Up Next

By TIM McKEOUGH

Name Jamie Wolfond

Age 25

Hometown Toronto

Now lives In a two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with his fiancée, the product designer Sam Anderson, and a roommate.

Claim to fame In 2014, Mr. Wolfond founded Good Thing, a design company that makes pared-down, utilitarian housewares that are as on-trend as they are affordable. The line includes steel dustpans ($29), cylindrical bookends ($16) and silicone-dipped stainless steel mirrors ($19.50 to $34) in standout colors like powder pink, mint green and cobalt blue. “You get the more useful version of the thing, and it also becomes a piece of decoration,” Mr. Wolfond said.

Big Break After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013, Mr. Wolfond established a studio in New York but was dismayed by the design scene. “I was so sickened and angry about the amount of opulent brass and moody glass lighting,” he said. “I was going to go in this other direction, and make things that were affordable.”

When efforts to license his designs soured, he recruited other emerging designers and began manufacturing products on his own. “I realized, ‘Oh, if you have these other designers and yourself, you can call it a manufacturing company,’” Mr. Wolfond said. Products by Good Thing are carried by museum stores across the country, including the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Walker Art Center.

Latest Projects Good Thing is presenting a new collection Sunday through Wednesday at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York, including side tables by Chen Chen & Kai Williams ($220 each), and an aluminum stool by MSDS Studio ($240). The company has also collaborated with Harry’s, the shaving company, on an exhibition of experimental brushes at the WantedDesign Manhattan fair Saturday through Tuesday.

Next Thing Mr. Wolfond is opening an office in Toronto next month. He is also working on the perfect bar of soap with one of his idols, the British designer Jasper Morrison. “I reached out to him on Instagram,” Mr. Wolfond said. “He started liking our photos, and I was like, ‘Hey!’”

Real Deal Much of Good Thing’s success comes from making simple objects with a sense of purpose rather than resorting to gimmicks, “like a container that looks like a duck or a piggy bank that’s shaped like a dead pig,” he said. “That’s the one thing we’ll never do.”

Source: Bloomberg: Small Business