As Zanat celebrates its 10th anniversary, we are delighted to announce our latest design collaboration with world-renown designer Yves Béhar. While the Swiss-born American designer and entrepeneur may not be a household name in the designer furniture industry, he has an imposing track record in creating innovative design solutions across the range of industries such as product, digital, design and brand strategy. His clients include iconic brands such as Herman Miller, GE, Puma, Prada, Issey Miyake, among others.
Zanat has from its inception aimed to build long-term relationships with extraordinarily talented designers who fit with our brand mission and vision. Yves Béhar is much more than a product designer. He is a design thinker and entrepreneur. Fuse Project, the design studio Béhar founded has taken on for Yves Béhar, just like for Zanat, the purpose of design is to create products which are both commercially viable and contribute to social good. Yves Béhar has been a strong advocate and educator on sustainability. He is a member of the Founder’s Circle of the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, a non-profit organization founded in 2010 in order to educate and empower manufacturers of consumer products to focus on environmental impact and social fairness.
The collaboration started as a chance encounter in San Francisco between Yves Béhar and Zanat co-founder and CEO Orhan Niksic.
“Yves and I had a great conversation about design and craftsmanship and decided that we share a lot in common in terms of how we see design as discipline. There was also a shared passion for crafts. We thought that an interesting collaboration can be born by creating synergies between Zanat’s woodworking know-how and brand vision with Béhar’s integrated and rigorous approach to design. Making a good product in today’s world requires much more than meeting functional and aesthetic criteria and doing the economic analysis. In the world flooded with similar products and over production, good design has to contribute to a more sustainable world that improves the quality of life.“ says Orhan Niksic.
The collaboration process between Yves Béhar and Zanat started a year and a half ago and the designer has challenged Zanat’s engineering team and required new skills and manufacturing
collaborations to create products that will raise the bar in terms of innovativeness, rigor and complexity.
