10 Grain is a California design firm based in Southern California. Paul Frank people put me and the product designer Eric Pfeifer together and we have eight different products that have two different versions: a chili red version and a Paul Frank version.
WHY CHILI RED
Going through our research that yellow blue something in the primary colors weren’t as prevalent inside home, so we decided to go with more of a red, more of a contemporary design aesthetic as well
PRODUCTS
Some of our furniture items are Softy tables our Popstick chairs, RoboStool, Slice step. Then we get into more things like Play Pads which are dollhouses, U-Roll which is a ride along and the log rocker which is like an indoor see-saw.
SAFETY
For us, we have children ourselves, so it’s very important for us to see a product as how a child would use it. For instance, our log rocker, instead of having children sit on the ends of it, where they could fall backwards, we have them sit on the inside so there is nowhere to go. We also look at sharp edges, any kind of exposed edges and things like that. As far as finishing, we test all of our products for lead content. Don’t want to be using any chemicals in our products that will hurt the ozone layer and things like that. We kind of pay attention to that we like to have a little bit of a sustainability story with our bent plywood. There is a lot of thought put into safety and it is tested for not only what goes into the product but also the way the product performs.
We just launched a year ago. We’ve turned into a being a really cool fun fresh brand. The whole dynamic of our business is just to have fun. And that’s really where we have rooted our thinking and our strategy is how people react to it and how we get the smiles out of it.
