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Today may possibly be the happiest (and cutest) national day in the world – it’s National Puppy Day! Being a new pet parent can be overwhelming, I’ve been there… So if you’re welcoming home a new puppy, or just looking to spoil your current one, here are 7 essential items to cover all your bases. After all, their happiness is your happiness! Plus, they’re all tested and approved by #dogintern, Koda, and trust me, she’s a picky one.
Did you know that puppies sleep for about 18 hours a day? All that rest is when their brain, body, and immune system are doing the most developing, so it’s no surprise that a comfy bed is the #1 thing they’ll be needing. Unlike most foam beds that trap heat, Koda especially loves Newton Baby’s Pet Bed, which features the same Wovenaire technology as their award-winning mattress. Koda’s an Aussie-mix with two fur coats, so she really appreciates a bed that keeps her comfy without getting her too warm! It’s designed to be 100% breathable, washable, and better sleep for your pup. (Extra emphasis on ‘washable’ because we all know accidents are prone to happen with new puppies.) For puppies that paw – not to worry because the bed cover is also scratch-resistant!
Timeless, simple, and made of food-grade stainless steel that’s dishwasher safe, Wild One’s bowls are perfect for mealtimes. The nonslip silicone base keeps the bowls from moving around, but if you want to go one step further, they also have matching silicone placemats to catch any spillage! With a messy drinker like Koda, the placemat is a lifesaver. It keeps my floors clean and dry, and it’s so easy to wipe down. Available in 2 sizes, with the option of neutrals (Black or Tan) or a pop of color (Lilac or their seasonal addition, Spruce)!
With all that puppy energy, long walks are a great way to tire them out. Maxbone’s GO! With Ease Hands Free Leash is perfect for us hoomans because 1) the leash distance is adjustable and 2) it can be worn around the waist or shoulder, making it one less thing to worry about while you’re training your puppy to heel. It can still be used as a regular leash if you don’t want to go hands-free, but I love the fact that it’s versatile to however YOU want to use it! Pair it with the matching Signature Collar + the GO! With Ease Pouch, and you two will be the most stylish duo on the block. Call me extra, but the Pouch is such an easy way to elevate your walking game since it can be attached to the leash. (Step aside, Lululemon Fanny Pack!) Load it up with your phone, credit cards, keys, and poop bags, and you’re good to go!
It’s hard to avoid your puppy tracking in dirt and germs from outside, but at least Dandylion makes it easy to clean! Their Clean Paws No-Rinse Foaming Cleanser has become my second best friend as it instantly washes Koda’s paws without the need to rinse. The foamy formulation and soft silicone bristles allow for a gentle deep cleanse with plant-based ingredients that soothe, nourish, and provide anti-microbial benefits! Just simply remove the cap, pump out some foam, and gently massage into those hard-to-reach areas. Wipe dry and your puppy’s ready to roam free again. I love that they have a refill bottle so that when you’re through with the bottle, you can reuse your pump to stay eco-friendly!
A daily routine extended to your puppy – personalized supplements for dogs have become a thing. Vet-formulated and pet-approved, Dandy has supplements that you can customize from scratch or simply choose pre-made packs to eliminate any guesswork. They also have a short quiz you can take, which gives you a vet recommendation based on your pup’s unique needs! For me, it’s been an uphill battle with Koda’s allergies, so I appreciate that their vet-formulated packs are a quick and easy no-brainer for me. They’re even available at some retailers so we never have to worry about going a day without them. Depending on your pup, choose from Allergy, Anxiety, or Wellness Care to target their concerns. (They also have Joint Care for anyone with older dogs!)
As mentioned before, this short puppy period is full of development. Physical fun and exercise help their little bodies develop, while mental challenges help grow their brains. Fable’s Enrichment Set includes The Game and 2 Falcon Toys, which allow for interactive or independent play. Their Twin Falcon Toy is also a great option if you’re looking for a two-in-one. Enrichment isn’t just limited to mealtime; the open cavities on the Falcons can be stuffed with spreads like peanut butter, but don’t worry about the mess – the toys are top rack dishwasher safe! (Just try to skip the heated dry cycle.) Koda’s a huge lover of peanut butter and non-fat Greek yogurt, so she always knows what time it is when I bring out her Twin Falcon!
