Caraway introduced us to the concept of the color-coordinated kitchen. Today, it’s rolling out more kitchenware to complete the look.
As I wander around Crate & Barrel, I stare out into a sea of pots and pans in every color of the rainbow and wonder which set will perfectly match the pistachio-colored KitchenAid mixer that sits on my counter.
It’s a distinctly modern quandary. A generation ago, kitchen products were primarily designed to be utilitarian. My mother stocked her kitchen with Pyrex baking dishes, Tupperware, and Teflon pans, none of which were color-coordinated. But a wave of direct to consumer cookware brands like Our Place, Great Jones, Material, and Anyday have popped up over the past decade, focused on creating kitchenware that is both functional and beautiful.
One of the biggest in the category is Caraway, a brand founded by Jordan Nathan in 2019. It launched on the internet with a set of sleek, minimalist pans that came in colors like sage green and terracotta red. The brand began to pop up on Instagram, where celebrities like Mindy Kaling, Kate Hudson, and Gigi Hadid showed off their color-coordinated kitchens.
During the pandemic, when people were spending more time cooking and cared more about the aesthetics of their home, Caraway’s popularity grew. Now, the brand is poised to take over more of the kitchen. It landed a $35 million round of VC funding late last year, which it will use to expand its product range. Its newest addition, a collection of prep tools, includes knives, spatulas, and cutting boards, along with a storage system to keep things organized.
Nathan’s first goal when launching Caraway wasn’t to create colorful, aesthetically pleasing products; it was to create a nonstick alternative to Teflon, which has been called out over the years for its toxic coatings. (In 2013, Teflon eliminated PFOA, a chemical known to cause cancer.) In the decade prior, a new category of pots and pans called ceramic cookware had entered the market. Contrary to what its name implies, they’re not, in fact made of ceramic, but from metal with a silicone coating that helps create a nonstick surface. Nathan says that many consumers were not familiar with the material when he was launching his startup. “It tended to be sold in the retail environment without a lot of storytelling behind it,” he says. “With a DTC brand, we could help explain that there was an alternative to Teflon for folks who didn’t want to use it.”
But selling a pan on the internet was different than selling it in store. For one thing, it needed to stand out on social media and on the e-commerce website if it was going to catch consumers’ attention. Caraway hired the well-known design firm Box Clever to help design the pots. The designers created minimalist pans with handles inspired by the oblong shape of the caraway seed, which gives the brand its name, and also went beyond the mundane colors typically found in cookware. Finally, they developed a simple storage system that would allow consumers to easily organize their pots in kitchen cabinets or on counters. “A lot of our design choices center around how do we make people’s lives easier,” Nathan says. “This influences our material choices as well as the storage solutions.”
During the pandemic, as Caraway’s sales grew, it developed new products, including bakeware and food containers, all of which are coated with the same ceramic material and came with their own storage systems. The brand has since started selling its products in retail stores like Crate & Barrel, Nordstrom, and Amazon. “People tend to buy kitchen products at big life moments, like registering for a wedding or a new baby,” Nathan says. “It was important for us to be in the places where people are shopping.”
Now the brand is continuing this expansion with its kitchen tool prep set. These new products are wood-heavy, which makes them slightly different from the brand’s existing product line. The three piece cutting board set and the five piece set of cooking tools are made from FSC-certified birch wood. But Caraway has found ways for its design language to carry through into these new pieces. The knives’ handles have the same oblong shape as the pan handles, and come in a range of colors, including blue, terracotta, grey, and mist green.
Each of these products has a thoughtful storage solution. There’s an organizational unit that has a spot for each of the five cooking tools, making it easy to quickly find the one you’re looking for. And there’s a knife block for the knives. Both the tools and the knives can sit neatly on a little tray, creating a tidy look on your counter. But Nathan says that the storage was designed to be modular, so it will work in different kitchens. For instance, if someone wants to keep the knives in a drawer, the block can be put sideways. “There are magnets in the slots, holding it nice and tight, so you can put them in and remove them safely,” he says.
Ultimately, Nathan wants to make it possible for someone to design their entire kitchen in a unified aesthetic. They can pick a color and apply it to everything from their pans to their knives to their storage containers. (They even have a green that goes perfectly with my KitchenAid mixer.) The idea of a perfectly color-coordinated kitchen is something that previous generations may have found ridiculous, but Nathan says it’s increasingly what millennials and Gen Z consumers expect. “They’re looking for cohesiveness and consistency in their kitchen through design,” he says.
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2023-08-29 09:00:00Z
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