lite
collection

The brief I wrote myself

Tuli is a successful Slovak EPS-seating company — strong at home, invisible abroad, and without a development department. I worked with them for years and designed three collections; Martin, the owner, became a friend. Lite was the one nobody asked for. Thinking about the bulk of standard beanbags, I saw the real constraint: shipping. Parcel size and weight decide whether a product can even be sold online.

Three metres, working inward

So I started from the box. Three metres — the maximum standard parcel dimension — became the bounding volume, and I designed inward from it: a range of seating objects, each under five kilograms, that ship as normal parcels. The logistics requirement came first; the form was what fit inside it. Design from the outside in.

Each piece is built in layers: a two-axis-cut EPS core — the hotwire process I had introduced to Tuli for the Nimble collection — over it a thin soft foam, then a white mattress-style inner cover, then a removable outer cover.

The loop and the cover

Two details carry the whole idea. The removable outer cover lets Tuli warehouse white cores and fabric covers separately, assemble to order, and ship fast in any colour — preserving the exact advantage their beanbag business was built on, inside a completely different product category. And the colourful fabric finger loop: not decoration, but the functional icon of the collection. Under five kilograms, you lift a stool with two fingers and carry it across a room. True mobility is not a castor that signals movement — it is an object light enough that a child can rearrange it.

Closing a loop

The Rocker is the exception in the range — slightly larger, a different level of comfort, and personally the most significant: a rocking chair at minimum viable dimensions, closing a loop back to the Wave rocking chair I designed for TON years earlier.

Same theme, completely different language, a different client and material — and a brief I, again, wrote for myself. Lite was identified, defined, and delivered because I saw a gap and decided to fill it. It is in production.