Recycled, relaxed and expressive the Thai way

Young urban people who nurture a conscious attitude towards fashion and home interior are often stuck with small and limited living spaces. Even with a tight budget we want to be able to express ourselves through unique objects and expressive design.

This time we went to Thailand, where recycling, reusing, and creative re-purposing is a part of the everyday life, and teamed up with Greyhound Original based in Bangkok. Greyhound Original is a fashion company that sells food, and a food company that sells fashion. Multi-purpose and creativity is key for them. They opened the first store in 1980 in Bangkok with Men’s casual wear and then expanded to women’s wear and accessories. In 1998 they expanded the brand to food by opened the first Greyhound Cafe in Bangkok and turning the brand from fashion label to a cutting edge lifestyle brand. 

“We know that people today want their personalities to be shown in their home. At the same time both space and money is limited when living in big cities. Since multi-function and creativity is key in order to enable both a small space living solution and an expressive design piece, we turned to Greyhound Original.”, says Michael Nikolic, Creative leader at IKEA of Sweden.

Contemporary Thai attitudes and lifestyle

When Michael first reached out to Greyhound Original, the founder and creative director Bhanu Inkawat asked “Why Thailand?”. Now he is happy to bring contemporary Thai attitudes and lifestyle into the collection — an approach well suited to the task of making the most of small spaces in modern urban living.

What part of everyday life in Thailand have you brought into SAMMANKOPPLA?

“If you have ever been to Thailand, you know it is a lot about relaxation and easy floor living on cushions and rugs. At the same time Thailand is very chaotic in a way with a mix and match, and, mismatch of new and old lifestyles. Just look at how colourful a traffic jam is in Thailand! The third thing we bring into this collaboration is the Thai way to easily adapt to new environments and the tradition to give used or broken things a new life,” says Bhanu.

Do you have a favourite product in the collection, Bhanu?

“We really wanted to introduce the relaxing floor living to IKEA, so we made a floor mat out of recycled plastic. Instead of one pattern we put in different graphic patterns to make it funky,” says Bhanu.

Reuse, recycle and repurpose in a clever way is a strong theme in the collection SAMMANKOPPLA, which means interconnect or unify.

“Greyhound Original have a great experience of combining the expressive design of fashion and street culture to using materials in new ways, reusing and repurposing it. Something that can be really interesting when designing and it is also becoming more, and more important in the world,” says Michael.

The SAMMANKOPPLA collection will be available in stores 2020.