Spot Light On

Welcome to the blog for today's Spot light on interview, Mechteld Petersen, value director from Dutch homeware Brand Brabrantia who are presently re-launching their new branding & packaging with a new interior design identity.

 

What is your role as Value Director for Brand, Marketing and Product Innovation?

I’ve spent the past 8 years with Brabantia as the Value Director for the Value Factory department which has a team of 22 people. I am a strategist and connector for the Brabantia brand, our Product Innovation and our Marketing activities. My main role is to inspire the team to focus on trends in society, give them consumer insights and discuss fresh colour palettes, essentially bringing the outside world inside.    We then translate all these vital findings into experiences that make design worthy of conversation for our consumers, with our ultimate goal being to seduce our consumers by touching their hearts, letting them fall in love with our products.



‘Designed for living’ is a whole new look for Brabantia, what's the essence of it?

The essence is to enrich our consumers’ quality of life and living with beautifully designed interior products. Our goal is to make daily chores a pleasure, products that fit in to their stylish world! 


You mention surprise in the design, what can we expect? / How do you make 'domestic chores a pleasure’?

Transforming daily chores into a domestic pleasure is adding a hidden surprise, fresh inspiration and positive emotion into both our brand and products. A great example of this includes the soft, stylish pink pastel Mineral Retro Bin that has a extra surprise inside - the bright pink coloured handle!

The colours this year are bold and exciting, what made you want to focus on passion red and minty metallics?

We decided to base our new colour palettes and prints on two well-loved trends, colour blocking and pastel vs bold. Passion Red is our new bright and bold hue that’s perfect for spicing up your home interior and Metallic Mint is our ‘tougher’ take on this year’s pastel mint trend. With our prints we focused on pastel and bold colours and created Warm Mathematics consisting of shapes and patterns. The great thing about these two trend choices is that they compliment each other, pastel palettes go really well with a bold accent colour. 

The new collection from Pauline is the winning design from you Pimp Our Print, will there be another design competition this year we need to watch out for?

Yes of course, it will be launched in June! Something completely different and witty, and on social media.

If you had to choose one must-have product from the range, which one would it be?

I am a huge fan of our new Dunes print ironing board from our Warm Mathematical prints, it’s really to cool to be hidden away. I also love new Mineral Pink Retro Bin too! 


When can we see the new packing and products on the shelves?

First new products with new packaging will be available in April. We’re so excited for you to see them! 

Are you already planning colours and concepts for 2015?
  Can you give us a sneaky peak please?!

Yes we are investigating, but it needs to be a surprise! All I can tell you is that it will be delightfully colourful!