Studio OOOMS is run by Guido Ooms and Karin van Lieshout. Since 2017 the studio is designing and making kitchen knives, all by hand.
The fans of their knives are both cooking professionals as well as home chefs from all around the world.
A complementary couple…
Guido and Karin are two designers that have completely different personalities; therefore as a team they complement each other like yin and yang. They live in a small southern village called Geldrop with a workshop and office in their own backyard.
Guido loves to discover the past and create new things. He has always been interested in products that lost their function, as where he sees new possibilities for these leftovers. Going to metal dumps and thrift stores are things he loves to do. Guido needs to constantly invent, create and make. With leftover materials he will build new machines and tools to make sure his ideas will come to existence.
Karin loves to structure, nit-pick and plan ahead. This is evident in both her passion for cooking and the work she does at OOOMS. Creating a beautiful knife has a lot of similarities to creating a tasty meal. For a knife you need ingredients such as metal and wood and epoxy. For a meal you might use beetroot, honey and goat-cheese, but in the end with both processes it is all about using the ingredients in the right ratio. Her no nonsense approach and critical eye for detail is sometimes quite annoying for Guido but at the same time much appreciated.
Next to knives…
Before they fell in love with making knives, studio OOOMS created several successful interior products, such as Wooden USB Sticks, Wineglass Lamps, Puzzleboards, Goldplated Staples, Ceramic Milkmaids, Silhouette Plants, Solar Birdhouses, a Daisy Necklace, Dutch Romans, an Anti Gravity Machine and many other quirky designs.
A selection of their clients are Adidas, Hugo Boss, Skanska, Pernod, Guggenheim Berlin, Rossana Orlandi, 3M, Bosch & Siemens, Queen Máxima of the Netherlands.
Both Guido and Karin are tutors at Design Academy Eindhoven and University of the Arts Utrecht. Additional to teaching and managing studio OOOMS, Guido and Karin love to travel while giving workshops about up-cycling materials in connection to design. When they are invited to conduct a workshop abroad in countries like Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia and Singapore, they especially enjoy the experiences of having an intense contact with the people who live there.
The designs of Guido and Karin are available through their webshop. You can be the owner of a unique hand made kitchen knife with just a few clicks. If you would like to actually hold a knife before making the right decision, you are always welcome to visit the studio. Coffee will be ready!