Durable, non-toxic, and easy to clean, Fable’s Signature Balls are an upgrade from your typical tennis ball. They aren’t just for a good chase, they’re also great for mental stimulation! The two openings minimize choking risk, but you can also fill it up with spreads to keep your pup busy. Hand wash with soap and water, and they’re good as new.
It’s also nice to mention that Winnie Lou gives back to the dog community by donating some of their proceeds to local rescues each quarter. Koda herself was a rescue, so brownie points there!
Maivy Tran is a California native and if she’s not brainstorming narratives or curating content, she’s probably at the dog park with her pup Koda. See the BTS of her life over on Instagram.
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Few people understand design for children better than Lora Appleton, the founder of kinder MODERN, a contemporary and vintage design gallery and design studio that makes and showcases work for children. In turn, few people understand Appleton better than her son, whom she credits as her primary muse. In this week’s Milkshake, we asked her how he’s taught her new ways of looking at design: “A few years in, when my son was able to walk around and look at things and notice material, I was really fascinated by how much the built environment was an influence on him,” she says. “If he went into a new place, where he’d never seen a type of material on the wall, he would directly go right for it – and there was this real sense of curiosity that seems obvious with kids, but it was really pointed, their thinking. And then years later, he was able to recall that material, notice that it was made into a chair by one of my designers, and make that correlation. And I thought that was really fascinating – the memory, the tactileness of thinking, all of that really connects with kids in a way that before being a mom, I didn’t really understand.”
Also in this Milkshake: Lora shares why she thinks the 1950s might qualify as the golden age for children’s design: “The early 1950s to 1960s was such an incredibly robust period for design for children,” she says. “The things that were right – correct, good choices – very much focused on materiality. A lot of work from that period was very simple materials: birch ply, not a lot of paint glazes or things that could be harmful to children. They really understood how to boil things down to the most simplistic forms to give children options of curiosity, but not to give them the whole answer.” She also offers a quick show-and-tell featuring her favorite-ever design for kids: Hans Brockhage und Erwin Andrä’s rocking chair: “It was this incredible piece of furniture – a play item, if you will – that operated as a pedal car, so the child would sit in here,” she says. “It was made of birch ply, [with] a very simple metal armature for the wheels – and then when flipped, it was a rocking chair. This, to me, really signified a turning point for where play was headed in the 1950s, encouraging children to really get into what they were playing with in terms of furniture.”
For more from Lora – including her tribute to Mira Nakashima, one of the industry’s many (many) under-heralded, female-identifying designers – tune in!
Diana Ostrom, who has written for Wallpaper, Interior Design, ID, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, is also the author of Faraway Places, a newsletter about travel.
Milkshake, DMTV (Design Milk TV)’s first regular series, shakes up the traditional interview format by asking designers, creatives, educators and industry professionals to select interview questions at random from their favorite bowl or vessel. During their candid discussions, you’ll not only gain a peek into their personal homeware collections, but also valuable insights into their work, life and passions.
A truly beautiful piece of lighting can transform a room – and often costs more than we might think at first (well-lit) glance. Ian Yang, CEO and founder of Gantri, understands that push (toward great lighting) and pull (away from $1800 lamps). But Yang has long investigated the space between impulses: His education took him to the London School of Economics, but also revered art school Central Saint Martins. As a kid in China, he toured factories with his parents, who has a global logistics firm – and when he moved to San Francisco, he joined TechShop, a maker space fueled by a community fluent in the next-wave manufacturing processes like 3D printing. The result of all those influences is Gantri: “At Gantri, we’re rethinking how lighting is designed, made, and sold using 3D printing,” he says, in this week’s Milkshake. “We’re supporting independent designers and studios – and making great lighting designs more accessible and more sustainable.”
