As a hippie at heart, I did not study because what I wanted to learn I already knew and what I didn’t want to learn I just didn’t learn. So school didn’t really resonate with me. Together with some friends I started a health food store, a bakery and a restaurant. So we were pretty entrepreneurial hippies.” “Starting the shop was a process. At a certain point I was working in cafe Weltschmerz with a group of friends, which was incredibly fun and hectic. After we hosted a small exposition someone walked up to me and said he wanted to start a design-shop. It was the first of its kind in the Netherlands and design wasn’t a term yet. The shop was very eclectic with for example concrete pick-up turntables. And people were actually buying the products. The concept as a whole was really new. Even Simon Carmiggelt (Dutch writer) walked in one time and asked: “What does this all mean?” “A while later I worked at van Puffelen (bar) and I often walked by this empty space on the Prinsengracht. At a certain point I took the plunge. When we started the shop we were really oblivious to how to actually run it. We didn’t even know about trade fairs and the internet wasn’t around back then, so when I saw a rubber telephone in a magazine for example I had to search trough huge telephone-books to find distributors. That’s how we slowly filled the shop.” “Finding new products still is the most fun for me, together with coming up with new ideas. Recently we started thinking about developing our own product line. I have a whole stack of ideas and I often see finished versions of some at fairs. Such a shame, so that’s something we’re going to work on.”
opening_hours
Lunedi10:00 AM-07:00 PM
Martedì10:00 AM-06:30 PM
Mercoledì10:00 AM-06:30 PM
Giovedi10:00 AM-06:30 PM
Venerdì10:00 AM-06:30 PM
Sabato10:00 AM-06:00 PM
Domenica12:00 PM-06:00 PM
Indirizzo
Prinsengracht 297, Amsterdam, North Holland, 1016 GX, Netherlands
