Making recycling look good
STEVEN KORNER started off his career fixing up human bodies but now he’s focusing on an all-together different form.
Korner, along with wife India, runs a company specialising in functional, good-looking products.
The first, an innovative upmarket Recycling Station, hit the market early this year and has already made quite a splash.
Korner grew up in Masterton and attended Wairarapa College.
‘‘I hit my stride there,’’ he says. ‘‘I did really well at science and maths – and then from there went down to Otago University. I wasn’t totally clear what I should have been doing, to be totally honest but these things take a bit of time to figure out.’’
Korner started out on a physiotherapy degree, but the doubts were there.
‘‘By halfway through I knew it wasn’t for me,’’ he says. ‘‘But I persevered, qualified and actually practised as a physio for a year.’’
But the feeling that he should be doing something else wouldn’t go away, and by the end of that first year Korner had made a decision.
‘‘It was daunting, going back to university. But I hadn’t found what I wanted to do and had this desire.’’
So Korner enrolled at Canterbury University for a mechanical engineering degree and the realisation that he’d made the right move came almost straight away.
‘‘It was like night and day,’’ he says. ‘‘I knew I was in the right place.’’
In that first year, there was one course that all the students dreaded – thermodynamics.
‘‘The lecturer wasn’t afraid to fail people if you weren’t up to scratch, but it clicked for me and I managed to get an A+ for that in the first semester. That’s when it kicked in for me.
‘‘The eureka moment was probably around the complexity of problems and how to solve them. That’s what engineers are good at – you get it drilled into you how to frame the problem well and then use science in an applied way to solve it.’’
In the process of gaining his degree, Korner took part in several design projects and entered an entrepreneurship competition, winning one of the ten places.
‘‘The task was theorising a device on how to solve knee injuries,’’ he says.
‘‘The theory and things were there, but putting it into practice was a lot harder.’’
As it happened, his physio training helped as he’d had experience with clients having similar problems.
Korner graduated with first class honours in mechanical engineering in 2005. His final year project was done with Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, and they offered him a job once he’d graduated. ‘‘I was very lucky,’’ Korner says. ‘‘It’s a great company in terms of being engineering-led and you get exposed to a wide variety of projects, and they’ve got a very good process of design thinking – how to design a product and how to frame the problem you’re trying to solve.’’
The company also encouraged staff to use the facilities and equipment for their own projects after hours, he says.
‘‘When you’re prototyping, you’re making your own tools out of metal, which means you learn how to design products better – because if you can do the process from design and prototyping, you’ll get a better product at the end of it.’’
Korner was first assigned to a team working on new type of breathing support system and then moved to designing a neonatal unit.
‘‘I was the product manager for that,’’ he says.
‘‘I had designers working for me using US research so I went to the US and visited 50-odd hospitals in 3 weeks – it was gruelling but I learnt a huge amount in terms of how an application like this could be used for premature babies.’’
Korner left the company after five years and spent another year at a design consultancy before he and wife India decided to buy their own business.
‘‘We bought a small business direct-selling all sorts of bins,’’ he says. ‘‘Pretty much within the first six months we figured out we wanted to design our own recycling bin, but we waited till we had completed a year’s trading.’’
The Korners found there was practically nothing on the market that architects were willing to specify for a building.
‘‘They’d either build cabinetry to hide bins in, or they wouldn’t specify anything and when they turned up, after spending thousands of dollars per square metre to fit the place out, there’d be wheelie bins in the corner. They didn’t have anything that they were proud of so we knew straightaway there was a real need for a well designed recycling bin to fit into the corporate world.’’
Korner’s product development background proved invaluable.
‘‘We engaged industrial designer Lucy Cant from Studio Cassells as we knew we needed our design aesthetic to be spot on and went through a fairly rigorous couple of years of research and design concepts, including getting production machinery made, before we were able to launch the Method Recycling Bin in January.’’
The bins have been a huge success, he says. The company was a finalist in this year’s Gold Awards and has also made it into the finals of October’s Designers’ Institute Best Awards.
‘‘We’ve made it both in the product category and in the packaging category.
‘‘India designed the packaging – she studied graphic design and did the brand development and packaging design and it’s a magnificent result. We’re really stoked that our peers chose us.’’
The Method system is a modern take on how a bin should be designed both in terms of aesthetics and function, Korner says.
‘‘We’ve had to break a few rules on how plastics are designed – a few people in the plastics community said we were crazy to try – but we managed to do it and come up with a form that we could adapt across a range of uses.’’
The Method bins have been exported to Australia and Korner sees a bright future ahead.
‘‘There are a lot of things that haven’t had a lot of design thought put into them, that we can add value to,’’ he says.
There’s another set of products coming out that will help organise desk space more efficiently.
‘‘They’re being trialled with a couple of companies and we’ll launch those in a couple of months. We don’t want to go outside our niche – now that we’ve got some sales channels we’ve opened up, we want to keep using those channels.
‘‘Once you’ve developed a product 60 per cent of the effort is getting it on the market so we don’t really want to be doing that again.’’
Besides, when you’ve got the job you always wanted, there’s no reason to change, he says.
‘‘It took me a wee while but I got there in the end and found the career path that was right for me!’’