Gantri partners with designers around the world – like Oakland’s Prowl Studio, Felix Pöttinger in Munich, Heitor Lobo Campos in Brasilia, and former Milkshake star Bradley L. Bowers in New Orleans – to create their work at a reasonable cost. Here, Ian shows off the Kobble task light by none other than Karim Rashid: “It’s typical Karim – really blobby, really beautiful – and the entire product is actually made from two different types of plant-based materials that we call Gantri, plant polymers,” Ian says. “They’re both derived from sugarcane, which is a really amazing material.” Each part is 3D printed, then QC’d multiple times before it’s hand assembled. (We loved this collection – which includes task lights, wall lights, and floor lights – so much that we covered it when it debuted last year, saying that “while each piece of the lighting series can easily work alone, the group together has the ability to make a space feel extra balanced.”)
Also in this Milkshake: Ian shares how digital-centric manufacturing processes alter a product’s look and feel – including layer lines and subtle textures – and tees up the brand’s latest Independent Creative Release, which included the Hula Collection by Pöttinger, the Gallery Collection by Andrew Ferrier, the Noah Collection by Filippo Mambretti, and more. “It’s a way for us to really support independent desires and studios who wouldn’t otherwise be able to launch products to market with a lot of visibility,” Ian says. “So we thought by creating this platform – where we launch a bunch of designs from a whole collection of designers – we can really maximize their voice and amplify the effect of the product launch. Last year, we launched more than 20 designs as part of this initiative, and this year we’ll continue to do that with even more designers.” To see more of what Gantri has in store, tune in!
Diana Ostrom, who has written for Wallpaper, Interior Design, ID, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, is also the author of Faraway Places, a newsletter about travel.
Milkshake, DMTV (Design Milk TV)’s first regular series, shakes up the traditional interview format by asking designers, creatives, educators and industry professionals to select interview questions at random from their favorite bowl or vessel. During their candid discussions, you’ll not only gain a peek into their personal homeware collections, but also valuable insights into their work, life and passions.
In this week’s Milkshake, ceramicist Helen Levi welcomes us to her studio in Queens, New York. This is where she creates her highly regarded work: mugs and cups, plates and bowls, and – our favorite – her colorful tiles. Her work is distinguished by highly graphic vibes (like these incredible Color Field tiles) and a determined sense of whimsy – like her Artist’s espresso mugs, with a rainbow splatter pattern covered in a clear glaze or her Snow Drift mugs, with a textural, and very snowy, white glaze. In addition to their sense of welcome and warmth, her pieces exude a sense of easy style.
Here, she sails through a few of our questions: Was her big break – which came courtesy of famed retailer Steven Alan – a product of fate or chance? Levi had been working in pottery since childhood, even teaching the discipline to kids – but until she met Alan in 2013, she hadn’t sold it to the public. “I was at a pop-up in one of his stores, and I went with a friend who had been working on the store,” Levi says. “I saw he had some handmade pottery out, and I thought, ‘Why is a clothing store selling handmade pottery?’” The answer was straightforward: Alan planned to open a home goods store. “I had been completely unaware of the community of functional potters that existed – obviously they had been doing their thing and I just didn’t know about it, but it was so exciting for me to think about these small studios,” she says. “Since I had been making pottery for a very long time as a hobby, it kind of lit a little light bulb in me that maybe this was a path that existed.” Alan asked her to share pictures of her work, and when she did, he placed an order. “That was my first experience selling wholesale,” she says. “My first experience getting my work out there – and it was also my first experience making work not for myself or as a gift. So, a huge learning curve there – I think I remade that order three times.”
Also in this Milkshake, Levi shares how she splits her artistic identity between potter and photographer (settling on the “pot-ographer” of her Instagram bio) and a technical challenge she’s faced. For the latter, she has a (very large) piece to share – one that was so big, it didn’t fit in her kiln. “And so it remains here, half-finished five years later,” she says. Tune in for more!
Diana Ostrom, who has written for Wallpaper, Interior Design, ID, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, is also the author of Faraway Places, a newsletter about travel.
Milkshake, DMTV (Design Milk TV)’s first regular series, shakes up the traditional interview format by asking designers, creatives, educators and industry professionals to select interview questions at random from their favorite bowl or vessel. During their candid discussions, you’ll not only gain a peek into their personal homeware collections, but also valuable insights into their work, life and passions.
Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus of The Minimalists have built their careers on helping people live better with less stuff, via their best-selling books, films, live events, and The Minimalists Podcast, co-hosted by T.K. Coleman. On this episode of Milkshake, we speak with all three, as they trade off questions about minimalism, maximalism, and how to consider the objects in our lives.
