ABOUT US
What are we doing?
What does "noos" mean?
The origin of the word noos comes from Ancient Greece. Noos is the rational part of one’s inner self; hence it is often translated “mind,” but it is also a uniting or integrating force between emotions and life-force and can often have the meaning of “sense” as in “good sense.”
The Story
We started making things from scrap leather pieces we found from a friend and enjoyed the process of making things. While finding things to make for ourselves there was a strong urge to move away from what was obvious so we started exploring what was out there.
We came across a few items made by enlacing leather. Intrigued by the technique we decided to give it a try. After a few tries, we managed to create something that would hold indefinitely. During this time, we decided to stop eating meat and we gradually stopped. We knew we would not use genuine leather anymore so we started to search for alternatives.
We found cork fabric first, we had our samples but we had no idea what it was made of so we went to Portugal to see for ourselves. Most of what we found was made of plastic with a little bit of cork in it. We did find truly sustainable cork fabric as well. But structurally it didn’t satisfy our needs. So, we moved on.
After a while we came across this coconut leather and had our first tries with it. We knew that this material would be with us for the long run. It was so natural that we couldn’t put any unsustainable thing on it.
We wanted to make our products as affordable as possible so we used laser cutting with its high precision, it saved us time. Yet we needed the most precise and adaptable tools of the ancient times, our hands, for the best assembly of our products.
MATERIALS
When choosing materials and designing the products we are very careful to make rational choices that takes into consideration of the well being of nature as well as people.
Coconut Leather Malai
Fastener
PRODUCTION
When approaching production, we do our best to look at every level of interaction involved in making a product. Here you can find out our processes from design to production.
Design
We have made a lot of trial and error in order to understand the capabilities of the enlacing technique and we keep pushing its limits. We’re creating a design arsenal which we can implement into future designs. This way we also increase predictability when creating custom designs. Feel free to contact us about your design needs.
While designing our products we keep user experience as the core value while balancing functionality and aesthetics. We keep exploring new ways to approach design.
Prototyping
Here is a short clip showing some of the steps of our prototyping process.
Production
Enlacing technique requires a lot of fine details when it comes to the cutting stage of our production. Laser cutting makes our production accurate and fast, keeping the price of our products down while maintaining quality. We use computer generated nesting to help us minimize wastage.
The main part of the production from edge burnishing to enlacing the products together is done by hand.
FAQ
Coconut leather is made from a type of bacterial cellulose in other words a kind of paper made by bacteria. During the production process trees aren’t damaged. Production is made from coconut water which is an industrial waste. You might be thinking how can the coconut water be an industrial waste. Don’t worry it’s not the same coconut water which can be drunk as a beverage. Beverage coconut water is made from tender coconut, coconut leather is made from brown coconut’s water which is salty, acidic and bad for the environment.
It is a technique where we enlace the material to itself not needing to stitch it with additional threads. This way the product’s life is the same with the material’s life. As we’ve tested different materials with this technique, the enlaced part is the last to break down.
We made sure that they don’t come apart on their own or with help of the forces applied during everyday use. You must intentionally spend time to take them apart, even then it is not easy. Even though with some of our products you can take them apart and put them back together again, we don’t recommend this since you can damage the material in the process.
We use YKK products as fastener because of their high quality and sustainable conscious production process. The fasteners are made from brass and are recyclable.
We use coconut leather Malai as the main material. It’s a new kind of sustainable vegan leather made of bacterial cellulose using coconut water waste. It’s toxic free and colored with natural dyes, and can be composted in 90 days in a home compost.