The word “throwawayism” gives a little over 24000 hits on Google. Iittala has an opportunity to start owning this new made up word! Well, hopefully in the construction “against throwawayism”.

From the Iittala philosophy :

Have you noticed how easy it is, in our shopping-oriented world, to crowd your home with meaningless things? You find yourself with short-lived items that eventually cease to function, or go out of style. So they are thrown away, adding to the growing mountains of unusable rubbish on our planet, while you keep on shopping for new things.

I admire this approach and while many will argue that a really well designed product is by definition timeless (which I believe as well) it is so hard to actually live up to that. An interesting fact is that in pretty much every Finnish home you will find Iittala products and that is across all generations. In fact two of their popular “everyday drinking” lines Aino Aalto and Kartio have been around since 1932 and 1958 respectively.  They are simple in design and totally timeless.

Iittala found a very nice point of difference.I hope the make sure not to jeopardize this with more time sensitive products or by focussing on short term revenues. Stay true to the brand and brand philosophy.