There are days at the studio that look like any other. And then there are days when an email lands and the whole room goes quiet for a second.
This was one of the second kind.
Anzy Home has been awarded the Design Hunger Prize 2025 in the category Best Conscious Lifestyle Brand, presented at Playtime Paris. To say we are honored does not quite cover it. Coming from a small Ukrainian brand of hand-knitted home decor, working through some very heavy years, this recognition feels like a warm hand on the shoulder from the international design community. We needed it. And we are grateful.
A few words about Playtime and Design Hunger
If you do not live inside the kids and lifestyle design world, here is the short version. Playtime Paris is one of the most important international fairs for kids' fashion, lifestyle, and home brands. It is where buyers, press, designers, and concept stores from around the world come to find the next pieces worth carrying.
Inside that fair, the Design Hunger team picks a tiny shortlist of brands that, in their words, are shaping the future of lifestyle. Eight brands. That is it. Each one is celebrated in a specific category, and the team looks at things that are hard to fake: craft, responsibility, originality, and a real point of view. To be on that list is already a lot. To take home a prize in your category is something else entirely.
What we were recognized for
Our category was Best Conscious Lifestyle Brand, and honestly, it is the category we would have picked for ourselves if we could have.
Conscious is not a word we throw around lightly at Anzy Home. It is the reason the brand exists in the shape it does today. From the very first basket we made, we have built around a few simple ideas:
Make things by hand. Real, human hand. Not assembly lines pretending to be artisans.
Use materials a family can trust. Cotton, wool, wood, recycled cord. Things that come from the earth and can go back to it without leaving a mess behind.
Build pieces meant to be kept. A blanket that grows with a child. A pouf that survives years of jumping. A basket that gets passed from one room to the next as a home changes.
Pay the people who make it fairly. Especially the women in our community in Eastern Ukraine, many of whom do this work from places that need to feel safe. Their craft is the heart of everything we ship.
The Design Hunger team saw all of that and chose to put a spotlight on it. We will not pretend that did not move us.
A thank you, a real one
This award does not really belong to a logo on a banner. It belongs to the women in our team who pick up needles and hooks every day and turn yarn into something soft enough for a baby and strong enough to live in a busy family home for years. It belongs to the partners who help us source materials we are proud of. And it belongs to every store, every parent, and every reader who picked Anzy Home because they wanted something with a story in it.
To the Design Hunger team and everyone at Playtime Paris: thank you for seeing us, for choosing us, and for using your platform to put conscious craft in the spotlight where it belongs.
