striped shirtstriped blueWhen it comes to tackling the laborious task of decorating a house or apartment, let's not kid ourselves: most of us run to wander through the industrial aisles of this famous Swedish furniture giant. A habit that TIPTOE, a small company with twenty employees - all the same! - installed a chair leg in Paris and a table leg in Chamonix would like to shake up. With a strong argument: sustainable and recyclable collections. A way of doing things that, of course, had something to arouse our curiosity, at Hast. Meeting with the co-founder of TIPTOE, Vincent Quesada.
TIPTOE is a company that claims to be part of what is now called “eco-design”. Broadly speaking, how does this model differ from mainstream brands that sell furniture?
The difference between the two models is not automatically obvious because you have to be a bit of an expert to understand the particularities of a piece of furniture. Let's say that for the majority of "mainstream" brands, it is mainly about producing as cheaply as possible. When we start from this principle, few issues are really taken into account. Roughly speaking: the origin of the raw materials is not monitored, the workforce is poorly paid and the design effort is neglected. In many cases, mainstream brands choose their furniture "off the shelf" in gigantic factories in Asia by modifying a few details here and there to adapt them to their market, without any real design effort. To produce a chair for fifty euros, this is the only way to do it. Conversely, the eco-design approach (or eco-design) involves placing sustainability at the heart of design methods. A product must last over time, it must be easily repairable but also easily recyclable when the time comes. At TIPTOE, we think about the construction and deconstruction of our products. Everything is done to ensure that each product is as durable as possible. Generally speaking, a classic sofa is very difficult to recycle because it is made of a multitude of composite materials: at the end of its life, it is crushed, burned or buried underground.
The choice of materials is therefore an essential element of your equation…
For each product, there must be few materials, few different components, and everything must therefore be recyclable. For example, last year, we released a chair made from recycled plastic whose back and seat are produced from industrial production waste. We recover plastic waste that we transform into granules before injecting them into a mold to create a useful, beautiful and durable object over time. From the same material, the tops of some of our tables are made from recovered yogurt pots to be melted, pressed and transformed into a material ready for cutting that has the appearance of marbled terrazzo. Before releasing a product like that, we had to work for a year with a number of partners to ensure that the material could withstand heat, that it was not brittle and also that it was aesthetic, because that obviously counts when purchasing. No matter how durable an object is, if it is not beautiful and desirable, no one will want it.
Wood is probably the most important material in furniture. It is found almost everywhere. Of course, there are a whole bunch of ethical issues around it. How do you ensure the origin of your wood and how do you work it?
Depending on the object we are going to produce, we do not necessarily use the same wood. For our stools, we use solid wood - mainly beech and oak. These are strips of raw wood that are not mixed with anything else. They are cut, glued together and then machined. If we want to give a certain shape to the wood, we will use what is called plywood. These are very thin slices of wood that are glued together with water-based solvents and then folded. In terms of sourcing, we only use virgin wood that comes from sustainably managed European forests and labeled PEFC or FSC. These certifications are not yet perfect but they go a long way to ensuring that the wood comes from forests managed in such a way that the trees can regenerate easily and where regrowth is ensured. Traditional brands often buy wood that comes from the other side of the world, from India or Indonesia for example, where there is little traceability and where deforestation problems are recurrent. We also use recycled wood. In these cases, it is wood that comes from destroyed buildings where we recover beams, floor sections, everything that the structures contain wood. Generally speaking, we avoid working with chipboard: a mass of wood waste condensed with often harmful solvents and which tends to deteriorate quickly.
What about the steel, too, which you use in particular to develop your table legs?
Steel is the most recycled material in the world. In Europe, it is estimated that 80% of the steel in circulation has already been recycled at least once. Steel is infinitely recyclable. With each recycling cycle, it loses no mechanical properties, whereas plastic can only be recycled a few times with the current state of technology. For our part, we use steel sheets that are laser cut, folded and painted before being baked in an oven so that the paint sets on them. This is called powder-coated steel, which guarantees a very long life for the object, by preventing it from rusting, for example. My partner's family owns a factory that has been working steel for several generations near Chamonix. More precisely, the family know-how is called bar turning. It is a way of working metal that developed in Haute-Savoie from the 18th century and which allowed farmers to find additional income by supplying parts to the neighboring Swiss watchmaking industry. The family factory is one of our first suppliers and produces all our mechanical parts, screws and assembly elements.
Like Hast, you also pay close attention to the packaging of your products in order to reduce the environmental cost of your activities…
We mostly use cardboard to package our products and we make sure that it is made of at least 80% recycled paper. It is a requirement but it is not a difficulty to find. This has nothing to do with food where packaging must meet extremely specific quality standards so as not to corrupt the food. We are also trying to reduce the amount of single-use packaging. We are working to no longer put our assembly tools in plastic bags that are then quickly thrown away. We need to create a paper bag, or a place in the cardboard where they can be fixed.
What are the projects that are closest to your heart today?
We continue to develop our product range beyond our first object, the clamp table leg. It is an object whose first variations date back to the 70s and which had mainly been designed for very high-end products until then. The TIPTOE table leg is an object that gives ideas. It allows you to create a table with a wide variety of tops. There are examples of people who have used old barn doors, others who have used parquet boards. This forces you to look for things that already exist. In a few weeks, we will release a sofa whose cushion foam is entirely recycled: it comes from mattresses that are chopped into small flakes, and these are then disinfected and recondensed. Everything is also disassemblable, which means that each element, from the foam to the steel of the structure, can be recycled. Above all, we want to make useful things; we don't want to fall into what is ornamental and make objects that are purely decorative. In the long term, if we develop on a very large scale, for example in Asia and the United States, our philosophy is that we will have to ensure that we produce our collections in these territories instead of importing them from Europe. But we are not there yet!
You work with factories, and men and women who still wear overalls, with tools in their pockets. But on your side, as a business leader, do you wear the suit?
Before TIPTOE, I worked for three years in an investment bank. I wore a suit and tie every day. I was sick of it. Today, I wear a t-shirt and shirts most of the time, even when I have to meet our investors. The suit is over. I don't even wear one for weddings.