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We zijn blij dat we in de aprileditie 2024 van het designtijdschrift "Designo" te zien waren. Voor het tijdschrift werden de oprichters van LucyBalu, Mathias Wahrenberger en Sebastian Frank, geïnterviewd. In het artikel gaat het onder meer over het feit dat kattenmeubels tegenwoordig grotendeels nog steeds eerder functioneel zijn dan mooi, laat staan "designer".
Volgens Designo verandert LucyBalu dat:
"She’s not wrong. I bought Edward’s cat tree on Amazon in 2019 and, five years on, the platform still seems to offer a decent overview of the market – a search for “cat trees” brings up seven pages worth of functionally identical products, all sold by different brands: Yaheetech, PawHut, Feandrea and Jissbon. They would all, I suspect, delight Edward, but they’re not objects you would readily associate with high design values. “There are a lot of products out there,” confirms Mathias Wahrenberger, who co-founded the cat brand LucyBalu with industrial designer Sebastian Frank in 2019. “The pet market is growing and already huge,” he says, “but it’s also been going in the wrong direction from a consumer standpoint, because the products are getting cheaper and cheaper.” Looking at LucyBalu’s website, I can see his point. The brand sells a variety of cat platforms, wall mounted hammocks and scratching posts that meet all the same functional needs as Edward’s tree, but represent a clear step up in terms of construction and materials. There is, for instance, a startling absence of poorly upholstered fleece. Instead, LucyBalu’s products seem tasteful, well thought through, and solidly made. “We have the parameters of the cat, which are not discussable because if we just do nice looking products that don’t work for them, then it doesn’t make sense,” says Wahrenberger. “But we also want to offer a nice product for the human.”
