In terms of reaching customers, your location doesn’t really matter in 2021, the internet and social media knows no borders. However, physical networks are important, and the size of the creative community in Oslo feels like a tiny village, which makes it easy to initiate collaborations. We love to host dinners; we get inspiration from gatherings with close friends. So, for us, working as creatives in Norway is good. However, there are times when we wish that Oslo had a slight longer design heritage like Copenhagen. Sometimes Oslo feels a bit small. But we have both lived in a few different cities, and what we have gradually realized is that it’s really not a matter of which city, but rather who you know in the city you live in. We both have great friends and wonderful connections in Oslo.
Besides the obvious, trying to take care of our environment, we like the challenges pursuing a sustainable production brings. However, the industry needs to move away from talking about sustainability, as the word has lost its meaning through misuse and greenwashing. What does it even mean anymore? A company that takes steps to pollute less than before, can label their production ‘sustainable’, yet are still not taking care of the environment. Sometime in the near future, technology can help fix such issues. We find the idea of government imposed, mandatory, blockchain-based traceability on all new products, very interesting. We imagine a future where you’re not allowed to manufacture or import/export products that are not traceable.
Norwegian design in itself is still a bit outside the international conversation, as it is often clustered within Scandinavian design, which usually references Danish or Swedish design. However, there is a lot of interesting work and collaborations happening in Norwegian design, especially young talent. We’d like to mention Nebil Zaman, Jinbin Chen, who also was one of the models in our latest photoshoot for Yoke Tokyo, and lastly Ali Gallefoss, who we recently did a design collaboration with.
We were part of a creative community, and wanted a new creative outlet where we could start experimenting, and see where the process took us, without a plan or strategy. We started experimenting with making jewelry of different recycled materials in 2017. The process is still really organic, we initiate collaborations, experiment with materials, and lately, creating visual stories for other brands has become a bigger part of our daily life.
First of all, the one of us that had the best night's sleep gets up and starts making our kids’ lunchbox. If the weather is nice, we go together as a family to drop off Storm at the kindergarten before we go to our studio, make coffee and take care of all urgent emails. Sometime before lunch we spend an hour talking about ideas for new collections, design ideas, or an idea for a story for a brand we’d like to work with. Lately we’ve been planning our first physical pop-up exhibition where we’ll show our limited-edition pearl earrings made in collaboration with industrial designer Sofia Olsson. For the exhibition Linda made a series of unique pearl earrings of sanded brass, and Sofia Olsson expedited the oxidation process chemically. In all our brass earrings we embrace the life of oxidation, and this collaboration is a tribute to that life. Follow us on Instagram @Mold.Atelier to get invited to the exhibition.
