Women In Design
Spend a day with industrial designer Coco Reynolds as she combines work, home and play.
Growing up on a vineyard in the Upper Hunter Valley of NSW was an idyllic childhood for lighting and furniture designer Coco Reynolds. It also sparked her creative life. “We were pretty isolated and had to entertain ourselves,” she says. “I did lots of craft. That’s where it all started for me.”
Beading was her thing. She spent hours threading glass beads onto string, making jewellery and other creations. It was a “lovely coincidence”, she says, that her first commercial success decades later – the acclaimed Bright Beads pendant light – consisted of timber beads threaded onto cord, teamed with a globe. After completing a Bachelor of Industrial Design at the University of Canberra, Coco worked for wayfinding agencies and a furniture manufacturer. Her (ahem) lightbulb moment came in 2007 when, as part of a Sydney Indesign event, she was asked to demonstrate how to use a lathe. She devised the simple yet genius idea of producing turned-timber beads to form a sculptural pendant light – and the Bright Beads range was born. Design-savvy consumers loved it and Coco’s solo career took off.
Coco launched Marz Designs in 2010 and has since expanded her range of products to include furniture and small objects.
“I see my pieces as functional art,” she says. “My aim is to create things that are useable and enhance a person’s life in some way.”