striped shirt blueWhen it comes to tackling the laborious task of decorating a house or flat, there is no point kidding ourselves: most of us head straight for the industrial aisles of that famous Swedish furniture giant. A habit that TIPTOE, a small company of twenty employees — no less! — with one chair leg in Paris and one table leg in Chamonix, would very much like to shake up. With a compelling argument: sustainable, recyclable collections. An approach that was bound to pique our curiosity at Hast. So, we met TIPTOE co-founder Vincent Quesada.
TIPTOE is a company that identifies with what is now known as “eco-design”. Broadly speaking, how does this model differ from mass-market retailers that sell furniture?
The difference between the two models is not imtely obvious, as you need to be something of a connoisseur to understand the particularities of a piece of furniture. For the vast majority of mass-market brands, the aim is above all to produce as cheaply as possible. Starting from that premise, very few issues are truly taken into account. Broadly speaking: the origin of raw materials is not monitored, labour is poorly paid, and the effort put into conception and design is neglected. In many cases, mass-market brands choose their furniture off the shelf from huge factories in Asia, altering a few details here and there to adapt it to their market, without any real design effort. To produce a chair for fifty euros, it is the only way to do it. By contrast, the eco-design approach involves placing sustainability at the heart of design methods. A product must stand the test of time; it must be easy to repair and, when the time comes, easy to recycle. At TIPTOE, we consider both the construction and deconstruction of our products. Everything is done to make each product as durable as possible. Generally speaking, a conventional sofa is very difficult to recycle because it is made from 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 part of your equation…
For each product, there must be few materials and few different components, so everything must be recyclable. Last year, for example, we launched a chair in recycled plastic, with its backrest and seat made from industrial production offcuts. We recover plastic waste and turn it into pellets before injecting them into a mould to create a useful, beautiful and durable object. Using the same material, the tops of some of our tables are made from yoghurt pots collected to be melted, pressed and transformed into a material ready for cutting, with the appearance of marbled terrazzo. Before launching a product like this, we had to work for a year with a number of partners to ensure that the material could withstand heat, was not brittle and was aesthetically pleasing too, because that obviously matters when buying. An object may be as sustainable as possible, but if it is not beautiful and desirable, nobody will want it.
Wood is undoubtedly the most important material in furniture. It is found almost everywhere. Naturally, there are all sorts of ethical issues surrounding it. How do you ensure the provenance of your wood, and how do you work with it?
Depending on the object we are going to make, we do not necessarily use the same wood. For our stools, we use solid wood — mainly beech and oak. These are raw wood boards that are not mixed with anything else. They are cut, glued together and then machined. If we want to give wood a particular shape, we use what is known as plywood instead. These are very thin layers of wood glued together with water-based solvents and then bent. In terms of sourcing, we only use virgin wood from sustainably managed European forests certified PEFC or FSC. These certifications are not yet perfect, but they go a long way towards ensuring that the wood comes from forests managed in such a way that trees can regenerate easily and regrowth is ensured. Traditional brands often buy wood from the other side of the world, from India or Indonesia for example, where there is little traceability and deforestation issues are recurrent. We also use recycled wood. In these cases, it comes from demolished buildings, where we recover beams, floorboards and all the wood found in the structures. Generally speaking, we avoid working with chipboard: a mass of wood waste compressed with often harmful solvents, which tends to deteriorate quickly.
And what about the steel you use, notably to develop your table legs?
Steel is the most recycled material in the world. In Europe, it is estimated that 80% of steel in circulation has already been recycled at least once. Steel can be recycled indefinitely. With each recycling cycle, it loses none of its mechanical properties, whereas plastic can only be recycled a few times with current technologies. For our part, we use steel sheets that are laser-cut, bent and painted before being baked in an oven so that the paint adheres to them. This is what is known as powder-coated steel, which guarantees a very long lifespan for the object by preventing it from rusting, for example. My business partner’s family has owned a steelworking factory near Chamonix for several generations. More specifically, the family craftsmanship is called screw machining. It is a way of working metal that developed in Haute-Savoie from the 18th century onwards and enabled farmers to earn additional income by supplying parts to the neighbouring Swiss watchmaking industry. The family factory is one of our first suppliers and produces all our mechanical parts, screws and assembly components.
Like Hast, you also pay close attention to the packaging of your products in order to reduce the environmental cost of your activities…
We mainly use cardboard to package our products, ensuring that it is made from at least 80% recycled paper. It is a requirement, but not a difficult one to meet. It has nothing to do with food packaging, where packaging must meet extremely specific quality standards so as not to contaminate food. We also try to reduce the amount of single-use packaging. We are working to stop putting our assembly tools in plastic pouches that are then thrown away in haste. We need to create a paper pocket square, or a space in the cardboard where they can be secured.
What projects are closest to your heart today?
We continue to develop our product range beyond our first object, the clamp-on table leg. It is an object whose first iterations date back to the 1970s and which had until then mainly been conceived for the very high-end market. The TIPTOE table leg is an object that sparks ideas. It makes it possible to create a table with a wide variety of tops. Some people have used old barn doors, while others have used parquet boards. It encourages people to look for things that already exist. In a few weeks, we will launch a sofa whose cushion foam is entirely recycled: it comes from mattresses shredded into small flakes, which are then disinfected and recompressed. Everything can also be dismantled, meaning that every element, from the foam to the steel frame, can be recycled. Above all, we want to make useful things; we have no desire to fall into ornamentation and create purely decorative objects. In the long term, if we expand on a very large scale, for example in Asia and the United States, our philosophy means we will need to produce our collections in those regions rather than import them from Europe. But we are not there yet!
You work with factories, and with men and women who still wear work overalls, with tools filling their pockets. But on your side, as a business owner, do you wear a suit?
Before TIPTOE, I worked for three years in an investment bank. Every day, I wore a suit and a tie. I had had enough of it. Today, I wear a T-shirt and shirts most of the time, even when I have to meet our investors. Suits are over for me. I do not wear one even for weddings.