Our Square Pouf from recycled cord, was nominated for the Formex Sustainability Award 2024. For a small Ukrainian brand making things by hand through some very heavy years, hearing that one of our pieces was picked out by a Scandinavian jury felt almost unreal. We had to read the email twice.
A quick word about the award
If you have not been to Stockholm in January, picture this: a huge fair, thousands of brands, hundreds of buyers, and a strong, very northern obsession with doing things properly. That is Formex, the biggest interior design fair in the Nordics.
Every season, the Formex Sustainability Award goes to products with a real story behind them. Not "sustainable-ish". Not "eco-inspired". The jury wants to know where the material came from, who touched it, how the thing was made, and how long it is going to live in someone's home before it gets tired. Out of hundreds of exhibitors, only a small handful make the shortlist. Seeing our pouf on that list still makes us smile.
Meet the pouf
The piece that caught the jury's eye is one we are quietly very proud of: our square pouf, hand-knitted from recycled cord.
Here is what makes it tick.
The yarn is not new. It is recycled cord, made from textile leftovers that would otherwise have ended up as waste somewhere nobody wants to think about. Instead, those fibers get a second life as a soft, chunky cord that we then turn into something you actually want in your living room.
Every pouf is knitted by hand, loop by loop, by women on our team here in Ukraine. None of them are perfectly identical, and that is sort of the point. You can feel the rhythm of the person who made it. There is a small irregularity here, a slightly tighter stitch there. That is what hands do. Machines do not.
The build is sturdier than it looks. Kids jump on it. Dogs claim it. Friends drag it across the floor when there are not enough chairs. Years later, it is still doing its job. A pouf you keep using is, by definition, a sustainable one. The most eco-friendly object is the one you never have to replace.
We also keep the colors calm and natural, partly because that fits any room, and partly because we do not want to make pieces that look dated the moment a trend cycle turns. Slow color, slow shapes, slow craft. Boring? Maybe. Long-lasting? Absolutely.
Why the nomination matters to us
Honestly, we did not enter Formex expecting a nomination. We entered because we wanted to be in the room with brands we admire, and because the values they care about are the values we have built Anzy Home around from the start.
So when the shortlist came out, it felt like a small voice saying, "yes, the slow way is still worth it." We needed to hear that. Choosing recycled cord over cheaper new yarn costs more. Knitting by hand takes time. Paying women fair wages, in a country that has been at war for over two years, is not the easy path. None of this scales nicely on a spreadsheet.
The nomination did not make those choices easier. It made them feel right.
We did not win, and that is okay
Here is the part where some brands would gloss over the result. We will not. We did not take the trophy home. Someone else did, and they deserved it.
What we took home was something less shiny but maybe more useful: confidence that we are pointed in the right direction, and a reminder that our work is being seen by people whose opinion we genuinely respect. That counts for a lot. Awards are moments. The work is the lifetime.
A thank you, mostly
This nomination does not really belong to a logo. It belongs to the women who turned recycled yarn into something beautiful enough to land on a Scandinavian design stage. It belongs to the suppliers who help us track down reclaimed materials. And it belongs to every family that picked our pouf because they wanted more than another thing in the corner.
To the Formex team and jury: thank you for seeing us, and for keeping sustainability at the center of the conversation instead of off in some side room.
