something here’.

First we were very transparent about what we did. With production being super dirty, you had the contradiction of showing a beautiful piece of furniture and the dirty production images and that doesn’t sit well if you’re paying a premium. So we had to find a way of communicating what we do.

Essentially every piece of furniture we launch must be judged as a design object on its own, and in the beginning it was clear to us that the sustainable, ethics part was something of an added benefit.

Now clearly the market has changed and the years have progressed. Now in the last few years, sustainability is much more in demand. The discussions we have now come out of a desire and recognition that it is part of the branding.

But its a conscious choice not talking about sustainability – who can define that anyway – we internally see them as good stories. And we see our product developments as stream thinking, because the word stream means something that is transferred from one point to another – so for instance a waste stream; waste that is transitioned into something that is beautiful from a design perspective.

We’re still very design driven but we’re getting progressively more engineer driven. Not that we have a staff of 100 engineers just inventing what you can do with lava or something, but we tap into existing developments that are driven out of different technology projects, so we look at carbon waste, seagrass waste, wooden waste. Lighting is a growing category for us. We must use that knowledge to create more playful, more interesting objects.

As well as using materials that are sustainable and recycled, how else is the company ethical and conscious? 

It’s a philosophy that is mainly driven into the product philosophy. We’ve opened several showrooms and even opened our own interiors studio. When we’re commissioned to do interiors, we come with a complete offering, so one of the projects we’re doing in Copenhagen for one of the new hotels opening in 2019 has sustainable painting, sustainable flooring; sustainable thinking around every choice that you see as a guest in the rooms.

We also need to think of new products as ideally flat shipped and we must reduce the carbon footprint. But it’s not like we’ve done a bible or a script manual internally, I don’t think I would put that down on the company yet, I’d much rather that we internally think about how our design DNA is brought to life with products; that is, how is it shaped, choosing production nearby, etc. I also need to create a sustainable business, and a sustainable business is about profit. 

It’s a huge task even for a company of our size to get everything encapsulated in our thinking, being Danish we’re brought up by certain values, it’s within our education system that you think about what you print or how you use a resource. It’s built into the schooling system. 

When I go to Milan or any of the furniture fairs, I see all these new product launches in the design world, some beautiful, some unnecessary. How do you deal with the contradiction between the hunger for new designs and the simple fact that  we don’t really need more chairs? 

For me it’s a key question. We must answer a simple set of rules before launching a product – essentially it must have in its production manifest more good than bad. Now how does that translate. Why would we do just another chair, we could never do that. The chair, for example, that you’re sitting in is made of sustainably sourced wood; that’s not the key story anymore, the key story is the seat. It’s made of sustainably sourced papers and those are weaved by an old Danish tradition and these workshops have died by the numbers as we have industrialised. There’s only two workshops in left Denmark that can master that tradition. So a choice is to uphold that tradition and you keep going back to them. Also, all the wood waste from making the chair is converted into wooden pellets that are reused for the factory’s own self sufficient heating system. The entire village can then join that system. 

There’s an argument that if you build something made to last then that’s inherently sustainable because you’re less likely to throw things away, what do you say to that? 

I don’t buy that for one second because if you have built a design tradition about making timeless design without looking at your supply chain and taking some choices in your supply chain – the choice of material, your choice of foam, your choice of glue – then it’s just a bad excuse. Some of our Danish competitors have done that; they have taken some choices, some good ones and some not so good.

Beauty will last forever, fine I take that argument everyday, but the discussion should also be about how that beauty is made.

I realise and I respect that if you have made a product for 60 years and have a huge portfolio of products, you cannot change your way of thinking overnight.

We internally align around supporting very new materials which aren’t ready for the market yet. We engage with different technology institutes in Denmark to develop completely new ways of thinking – we’re working with wooden fibre, beer waste, food waste.

We’re one of the few companies who knocks on the doors of big companies and asks for their waste. 

That’s the fun part, that’s what drives me out of bed these days. Now we have companies coming to us saying what can be done with this waste, we’re looking into ocean waste plastic, fish net waste.

How do you choose the designers that you work with? 

Me not being a designer, me not understanding production, means I had to engage design talent, ideally with a philosophy that understands the Nordic or Scandinavian design traditions, which relates to timelessness, quality, choice of material and ethics.

We take on new projects with new, exciting, young people that come with an open minded philosophy or a new material that they’ve experimented with with. We scour every talent show at all the big fairs. It’s a new world expanding. 

We work with architects as well and are invited into more and more conversations. We feel especially in the last two or three years these types of discussions or consumer choices have expanded.

Could you talk about the concept behind the Earth Galleries and the design of the gallery in London?

We have opened several showrooms across bigger cities, we had Copenhagen, then London and Hamburg. We try to sit where the big markets for projects are. We will do Munich soon and Stockholm will come. We recognise that in order for us to get our stories across and get a feel for the brand, we need to display the whole collection.

Like any interior job, the design of the space must also reflect the actual premises you’re in. In Copenhagen we have a huge showroom space in an old car repair shop building in the north west of the city in an upcoming creative area. We have an old desk from the 1950s where we display materials. But when you translate that idea to a small boutique in Clerkenwell you have to adapt.

In London, there’s a lot more use of brass and a focus on detailing. This space needed more sophistication, with materials that will stand the test of time and age more beautifully. We have also used raw steel, which is very honest material.

It’s important that in every gallery we have a display of materials, so for instance, we’re designing a lamp out of elephant poo, so we have some waste products here to see. We’re going to be redoing the showroom in London and there’ll be a lot more production tools on show.

Thank you for speaking to me Henrik! I’m sure you’ll agree, there’s a fascinating story behind this conscious and ethical design brand – opening up conversations around the industry’s responsibility, material development, recycling and reuse, ethical production and conscious consumerism. If only more brands were as transparent and mindful in their approach to good quality design. But I for one am intrigued to see a lamp made out of elephant poo! Let’s watch this space…

All images courtesy Mater