After similar dialogues with my wife before the birth of our son, I remembered a traditional ceiling dryer from my student days in England, with which the laundry could be pulled under the ceiling. I improved the model and inadvertently built the first prototype of the Hangbird – at that time, of course, still without a name. After friends and acquaintances also wanted to have the unusual furniture, I recognized the opportunity to create a “new” object from the simple everyday object “clothes horse” and to combine furniture design with sustainability.
The shared kitchen / living room in England: barely visible on the back wall (concealed) is the rope of the English model, which was later to give the idea for Hangbird.
Not space-saving: Trials and variants of the new idea are suddenly spreading in the own apartment. – Not time-saving: the preparations up to the first regularly sent parcel took around 1.5 years.
There is not necessarily a magic inherent in every beginning: sweating in the summer heat, transporting raw materials for the first prototype series alone raises doubts whether you are doing the right thing in life.
Working title “TakeOff” in the first “sales brochure” to friends. – Fortunately, there was a better name for the company later.
“I”, that’s me, Samuel Kutter, designer and founder of Hangbird. Born in Basel, who moved to Munich because of love. After working in the natural sciences, management consultancy and a large corporation, I am fortunate to be able to set up my own company with Hangbird and to be active in a variety of ways “en miniature”. I am happy that I have now become the owner of hundreds of “birds” that have found new homes all over the world and enable their owners to dry their clothes in a space-saving and beautiful way.
The company “Hangbird” used the wings of the Kickstarter campaign at the time and has been successfully flying through the drying rack life for several years now. Not just me anymore, but also a small team now takes care of the communication with the customers, the further marketing of the bird, the production and the dispatch. Our “bird’s nest” is a backyard workshop in the heart of Munich – only a 3-minute walk to the Viktualienmarkt – and is supplemented by a small office and a warehouse. Everything no more than 500 meters apart.
The first parts of the pre-series have arrived: 11 frames for friends and acquaintances and for taking photographs.
For the first series, we worked on many details and packed the boxes ourselves.
Arrival and departure: The amount of incoming frame parts seemed to be in a ridiculous relation to the number of packed packages.
The first packages for customers in the immediate vicinity were personally delivered.