edge
collection

The brief

Anton Šťastný — a former professional ice-hockey player — owned Evergreen, a Slovak solid-wood manufacturer that was already for sale. The brief was not a product brief. It was a business one: build a credible design vision that could either restart the company or make it attractive enough to sell at a proper valuation. Good joinery, no contemporary identity, nothing to separate it from dozens of other Central European wood producers.

Direct, don't draw it all

Rather than design everything myself, I built a team and directed it — and designed within it. Ľubo Majer — a Red Dot and German Design Award winner — and I developed the two collections together; a number of the pieces shown here are my own. Mikina Dimunová built the brand identity under the name EDGE. Across all of it I held the positioning: defining the market, coordinating the team, and keeping the design language and the brand narrative pointed the same way. This is how I work at my best — directing and designing at once.

Two collections, one argument

Arc and Wedge — a dining table and hexagonal coffee tables — set Brazilian granite into oak. Granite was chosen deliberately over Italian marble: harder, more durable, an organic fossil surface unique to each slab. The product argument was a stone surface you could actually live on, built into the material choice rather than added in marketing. Round, the storage line, was solid oak with rounded corners and flush finger-pull cuts, grain-matched across the door fronts — furniture for someone who does not want furniture to announce itself.

What it taught

I delivered what the brief asked: the collections were coherent, the brand was ready, and the company became saleable — I even helped sell it. EDGE launched on its own stand at Nábytok a Bývanie 2017, and returned in 2018 on a stand I connected alongside Kroslák — one that took the TOP Trendy prize. Anton Šťastný backed it with real investment in prototypes. The signals were genuine. What I learned is that none of it — not the design, not the craft, not the prototypes — is enough on its own.

A product thrives commercially only when the whole system around it is sound: the company's economics, the internal attitude, the push to market, the vision, and the real sales capability to carry it. I had trusted that a change of ownership and fresh capital would supply that engine. It did not. The design was right; the system around it was not yet built. It is the clearest reason my practice now offers more than design — because design alone does not make a company succeed.