The internet’s favorite design shop is closing. Its founder reflects on what went wrong

In early February, the 22-year-old design brand Areaware announced it will close on May 1 citing tariffs and “mounting pressures on the home goods industry” in a letter posted to its Instagram account. “Every product we’ve made has been an act of optimism—a belief that good design can make our world a little better,” the letter said. “Lately though, our world has been making that difficult for us to do.” 

It’s been a challenging few months for good design brands. In December, Food52, the parent company of Schoolhouse and Dansk, declared bankruptcy; earlier in February, it was stripped for parts and sold at auction. While Areaware and Food52 don’t share the exact same business model, both brands were curators and manufacturers that assembled an eclectic mix of goods targeted toward an aspirational shopper who valued design, affordability, and storytelling in everyday objects. 

It’s a type of company that looks like it’s on its way out. “To be both a curatorial voice and a manufacturing voice are two disparate and incompatible forces,” says Noel Wiggins, Areaware’s cofounder and CEO. “It is not a great business model. It’s a wonderful creative model.” 

A ‘record label’ for industrial design

Areaware has been a fixture in the home goods landscape since launching its first collection in 2005. It established itself as a publisher of stylish, playful, and accessibly priced products that cut across categories. If you wanted to buy something distinctive but tasteful—a minimalist silver baby rattle, brightly patterned napkins, pastel candles shaped like blobs—you could find it on Areaware’s website. 

From the start, Areaware primarily licensed pieces from independent designers, who received a 6% royalty fee, and manufactured them. Less than 10% of products were designed in-house. Through this model, it forged an entire ecosystem of design, from product development to manufacturing to wholesale and eventually direct-to-consumer retail, which it began strategically investing in four years ago. By 2024, direct sales accounted for 26% of overall revenue, domestic wholesale was responsible for 64%, and international accounts and global partners made up 10%.

Artists and designers who wanted to mass produce their work knew they had a partner in the brand, which took care of manufacturer sourcing, marketing, and sales. This included legends like Susan Kare and Tobias Wong along with emerging studios that eventually became heavyweights like RBW, Jason Miller, and Chen Chen and Kai Williams. 

“In many ways we function like a small record label,” Wiggins says. “There’s this kind of sound to that label and it’s the feeling of ideas coming before function in industrial design.” Over the past 22 years, Areaware collaborated with over 50 artists, distributed its products internationally, and produced true icons of design (David Weeks’s Cubebot, and its many iterations, generated $18.7 million in sales). 

A fragile ecosystem

While most manufacturers specialize in a specific material or one technique, Areaware was more focused on authorship and doing something interesting with an artist who wanted to experiment. This helped Areaware built a loyal following throughout the design community, but it also created issues on the business side.

“The ecosystem was fragile,” Wiggins says. This is because the company made so many different types of materially different goods—from glass butter dishes to wood bottle openers and stainless-steel flasks. The variety that gave Areaware its creative identity was also a weak business point.

“This multidisciplinary approach created structural challenges,” says Roberto Fantauzzi, Areaware’s chief design officer. “Unlike companies focused on a single category, Areaware did not benefit from the same economies of scale or pricing efficiencies. Developing across multiple categories required higher upfront investment, increased tooling and mold costs, and a careful allocation of in-house resources across a range of product types.” 

Depending on the type of new product, like a color update of an existing SKU or entirely new object, product development could cost anywhere from “a few hundred dollars to several thousand,” Fantauzzi says. 

While the brand was able to pay its bills and not carry debt, margins were always tight. According to Wiggins, Areaware generated $4 million in sales annually on average, but profits vacillated—$40,000 one year, zero the next, then minus $20,000. 

Still, the company was able to manage. That is, until Trump’s tariffs entered the picture. “Maintaining that balance between design integrity and affordability at times meant operating with slimmer margins,” Fantauzzi says. “When tariffs took effect in 2025, those margins were significantly compressed, making it increasingly difficult to sustain certain collections and SKUs at the standards and prices the company strives to uphold.”

It takes around 18 months for Areaware to bring a product into production and the constantly changing landscape made it extremely challenging to plan ahead and manage the risks involved. “It wasn’t only the tariffs, which were horrible as they were, but it was the unknown,” Wiggins says. “You don’t know whether to wait out if the tariffs are going to change. It creates this enormous stall in the system.”

Around 80% of Areaware’s products are made in China. The rest are mostly produced in Indonesia (mostly furniture), India (cast-iron pieces), Vietnam (candles), and Mexico (silver baby rattles). Wiggins explored manufacturing the Cubebot with a wood toy maker in Vermont, but the extra cost wasn’t justifiable. Production would have cost four times more for the toy itself, turning a $10 product into a $30 product for shoppers. 

