Two extremely stylish polyglot ladies are at the helm of our next featured women-owned business client, the design fair WantedDesign: Odile Hainaut and Claire Pijoulat. As if we needed any more proof that Canva and its ilk (hiss) will never hold a candle to living, breathing professional designers – these ladies rock.
WantedDesign is a platform dedicated to promoting design and fostering the local and international creative community throughout the year. The duo founded the company in 2011, and they now draw together the international design community with design fairs throughout the US and a permanent store in Brooklyn.
2022 seems to be a fruitful time for interior furnishings and design, drawing at least one benefit from the pandemic. According to Forbes, “The pandemic has dramatically changed consumption habits, as it happened during the previous one in 1918: People started to redesign their kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms.”
NY Times also featured Claire and her partner’s efforts amidst a pandemic wave of New Yorkers moving out of the boroughs to build $1 million houses upstate (4/21/22). They promote designs that can be less expensive, more sustainable, and less energy dependent and demonstrated it through building a simple yet exquisite one-room cabin in the western Catskills.
One of their flagship efforts is the fair WantedDesign Manhattan. Most recently, the fair ran in May in tandem with the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in Manhattan’s Javits Center, together hosting 378 design brands from 23 countries. All told, the dual fairs gathered 7,000 architects, interior designers, and contemporary retailers, with the total number of visitors topping 10,000.
In 2018, Odile and Claire received the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, one of France’s highest honors, for their accomplishments in promoting and fostering French design talent in the US.
Now going on seven years of working together, we at Benchmark have provided dozens of signs and also postcards for various WantedDesign Manhattan exhibitions of up-and-coming designers.
