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A Day in the Life of Vim & Vigor

Vim & Vigor is a New York City-based design firm established in 2009 by Aaron Tsui and Irina Kozlovskaya, who met at RISD. Their award-winning designs include Stella, a reading light for Barnes and Noble’s NOOK, which won the Red Dot award and Bento, a steamer and portable lunchbox, which was a finalist in the Spark Concept Design awards. Their newest product, the SF Lamp, employ a unique fabrication process to bring a new twist to traditional spun metal. Most spun metal parts are symmetrical in shape, but the SF is not. Instead, the lampshade appears to be a typical symmetrical shape when viewed from one angle, and entirely differently when viewed from another. This month’s Designer Dailies takes us through one of Tsui and Kozlovskaya’s average working days – right before ICFF 2012, which was where we first took note of their designs.

9:00 AM: Cycling to work. Our team loves to be active, most days we ride our bikes to work from various locations in the five boroughs.

10:00 AM: Lamp parts arrive at our office. The blank spun pieces for our SF lamp collection arrive at the office. We are excited to begin the finishing work in the afternoon!

12:00 PM: Working lunch. We head to the park for lunch, and spend some time discussing next steps in the lamp construction, while enjoying the sun.

1:00 PM: Laying out ICFF booth. We have been honored with the ICFF Studio award, and are preparing our lights for the show. We have mocked up the booth in our office.

4:00 PM: Verifying lamp CAD. Before doing any work on the lamp prototypes, we confirm the size and location of the cuts we plan to start in the afternoon.

6:00 PM: Gallery hopping. We take a quick dinner break and spend some time to gallery hop in our neighborhood. We catch a great Brancusi photo exhibit at the Bruce Silverstein gallery.

7:30 PM: Working on cuts for the lamps. Senior designer Sofia Kim spends some time experimenting with various cut shapes and sizes. She runs her ideas by Aaron.

8:00 PM: Cut designs are finalized. Cuts are finalized and we are ready to create the show pieces!

Marni Elyse Katz is a Contributing Editor at Design Milk. She lives in Boston where she contributes regularly to local publications and writes her own interior design blog, StyleCarrot.