For those who find this lifestyle philosophy convincing, the key might be easing into it: “There’s no need to get rid of your grandmother’s doily collection right away,” says Fields Millburn, noting that “people tend to struggle with sentimental items.” There are probably other places to look: “Start with the things that are easy to give you the momentum: Have you been in your closet lately? Have you noticed that most of the clothes you own you don’t actually wear? It’s okay to let go of anything you haven’t worn in the last year. We have a rule called the 90-90 rule – we also refer to it as the seasonality rule. If you’re holding onto something that you haven’t worn in the last 90 days, and you know you’re not gonna wear it in the next 90 days, you can give yourself permission to let it go.”
We asked how minimalists give gifts: “The best gift that I can give is the opportunity to help another human being feel, seen, heard, appreciated, validated in a way that matters to them,” says Coleman. “That’s what really matters. You can impress people with things. You can make them jealous of you. But you can’t ‘money’ your way into love. So when you’re trying to get a gift for someone [and] you pay a lot of money but your heart’s not in it, they’re gonna see right through it. But if your heart is in it, they’re gonna see what really matters.”
Also in this Milkshake, we ask how the pandemic changed minimalism, how to determine what’s junk and what’s essential, and where the hosts might permit a little bit of maximalism into their lives. Tune in for the answers!
Diana Ostrom, who has written for Wallpaper, Interior Design, ID, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, is also the author of Faraway Places, a newsletter about travel.
Milkshake, DMTV (Design Milk TV)’s first regular series, shakes up the traditional interview format by asking designers, creatives, educators and industry professionals to select interview questions at random from their favorite bowl or vessel. During their candid discussions, you’ll not only gain a peek into their personal homeware collections, but also valuable insights into their work, life and passions.
From day one, Polestar has made a concerted effort to stand out among the competitively crowded EV segment. The brand’s stable of minimalist-modern vehicles have silently blazed their own aesthetic route; each Polestar model is easily identifiable even at a glance from the herds of similarly sculpted silhouettes of other brands, electric or otherwise. Add Polestar’s commitment toward achieving closed circle sustainability and engineering industry-leading safety, and you’ve got one of the most compelling automotive brands associated with the future of electric vehicles.
Polestar’s effort to stand from the crowd has also been expressed with numerous projects distinct, yet complementary to the brand. Last year Polestar commissioned artist Thijs Biersteker to help lead in the creation of the interactive We Harvest Wind, an installation inspired by Polestar’s LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) data spotlighting “information about emissions from materials production, manufacturing, how the type of electricity used when charging affects use phase emissions, and so on.” Suffice to say, the brand isn’t hesitant to use design in a multitude of mediums to further communicate the values and motivations behind their ethos.
While Biersteker’s kinetic polymer sculpture might be perceived more as a conceptual exercise, the brand’s latest showroom doesn’t require all too much explanation. It’s simply cool. Cold even.
Constructed in Rovaniemi, Finland by Frozen Innovation in a collaborative effort between Polestar and the Arctic Design Week, the Polestar Space stands as a 12-meter-high cube with 2-meter-thick walls of ice, an Arctic Circle showroom supplemented by ice sculptures of Polestar parts carved by local artists. You can even take a car out on a test drive around an Arctic Circle course.
The city of Rovaniemi is known for its wonderful design. We wanted to honor this by creating a beautiful work that was inspired by our brand’s minimalistic and pure design language. The choice of building material was easy due to the location and our desire to use circular materials: of course, it had to be built from snow.
– Polestar Finland’s Marketing Manager Martin Österberg
Despite its rectilinear architecture, the Polestar Space was conceived as the epitome of circular material design, built with snow and ice, materials in great abundance in the city located just 6 miles south of the Arctic Circle. The Snow Space took approximately 20 days to build with 3,000 cubic meters of snow sourced and transported by electric trucks from the nearby Ounasvaara ski resort.
While Polestar could conceivably close the loop by simply allowing the Snow Space to slowly merge back into the snowy landscape, the showroom is planned to be deconstructed and returned to grace the landscape from where it was sourced after the Arctic Circle Space closes its polar doors in late February.
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