Karim Rashid

is a prominent and prolific industrial designer whose visionary and award-winning art has transformed the international modern design world. Karim Rashid shares an early memory of participating in a drawing competition while travelling aboard the ship that brought his family to Canada from England. Born in Cairo, Egypt and raised in Toronto, Canada, Karim Rashid is one of the most renowned industrial designers in the world. He studied industrial design at Carleton University in Ottawa and completed his graduate studies in Naples, Italy. He has created over 4,000 designs and has won more than 300 accolades including the Red Dot Award, Chicago Athenaeum Good Design Award, I.D. Annual Design Review, and IDSA International Design Excellence Award. One of his most iconic creations is the Umbra Garbo garbage can, which has been exhibited in several museums. Through his revolutionary design philosophy, Rashid has shaped and challenged the art and design world with remarkable designs accessible to the public in their everyday lives. Karim Rashid explains how his father, a set designer and furniture maker, fostered his creativity th... Karim Rashid explains how he first became interested in the field of industrial design. Karim Rashid discusses how his training in Italy influenced his understanding of global design and t... Karim Rashid talks about designing “Garbo,” a garbage can he created for his first contract with Umb... Karim Rashid: And then I contacted Umbra because I was going to Toronto to visit my family. And I thought, "Maybe they'll work with me." I met Paul Rowan and Les Mandelbaum, the owners. They were very nice and gave me a brief, and the brief was to design some wastepaper baskets. So I went back to New York, drew hundreds of wastepaper baskets. You know, made models and sent them all the stuff. They got back to me and they liked three or four of them. I went up to Toronto. We made models of them. And then they decided to show three of the models in housewares show in Chicago. So I flew to Chicago with them. They put them in a backroom to only show their big clients. The big box stores like Bed Bath & Beyond, Staples. They would go in and they kind of looked at them and said, "We're going to release this next year." But before they wanted to get feedback because the tooling to make a can like that, which a lot of people don't know, this may be $100,000. Before they want to invest, they want to get sense of... Anyway, the can "Garbo", that I designed was basically vetoed by all the buyers. None of them bought. And Les Mendelbaum was sitting in the booth in Chicago, and he turned to me, "You know, I don't know. They just don't... They think it's too wild, or too progressive." I'm like, "It's just a garbage can. Come on." It's like a big vase, you know? It can be anything, right? This was smart, it was priced well, and the material was gonna be right on. Everything was like really figured out. I made the handles so you wouldn't touch the garbage with your hand. I made a round bottom inside so the coffee wouldn't get caught, you know, or liquids wouldn't get caught. And Les just turned to me and said, "You know, I have confidence in that can. We're going to do it anyway." In fact, I just told him this story. I saw him two weeks ago. And he forgot this story. Basically, companies who have done radical things in this world, they do it on intuition, not on focus groups, marketing and all this. I'm up against this perpetually with every company I work for. So much like decision making. But that's what's nice about working with startups or small companies. This is going back to Italian design. All those companies are just owned by a couple. And they make the decisions. That's why we see things go to market that are interesting. Anyway, and that's how I started with Umbra. That was about 1993, 1994. The can came out in 95 on the market. I remember being so proud, walking through Bed Bath & Beyond seeing a window of the