Credit
Tawni Bannister for The New York Times
Name Jamie Wolfond
Age 25
Hometown Toronto
Now lives In a two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with his fiancée, the product designer Sam Anderson, and a roommate.
Claim to fame In 2014, Mr. Wolfond founded Good Thing, a design company that makes pared-down, utilitarian housewares that are as on-trend as they are affordable. The line includes steel dustpans ($29), cylindrical bookends ($16) and silicone-dipped stainless steel mirrors ($19.50 to $34) in standout colors like powder pink, mint green and cobalt blue. “You get the more useful version of the thing, and it also becomes a piece of decoration,” Mr. Wolfond said.
Big Break After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013, Mr. Wolfond established a studio in New York but was dismayed by the design scene. “I was so sickened and angry about the amount of opulent brass and moody glass lighting,” he said. “I was going to go in this other direction, and make things that were affordable.”
When efforts to license his designs soured, he recruited other emerging designers and began manufacturing products on his own. “I realized, ‘Oh, if you have these other designers and yourself, you can call it a manufacturing company,’” Mr. Wolfond said. Products by Good Thing are carried by museum stores across the country, including the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Walker Art Center.