These pressures are also particularly challenging since Areaware’s business model revolves around small product runs. Aside from the Cubebot blockbuster and few products that have sold tens of thousands of units, most pieces sell in the thousands and hundreds. “It wasn’t even only price; it was just the ability to make small batch,” Wiggins says. “We can’t set up a local factory to do small numbers.” 

Another casualty of the attention economy

Wiggins—who was inspired by the SoHo design emporium Moss, the conceptual Dutch collective Droog, and the Milanese brand Danese—compares the trajectory of design businesses to art movements. “They kind of have their generational moment and then it ends,” he says. 

Lisa Cheng Smith, who once served as the chief design officer of Areaware and has developed products for Hay and Design Within Reach, says the brand’s closure signals a shift in what type of design is most valued today. When the brand started, the job of a “product designer” meant you made physical objects, but now it means digital experiences. 

“That speaks to me about the status a product or object has in our material consciousness,” Smith says. “The voices of creatives are more often seen on digital platforms now. It’s like cooking videos, YouTube—that’s how people are accessing culture. It’s less about buying a meticulously thought-through object.”

Wiggins echoes the impact of digitization on his business, particularly how information travels today. It’s a lot easier for everyone to directly find what they need. Shoppers can go on any number of social media platforms to find new brands, and designers can go directly to manufacturers without an intermediary like Areaware.

 “You don’t need the gatekeepers as much,” he says. “Pre-internet, the role of a curator was, in some ways, more important because if you were a store and you had to find neat things, you couldn’t really search for [them] easily.”

At the same time, the landscape has become noisier than ever and the constant firehose of content drowns out anything that isn’t viral, which poses another challenge to Areaware’s model. Wiggins describes Areaware as a media company that sells “three-dimensional stories,” and getting customers to listen is tough. 

“Every time there’s a piece of Trump news, the attention economy is going towards someone else’s story,” Wiggins says. “You’re constantly in competition for attention. There’s such a domination of fear in the attention system that it gets hard to get people’s attention in a way that’s sustainable.” 

The business of designers

So where do object makers fit into this new landscape? The wholesale model of affordable designer objects can’t sustain itself. Meanwhile, few big brands today seem willing to take risks on emerging studios; instead they’re reissuing heritage pieces, which have baked-in fan bases and greater chances of becoming a break-out hit. That leaves out collectible design, which relies heavily on concept and authorship. “It’s a place where the voice of the designer can really be preserved,” Smith says.

Beyond sales, licensing is still important to emerging studios. Sophie Collé, a furniture designer based in Brooklyn, licensed one of her earliest designs, a plant stand with an amoeba-like silhouette that she had been making by hand herself, to Areaware in 2022. The Splat table then went on to be sold at MoMA Design Store, the Guggenheim, and Coming Soon—places that are retailer-curators first and don’t typically manufacture their own goods. The deal became an important income stream for her small business, and through it her work reached a wider audience that led to custom commissions, and larger brand deals and collaborations. 

“Not only has Areaware done so much for my career, but it really was a support system for emerging designers,” Collé says. “I honestly don’t really know another company that does what they did with such grace and respect for the designers themselves. Finding manufacturers and fabricators is such a beast, and not every creative has the time or even wants to be doing that side of the business. That is what really makes Areaware irreplaceable in that sense, at least in my eyes.”

Ellen Van Dusen, founder of the textiles and home goods brand Dusen Dusen, has collaborated with Areaware for eight years on objects that her company isn’t able to make in-house. This includes a plywood tissue box cover painted with faces and a night light. “They took risks with products that were a little weird and unconventional that became huge successes,” Van Dusen says. 

Van Dusen adds that the distribution channels brought her work to all corners of the world. “People will text me pictures of the pepper grinders in New Zealand, umbrellas on the street in Japan, and the tissue box in Mexico,” she says. “We don’t have those same distribution channels in house, so Areaware brought an awareness to Dusen Dusen that I don’t think we would have gotten on our own. They were an integral part of our growth. And I must mention, the tissue box was on Succession.”

Beyond being a shopping destination Areaware was also an important industry connector, which is important since the design industry runs on relationships. Laura Young, managing director of collectible design gallery the Future Perfect, met many of the artists she represents now through her work at Areaware directing product development. “Areaware laid the foundation for my career,” she says. And Smith, who now runs Yun Hai, a retail shop and online store specializing in Taiwanese cooking, met many of the manufacturing partners she works with today through Areaware. “The way that I do business is based on everything I learned there,” she says. 

Like the reshuffle of Food52, there’s a chance some parts of Areaware might not completely disappear. For example, Wiggins is in talks with Weeks to take over production of the Cubebot. “Honestly, we’re trying to find someone to take over the arduous and difficult business model,” Wiggins says. “And because it’s arduous and difficult and very unprofitable, it’s hard to find someone to do that.”