Pirwi

Pirwi is a Mexico-based home furniture brand committed to high quality, green manufacturing and good design. The company was founded by two industrial designers, Emiliano Godoy and Alejandro Castro, and launched its first line in March 2007 in Mexico City. Today, the collection includes over 70 objects by 12 designers and features cutting-edge pieces as well as award-winning designs now co... read more

Pirwi is a Mexico-based home furniture brand committed to high quality, green manufacturing and good design.

The company was founded by two industrial designers, Emiliano Godoy and Alejandro Castro, and launched its first line in March 2007 in Mexico City. Today, the collection includes over 70 objects by 12 designers and features cutting-edge pieces as well as award-winning designs now considered classics of contemporary Mexican design.

Pirwi was conceived as an environmentally conscious manufacturing platform that could reduce impacts on in-house processes as well as materials sourcing and disposal. Furthermore, several design and manufacturing strategies have been implemented in order to better control the environmental impact of our products throughout their lifecycles. We like to collaborate on all levels: with designers, suppliers and clients that share our concern for the preservation of our planet.

Both our company and its product line address the needs of our social and cultural surroundings. Our design and manufacturing processes are in constant dialogue with both their social context and the environment in which they are developed. However, this dialogue is not constrained to the immediate users or to today’s reality.

At Pirwi, our paramount concern is with manufacturing products that work both today and in the future. And here lays our interest in working with designers. In addition to its ability to create beautiful and functional objects, our fascination with design comes from its capacity to visualize, and predetermine, the future. In this sense, design is understood primarily as a tool for change.

We consider our products as nodes in an interwoven network that extends endlessly in time and space, and for whose development we are commonly responsible as designers, producers and consumers. If we assume this responsibility, then the existing manufacturing paradigm shifts considerably, as we are bound to consider the immediate and remote impacts of our activity. Interestingly, this responsibility generates a large area of opportunity: the paths derived from a new context, limited by unique temporary and physical constraints, are necessarily new, and as such original. In other words, our products are innovative because they are created within a novel idea of responsible manufacturing, and not because of a superficial search for cosmetic differentiation.

It is with this vision of transforming our present and setting the stage for a desirable future that we work with each designer, which range from established figures to young graduates. We aim at seizing the opportunities and confronting the challenges of our present, and generating objects that both respond to our surroundings and prepare for a better future.

The first products that were included in our catalog already had a particular approach in regards to material and finishes procurement, specifying those with a low environmental impact, non-toxic and easily recyclable or biodegradable. Since then, we have selected and developed our raw materials based on these criteria.

Our objective is to use primarily renewable resources, and it’s very important to us that these materials come from sources that not only protect the original ecosystems, but also the working conditions of people involved in the extraction and transformation process. Our search for environmentally preferable and technologically advanced materials has led us to develop materials directly with our suppliers and import foreign products exclusively for our use.

In the same sense, each material, finish, color or texture has particular expressive qualities, which is a very important factor in our dialogue with clients and designers. In this process we have found innovative and unique options for contemporary furniture, among them, Oriented Strand Board (OSB), thinning wood from certified plantations, stained glass and cotton ropes. We are now working with several new materials and processes that will be applied to future collections.

A large part of our work to reduce the environmental impact of our products starts a long time before manufacturing. From the generation of the very first ideas we work closely with the designers, looking for options that have a lower impact and trying to prevent future problems or setbacks.

Among the many strategies that we apply are the planned disassembly of components manufactured in different materials, the design of either parts or raw materials’ formats to improve resource efficiency, the design for recycling and biodegradation at the end of the product’s lifecycle, or a strength requirements analysis to determine the lowest amount of resources needed to create a robust product.

During manufacturing we also aim at greater efficiency in energy, raw materials and operative resources use. Some of our pieces are designed for assembly by the end user, thus reducing space, resources and energy use during transportation, packaging and storage. We also try to reduce in the impact of our daily operations through the use of efficient consumables and office products, the use of energy-efficient lighting and even by planning the working hours at our facilities to help employees to be more efficient in their daily commute.

In general, we wish to use Pirwi and the objects we manufacture as tools to question the status quo of industrial manufacturing and devise alternatives that are socially and environmentally preferable. It is also very important for us to communicate the virtues and limitations of our objects, and together with our clients and collaborators keep developing a path that in the near future, stops having a negative impact, no matter how small, and starts having a positive impact on the environment and society as a whole.