By collaborating with two designers that she met as part of the designer-company networking initiative launched by Belgium is Design, the founder of the French design editor Ibride is reaffirming the enthusiasm that foreign brands have for Belgian creation in the broadest sense.

While the name of your brand is not be very well known in Belgium, your products are anchored in the collective unconscious. How do you choose the designers that you collaborate with?

My answer will sound cliché (she laughs) but first and foremost, it’s about meeting them. For a collaboration to work, we have to have shared values. For thirty years, we have been collaborating with talents who align with our editorial line. When I founded Ibride, I didn’t feel totally comfortable with the idea of creating new items. In a market that is saturated, from the beginning, I focused on creations that were inspired by nature and living things, the Made in France concept, but also, as a manufacturer, on items that could be sold in flat packaging, which had dual uses, that could be repaired (because they are not welded), that had a ten-year warranty and that had a funny or dark side to them. For me, all of these values are based on a certain family common sense. The goal is to make our collections evergreen.

What attracted you to the Belgian approach?

Until now, we based our work on a French approach. And we felt a bit restricted by that. When we discovered this approach, and then the proposals of Juraj Straka and Frederik Delbart, the two Belgians that we met during the networking sessions organised by Belgium is Design, it seemed logical to offer them a chance to broaden our horizons. Frederik is an architect in the noblest sense of the term. He has a very intelligent sense of design. The console he designed for us is based on a sense of technique and implementation that forced us to push our own boundaries.

With respect to Juraj Straka, his approach is more poetic. His approach is very artistic and particularly moving.

Our collaborations are most often linked to an artistic approach that embraces disciplines such as painting and literature. For this collection, Juraj took inspiration from ancient engravings. He is accustomed to the world of fashion (Editor’s note: born in Bratislava, he created patterns for Schiapparelli and Dries Van Noten, before founding his own textile design studio in 2020) where everything has to move very quickly, so he particularly appreciated our relationship with time. For Ibride, he had the opportunity to create hand-drawn patterns, some of which took dozens of hours to complete.

Taking your time is a real luxury?

For us, it’s how we work. If we are not satisfied with a design, we do not release it, even if it means losing six months of work or more. The strength of the design is that it lasts over time. The items that Juraj and Frederik make will more than likely still be relevant and beautiful in 15 or 20 years’ time. We try to distance ourselves from a certain sense of homogeneity that can be noted in design. These two Belgian designers have perfectly satisfied our expectations and our way of looking at the creative process in this respect too. For example, Juraj embraces the notion of classical beauty, which ignores trends and focuses on the aesthetic and poetry of an item.

Your new collection of items will not be presented to international buyers and the press at a trade fair, but in your headquarters in Besançon. Why?

Due to the Olympics, we didn’t participate to the September edition of Maison&Objet, as a result, we thought that a stroll through a beautiful private garden in the heart of the region we are based in would be a lovely way to introduce our clients from Europe, China, America and Australia to the land in which we create and experiment. While we do not define ourselves by our region, it is clear that our relationship with nature, and the poetry that emerges from our items, naturally arise from it.