Balazs Botos Design – Paper Up!

Balázs Botos Design mainly works with the designing and manufacturing of porcelain jewellery and home accessories. The collections and objects are characterised by clarity and round, “happy” shapes, “Northern design”, and clear, simple, often pastel colours. Balázs Botos, the person behind the brand, spent his two-week internship at Paper Up!.

Why did you choose Paper Up! as your internship location in the design START programme?

As I run a personal business myself, I wanted to get an insight into the operation of a company of similar size. We already knew each other with Rita Koralevics, the founder of Paper Up!, and we talked about the possibility of a collaboration already. It is true to both porcelain and paper that they are slow to work with, they allow small-scale production, so I was curious how overseeing the daily activities, time management and its communication, and marketing were done at Paper Up!

What product did you create together?

A small piece of furniture that can be placed next to armchairs or sofas, where you can put down a book or a cup, and we even finished it together during my internship, based on Rita’s designs. Through joint thinking, we managed to approach the designs from a new perspective and the smooth collaboration resulted in a compact piece of furniture, made distinctive by its rounded shape and clean lines. It was especially useful for me to see how important it is to have my own collection of colours ready that I can show to the customer when they are placing an order; thus, my future plans include putting together such a colour scale from my sample products.

Do you feel you got the knowledge you were looking for during your internship?

Yes! What I experienced at Paper Up! absolutely confirmed that the way I am managing my enterprise and thinking about the present and future is the good direction. The similarity of the workflow confirmed that the production of such small batch products is highly time-consuming and that this time must be calculated with. Thus, during customised production and marketing, it is especially important to clearly communicate this.

What will you be able to use in your own work, in running your business from what you have learnt?

I definitely wanted to get a closer look at the paper cement used by Paper Up! in use. During the two weeks, I realised that I cannot take this material into my own work as it is, but I can imagine creating a product in the future that will contain this exciting material.

Will you continue to cooperate in some form?

Hopefully, yes. We keep in touch; we talk about continuing the collaboration in the future as well.

Balazs Botos Design

Website: https://www.etsy.com/shop/BalazsBotosDesign 

Instagram: @balazsbotos.design

Paper Up!

Website: https://paperup.hu/ 

Instagram: @paper_up_collection