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Iittala is a Finnish design brand that has been making unique and long-lasting design since 1881. It is a design brand that brings Scandinavian design to the world. According to Iittalas website, their design approach is to create “aesthetically pleasing objects infused with progressive Scandinavian design”. The brand designs glass, cook- and tableware, interior design objects and other design objects. They design and make consumer goods and sell them directly to households and other customers. Even if they make and sell products for everyday use, they create the things to be unique. According to Rawsthorn, design needs to have a designated function. If that is true, then Iittala has made exactly as Rawstrorn says. Because all the products the brand has designed have designated functions.
According to Haskett the arena where design is mainly practiced is business. A good example of this is Iittala. The brand creates design objects by collaborating with artists and designers and then sells the products to customers. For the most part, everything that they design gets mass-produced and is sold to a large group of people. Iittala is famous for its partnerships with artists and designers. As early as the 1930s, Aino and Alvar Aalto, the first artists that partnered with Iittala, designed products for Iittala to sell to customers. Already the idea back then was to design mass-produced products and sell them. Both Alvar and Aino Aalto designed glass products such as glasses and vases. The same products they designed back then are still on sale. The design company’s lasting success is mainly due to the partnerships’ with artists and designers.
The famous brand competes on the design market with other brands such as Alessi, Villeroy & Boch and Riedel. All of these companies make partly the same products as Iittala does, glass products, cook- and tableware and design objects. The competitive advantage that Iittala possesses is that they make high quality and long-lasting products’ which are classical and functional. Because Iittala works constantly together with designers and artists, their products have design that distinguishes them from others in the market. The fact that they make so one of a kind products, is what makes Iittala so unique. As long as Iittala continues with its business model of collaborating with artists and designers and designing unique products, it will also hold on to a competitive edge that will allow it to keep on succeeding.
Making sense of art and design industries 