Product Design: Fashion Edition • Guni Kranz

(Founder of Clinq | Fashion Designer || Germany)

“I was a full-time fashion designer in Hong Kong. Every morning I’d dress up, get to the office, then put a rubber band in my hair. Nice clothes, then a cheap rubber band? As a fashion designer? How is that possible! I started looking for high-quality, functional hair jewelry, but without success. And if you can’t find it in Hong Kong, then you pretty much can’t find it anywhere. So I thought, you know what, I will do it.

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I started Clinq when we relocated to Germany. I thought it would be the perfect opportunity — it’s an engineering country, I speak the language — I figured it wouldn’t take me more than two years to get it going. But I quickly realized it’s actually not that easy. Working with metal is a whole different story than working with fabrics. You need more tools than just a sheet of paper and a sewing machine. So I bought all kinds of hair clips, took them apart, put them back together. I have a passion for simple designs — I became obsessed with the idea of making a clip out of one piece of metal. I created literally thousands of little paper mock-ups, and eventually I found a way to make it happen with paper. With this I went to several companies, trying to find someone who could help me make tools to build these clips out of metal. Most didn’t take me seriously. I finally found someone who said it was a crazy idea — he didn’t think it was even possible — but was willing to try because it challenged him. We worked together every night using a 3D program to develop the tool. The program refused to make this bend we needed in the metal — even the software didn’t believe me! Many nights and days of hard work later, we figured out how to trick the software and developed the tool to make my design with metal. Now I’m making several of them myself every day.

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I was always interested in product design. But in school I was so bad in maths, and product design is so technical — I didn’t think I could make it. But product design is also creative. You can actually do a lot without being a maths genius — like creating beautiful, simple, high-quality hair clips that nobody has made ever before.”