Jamie Wolfond is an industrial designer, artist, collaborator, maker, and most importantly an experimenter. After studying at the Rhode Island School of Design and spending five years in New York City, he found himself moving back to Canada and setting up shop in his hometown of Toronto. Today Wolfond is a student of his own projects, mixing problem-solving and a willingness to fail into his striking designs.  

Wolfond focuses on furniture, lighting, and everyday tools for consumer brands like EQ3, Ferm Living, Floyd Home, and Matter Made among many others. He also concentrates a lot on exhibitions and has been featured at Superhouse, Erin Stump Projects, Matter and more.  

We met up with him at his studio near The Junction in Toronto to chat about inspirations, experimentation, and studio life. Read the full interview below.

Photography by Storm Luu and Triston Hall

PHOTO BY STORM. JAMIE WEARS MERZ. B. SCHWANEN MEN'S LOOPWHEELED SWEATSHIRT, FOB FACTORY 66 SELVEDGE DENIM, DIEMME ROCCIA VET BOOTS, AND BEAMS PLUS 6-PANEL SUEDE CAP.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and the studio we're in?   

I'm a designer. I am trained in furniture design, but I don't know how to put all my work in a single category. There are a lot of different things that we do. I guess you could say we mostly design products for brands, but the way that we do that is a little bit funny and very experimental and the process is not very linear. And so a lot of the time, while we're doing that, we arrive at other things which are maybe useful objects that are not asking to be put into industrial production, or not very useful objects, or things that would go on your wall or things that there's no really good reason to make. I mean, those are actually the most common. But by sort of chasing all of these unlikely ideas, we end up coming up with some that other people might not have come up with. In short though, we design products for brands, and we make artwork for galleries.  

We are working on a channel where we sell things directly to people, which is something I've avoided for a good while. I had a consumer brand that I sold in 2018, and I have tried not to touch any aspects of that job with a ten-foot pole because of the circumstances under which I sold it. It was called Good Thing and we made housewares. We sold to West Elm in 2018. I came to really hate running a company like that, so every time we've ended up with a product that wants to be manufactured and sold out of the studio I've kind of gone in the other direction. 

Recently I decided to introduce direct sales to the studio in a very controlled way. So in the next few months, there will be a new platform where we sell limited editions of things that we make in the studio. So that is yet to be announced, but I'm happy to foreshadow it.

PHOTO BY TRISTON. JAMIE WEARS VETRA 5C SHORT WORKWEAR JACKET, A.P.C. NEW KAPLAN PANTS, AND KARHU MESTARI CONTROL SNEAKERS.

What's your favourite thing on this studio wall?   

It's hard to pick a favorite. Usually I'm the most interested in whatever we haven't figured out. Here's an unsolved problem. Furniture designers have this thing with screws. From a traditional point of view, screws are one of the worst ways you can connect wood. But when we cut the screws in half we make something really decorative - like marquetry, which is on the other end of the woodworking spectrum- a feature of intensive craft.  

We haven't yet figured out what to make with it. And that's partially because we're not very good at doing it. It's really hard to cut a screw out of a piece of wood and get the screw halfway through a piece of wood to stay in, and it tends to get really hot. We've gone through a lot of sandpaper and saw blades. So this puzzle was annoying for two reasons. One was that we had to physically figure out how to do it, which we still do. Two is that we didn't really know how to apply it. It could just make, like, a big surface of something, but somehow it has to be used to make a point or a joke about something, sort of putting together a very stuffy process and a very iconoclastically wrong one.

PHOTO BY TRISTON.

What's the most difficult part of launching a design?  

It really depends. It's so different when we design a product for a brand. The best analogy is how bands work with record labels. We don't have to produce the object, market it, take it to trade shows or deal with the inventory. We get a percentage of the wholesale price or sale price of something, and that's just for designing it. It's nice to give up all those responsibilities, but you also give up a lot of control.  

For every 50 good ideas that we have, five get interest from a brand, and then maybe two get picked up. For every two that get picked up, one actually sells. And it's only after the end of that process that we get paid, which is why there isn't one singular business model at the studio.

PHOTO BY TRISTON.

Would you say your practice is experimental? How do you go about your creative process?  

Usually, there are a few things that come together to kind of make an idea worth doing. I like to have some vague idea of what world an object will live in before we start designing it, even though this will change. I may have an idea to make a certain kind of print, and the context could be silly. It could be like, "I want to make holiday cards for my clients, so I'm going to do this," which is something that we've used as an excuse to make two-dimensional work for a few years now.   

It's usually when some kind of contextual element like, something a client wants or something we think would be useful, intersects with something we've been curious about for a long time. And the interest could be like these papers.

Is there an object in your studio that sparks an important question?  

Well, I thought this thread-wrapped one would be cool, simply because I haven't photographed it. 

