00:00What's your idea of good furniture?
00:03If it's eye-catching, long-lasting, and well-priced,
00:06then maybe this man's designs are for you.
00:09I'm a lover of all things design.
00:11I'm a trained designer, but a graphic designer.
00:13So all my life I've loved spaces,
00:16I've loved well-designed products, and so forth.
00:18But I found myself not finding the furniture that I loved
00:23at accessible price points.
00:25Meet Joey Kubulu.
00:27He spent pretty much his entire career in advertising,
00:30and now he's a self-taught designer on a mission
00:33to make good design accessible
00:35and to put African heritage on the map as well.
00:38I grew up with the fortune of doing a lot of traveling
00:41and moving around Sub-Saharan Africa in particular.
00:45Being an African and consuming African culture,
00:50be it spaces, music, fashion, and so forth,
00:54influences my design.
00:58It cannot not influence my design.
00:59One of the things that's very, very common with our pieces
01:02is the fact that you hardly see any sharp corners in our designs.
01:06And I think that comes from the fact that
01:10within African traditional craft making,
01:14we're always making things by hand,
01:16carving wood by hand.
01:18And if you're doing stuff by hand,
01:19you're never going to have any sharp corners
01:21or very sharp right angles.
01:23The other thing as well is if you go into traditional African spaces,
01:29specifically like in the village and stuff like that,
01:32the furniture, or what we use as furniture,
01:33is quite low to the ground.
01:35So we sit on the floor, our beds are low to the floor, and so forth.
01:39So you'll see across our furniture,
01:41a lot of the stuff is very low to the ground.
01:44The reason that we do that is that as African people,
01:47even just indigenous cultures around the world,
01:49the practice of being connected to the ground
01:51is quite important, of earthing ourselves.
01:53The intention hasn't been,
01:55I'm doing it because it's African.
01:57It's been organic.
01:59You know, the stuff that I'm drawn to when I design a piece,
02:02how I refine the piece is refined
02:05because of my experience, of my lived experience.
02:08Much of South Africa's furniture is imported from China,
02:11but it's not everyone's cup of tea.
02:14Joey's furniture appeals to the middle-class market,
02:17looking for high-end, locally produced furniture
02:20without breaking the bank.
02:21I think that our middle class is stretched financially,
02:25but they are still aspirational.
02:28And at the time, I was still in the corporate space.
02:31But even being in the corporate space,
02:33being very well employed as a senior executive,
02:36I found that beautifully made pieces of furniture
02:40were incredibly expensive.
02:43What makes these pieces more in reach for young buyers?
02:46A key intervention that we employ
02:48that allows us to achieve what we're trying to do
02:52in making the furniture accessible
02:53is the material that we use.
02:55The biggest, well, one of the biggest costs
02:57is the material that we use.
02:58And we specifically use pine plywood.
03:02It's where they layer pieces of wood
03:04and compress them together.
03:06Now, pine plywood isn't typically associated
03:09with the designer furniture.
03:10It's typically used for container ships
03:14and for building and stuff like that.
03:15But we saw the opportunity in this material
03:17because it's very, very strong.
03:19It's incredibly durable.
03:20So rather than using solid wood,
03:22which is what's typically used in high-end furniture,
03:26we opted for pine plywood,
03:27which is a cheaper material.
03:28But at the same time,
03:30its characteristics are that of hardwood.
03:34For Joey, it's about storytelling through design
03:39and not just form and function.
03:45One of the things that we do as well is
03:46all of our product names are named
03:51in indigenous African languages,
03:54whether Swahili, Shona,
03:57even Arabic and so forth,
03:58just to tell the story of the continent
04:01in some shape or form.
04:03You know, and also to be obvious
04:04about the story that we're trying to tell.
04:06And not just South African languages
04:07because I'm South African,
04:09but for the continent,
04:10because our aspiration is to be on the continent
04:13and not just to be in South Africa alone.
04:15This is called the Moyo coffee table
04:18as part of the Moyo collection.
04:20And the reason why it's called Moyo is
04:22because Moyo is the Sipedi name
04:24for the boobab tree.
04:27You know, the African boobab tree
04:29have got these massive big trunks.
04:32They're considered spiritual trees
04:33and they were so big that people
04:34also lived inside them
04:35because they could be hollow at times.
04:37These very, very thick legs
04:40are an ode to that,
04:41reminiscent of that,
04:42of this very thick,
04:44very rooted
04:46structure that we see in nature.
04:49And essentially what this range does,
04:50it attempts to mimic that.
04:53Joey's designs show us that beauty,
04:55heritage and accessibility
04:57can live in the same space.
04:59And that good design is meaningful design.
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