Recent MSC graduate in strategic product design, Ruru Hsu, is now striving to turn her passion for crafts into a career with her startup, ‘Ruru’s Laboratory’.
In the summer of 2010, Ruru Hsu life changed as she cycled through the narrow streets of her hometown Tainan, one of Taiwan’s oldest cities. Sweating in the humid, tropical air, she was amazed at the small craft shops hidden in the passageways, along with small cafes, hotels and secondhand bookstores, all of which seemed to tell a dynamic story of an ancient yet modern city. It was at this exact moment that the idea of ‘Ruru’s Laboratory’ started taking shape in her mind.
“As a design student, I was very impressed and inspired by how these architectures and stores mix elements of the old and new traditions. Each time I turned a corner, I discovered something new, and each time I stepped into a small shop, I experienced the warmth and friendliness of the local people,” Ruru recounts. “Then I had the strongest urge to start up a personal design brand called ‘Ruru’s Laboratory’, and deliver this message: ‘design comes from our life experiences, they’re full of little surprises and even the tiniest bits and pieces, if we pay attention to them, are full of wonders.’”
Ruru’s two years of study in TU Delft’s MSc program ‘Strategic Product Design’ proved a valuable experience, teaching her how to promote her products and brand ideas.
In May 2011, Ruru ran her first ‘Laboratory’ at the Swan Market in Rotterdam. Despite freezing cold winds, huge crowds gathered at her stand, where she displayed postcards, ceramics, porcelain works and wooden structures. Each item was unique and exclusive, handmade using simple materials from the ceramic and carpentry classes she attended at the Culture Centre.
Her stand also displayed small colorful buttons, tapes, stamps, and plain, undecorated little wooden houses in a box, which encouraged people to design their own houses.
“Visitors, especially the young girls, were keen to personalize their wooden houses,” Ruru says. “They really wanted to ‘experience’ design with materials from daily life!” On Saturdays, Ruru routinely visits Delft’s secondhand markets in search of interesting yet ordinary materials, ranging from bottle caps and fabrics to old brochures and vintage items – anything that catches her eye becomes part of her designs. When she returns home, her magical designer hands wrap fabrics around old paper, sews buttons and adds bits of this and that until she has transformed ordinary objects into something spectacular and new, leaving her friends and fans on Facebook and her blog clamoring for more.
Following her success in Rotterdam last May, Ruru decided to take her laboratory a step further, to the ‘Christmas Handmade Pop-up shop’ event held at Create Place in London (UK), last November. At the end of this event, Ruru was thrilled to learn that the organizers had invited her back to London to exhibit her special Xmas gift tags (stamps made from erasers, buttons made of various fabrics and hand-stitched patterns, and her signature wooden houses with special Xmas designs) at the Snapshot Christmas Market, on 17 December.
De hoogleraren zouden donderdagavond en vrijdag de hele dag
samen komen voor hun jaarlijkse heibijeenkomst. Dat maakte het voor hen onzeker of
ze de 21ste wel naar de Bijzondere Academische Zitting zouden kunnen
gaan.
Maar afgelopen vrijdag hebben zij in samenspraak met de decaan besloten
dat er tijd ingeruimd moest worden om dat mogelijk te maken. De
Citg-professoren worden vrijdagochtend vanuit hun bezinningsoord ergens buiten
Delft met de bus naar Den Haag gebracht.
Simplicity
“I get my design inspirations from life, from exhibitions and workshops, but most of all from interactions with people. For me, it’s the experience that counts more than making money,” she says with a sunny smile, her hands busy carving logos for wooden display boards she’ll use at her next activity, a boxXshop event held at Amsterdam’s Lloyd Hotel.
“I always actively position myself as if I’m part of an experiment and learn from it: I talk to potential customers, they share their lives with me, and then I try to find out which aspects they like about my products and where they plan to place them after they’ve brought them home.”
It’s from such snippets of information and interactions with people that Ruru develops her crafts. She recalls that once a customer spent a long time looking at the tiny dotted lines she’s drawn on one of her wooden houses. When Ruru asked what the woman was looking at, the woman replied: “We are for the details”, which Ruru finds a powerful articulation of the essence of design.
Like many design students enthusiastic about starting their own personal brands while still at university, Ruru struggled with balancing her creative design works with her heavy university workloads.
“While still studying at the TU and busy with assignments and a thesis project, it was difficult for me to participate in all the interesting design events,” she says, ruefully.
Now graduated, Ruru recently landed a position as an ‘event intern’ at Craft Central, a not-for-profit craft and design organization in London, where she hopes to broaden her horizons and meet other independent designers and artists from around the world who share her passion for design and craft.
When asked to visualize the ‘Ruru’s Laboratory’ of the future, she replies: “I’m not thinking about running a huge business. Rather, I want to keep it simple, independent, and lovely, using my small, unique handmade crafts to touch people’s hearts.”
She adds: “I think that, living in a material world, we’ve somehow lost the capability to embrace the simplicity of love and happiness that springs from daily life. With ‘Ruru’s Laboratory’, I’m reminding people of life’s little precious moments, and inviting them to take part in creating and re-living those wonderful moments.”
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