I noticed that when you buy a spool of thread, variegated [multicoloured] thread in particular, the spools somehow are always rolled in such a way that the colours end up getting grouped together. It doesn't totally make sense how that would be easy or doable, because the spool actually increases in diameter as the thread gets added to it, which means that each rotation should take up more thread. For some reason, however, they create these very graphic patterns where the same colour ends up in the same place at the same time.   

I have a friend who sometimes helps us with computery things because we're pretty analog here, who rigged up a 3D printer to help us wind a spool. And I just wanted to see if we could use thread to apply that pattern to objects. It didn't really work so well, except for this one. We tried to tune the diameter of the piece and the speed of rotation to the speed that it was feeding up and down. Pretty much none of them worked. I mean, most of them are actually in storage, but generally, the patterns we made were pretty random, except for this one, which kind of worked. The project felt like it would get 100 times more technical, only to make it a little bit better. And so that was where we left it. But we were definitely left really appreciating spools of thread. 

PHOTO BY STORM. JAMIE WEARS MERZ. B. SCHWANEN MEN'S LOOPWHEELED SWEATSHIRT, FOB FACTORY 66 SELVEDGE DENIM, AND DIEMME ROCCIA VET BOOTS.

What's one thing that you'd like to say about your design process that might not come across easily to people? 

I mean, I look at this space, and I feel like it's obvious that we fail a lot. If it's not, then I would choose to make that known.  

Maybe this is more interesting — There's this thing that happens when I'm trying to solve a problem, a physical problem, that is not for work. There's so much more magic. I've heard it said that everyone who does the thing that they love for work, sees a little bit of the joy drained out of it. It's a bit true. So I noticed that when I do those things outside of work, that extra bit of joy comes back.  

There was this thing that happened for me around the end of my wife's second pregnancy. I had to prepare, but my mind wasn't doing it in the way that hers was. So I worked on the house: made things for the house, fixed things. And almost always, the moment that I stop attempting to milk my creativity, to capitalize on it, squeeze the most I can out of it and into something that I can get paid for, really cool things happen. Is that a part of the process? I don't know, but I've learned in the last few years that if I just fuck right off and go do something for myself or my family, it really brings the fun back into it, and I feel more creative. Then of course that thing might turn out, and then I'm like, "hey, this is good". Then I decide to bring it into work and the cycle begins again.  

For example, I made this bookshelf for my wife. That was the most normal thing I could think of. But I found a sort of clever way to assemble it. A couple of weeks later, a company asked us to design a shelf for them. With a little adjustment, that assembly method actually turned out to be something really expressive, and we went with it. 

PHOTO BY TRISTON. 

So is design about solving problems? 

All the structural and ergonomic problems in furniture design have been solved. So, no, it's not just like making a shelf that assembles more easily or whatever. Usually, the problem is a bit more related to how to give an object a really special, unique story or identity, or make it connect with people in a different way. So sometimes the problem we are trying to solve is not easy to verbalize, but a good solution usually helps us understand our environment, or see it in a new way. That's the only answer I can give as to why we continue to need new furniture. 

PHOTO BY TRISTON. 

Why Toronto? 

I grew up here. My wife is American. We lived in New York for five years. I don't care where [I live] that much. I don't generally want to leave. Like, I set up, and then I have my universe. It's a great city in some ways. In some ways, not so much. I think a lot of the problems that other cities have, and it's far away from most of my clients. So in that sense, for a big city, it can be kind of isolating, but I don't know. It's close to my family. That's nice.  

What did you like about New York? 

The food. Yeah, the food was good. Both Toronto and New York have tons of culture, which is nice. It still happens to not be the exact world that my work operates in, so that can be kind of frustrating. Interestingly though, I get the sense that there are more Canadian designers per capita working with brands abroad than there are American ones. I think it's because there's no local alternative here. There's, like, really nothing here. Whereas in New York, a lot of people fall into a surprisingly small and cliquey design community that is exclusive to New York. 

PHOTO BY STORM. JAMIE WEARS MERZ. B. SCHWANEN MEN'S LOOPWHEELED SWEATSHIRT, FOB FACTORY 66 SELVEDGE DENIM, DIEMME ROCCIA VET BOOTS, AND BEAMS PLUS 6-PANEL SUEDE CAP.

How do you like to spend a nice day off? Is there a day off? 

There's either never a day off or there's never a day on because I'm always thinking about it, but I'm certainly not always here. I might be spending 16 hour days in the studio if I didn't have so many other responsibilities, but instead, I have it on my mind all the time when I may be doing other things. I ride my bike and I rock climb and I box. I rotate through those when I can. 

Why boxing? 

Probably because I have a really good trainer. I probably wouldn't be boxing with a super macho bro as a coach. I tried it because, I don't know, I got in shape for the first time in 2017 after I got married, I got tired of lifting weights, so I wanted to try other things.   

Punching. don't you want to do it right now? You should. It's really fun.

PHOTO BY TRISTON.