Blending Sustainable Social Business Model with Eco-Friendly Products
If we take our ordinary day-to-day products, they are not very exciting.
Now how do apply design thinking to these products and craft out extraordinary master pieces instead? And what if I told you to use eco-friendly raw material and build a social business model around this? Might seem like a impossible puzzle to crack.
Recently at the Influencer Conference in Mumbai, I met 2 such brilliant designer/entrepreneurs who have cracked this puzzle.
Meet Vijay Sharma, the creator of BamBike – India’s first Bamboo Bicycle.
Meet Tjeerd Veenhoven, the creator of Palm Leather
Tjeerd Veenhoven is a product designer with a love for inventing materials and production techniques. In his mind being a designer is much more than just esthetics or expressing trends. For him it is almost activism; design to change the world, even if just a little. From his design studio in the North of Holland he experiments with materials and crafts from all over the world developing new products to strengthen local economies, ecological awareness and design thinking.
His latest innovation is a modification on dry and brittle palm leaves that turns them in to soft and flexible vegetarian leather. The designs made from this material are produced in the rural area’s of South India in villages and communities in corporation with some of India’s brightest social entrepreneurs.
Tjeerd Veenhoven is 36 and is founder of Studio Tjeerd Veenhoven. Besides that he is part of several innovation platforms. Through workshops and teaching he spreads awareness on bio based materials and the power of design thinking. The Palmleather project is an award winning and exemplary of how design can promote eco friendly materials and social responsibility.
PalmLeather Flip Flops from Studio Tjeerd Veenhoven on Vimeo.
