HAY Mini Market Hits New York

Posted by oneal on August 13th, 2015

The Danish furniture company HAY has a loyal following in Europe but is virtually unknown in the United States. Think of it as the COS of couches: a brand that style insiders shop when they travel abroad and show off to their friends back home. What’s usually brought back from Copenhagen or Oslo is carry-on-size accessories, like HAY’s colorful trays, decorative textiles and stationery.

Starting last year, the company’s husband-and-wife founders, Rolf and Mette Hay, decided to gather those smaller housewares into a collection called HAY Mini Market. It was a hit when it debuted at the Milan Furniture Fair before it was sold at the department stores Selfridges in London and Le Bon Marché in Paris, and at the Tsutaya bookstore in Tokyo.

Now, HAY Mini Market is coming to New York, specifically to the MoMA Design Store in SoHo, which will turn part of its lower level into an outpost of cool Scandinavian design for four months, starting Monday.

The store will carry around 230 objects, from coat hangers and combs to pencil erasers and pillows, either designed by the Hays or sourced from designers whose work they admire. There is also a separate collection, Wrong for Hay, a collaboration with the London-based designer Sebastian Wrong that includes lighting, seating and kitchen accessories.

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Emmanuel Plat, the director of merchandising for the Museum of Modern Art, said that HAY’s inexpensive, well-designed, playful home goods and tchotchkes belong to the category of products you don’t need but want anyway.

“A lot of people, when they see the Mini Market for the first time, they just want to buy something,” Mr. Plat said. “It’s very pleasing.”

Mr. Plat had a similar reaction when he first encountered the collection last year in Milan. Although he wasn’t moved by any one piece (“They’re not timeless products that people are going to remember 50 years from now,” he said), the whole added up to something greater than its parts.

“Rolf and Mette organize by product categories and play with colors super well,” he said. “The success of the Mini Market is all about the merchandising.”

Perhaps that’s because Mette Hay, who handles the accessories side of the business (Rolf Hay designs the furniture), grew up working in her parents’ design store in Denmark. “Finding new things, new products, that’s always been my desire,” Ms. Hay said on the phone from Italy, where she and her husband were on vacation.

She added: “We have always seen HAY in between architecture and art and fashion. The Mini Market is more like fashion.”

For those in the design crowd who have encountered HAY Mini Market in Milan and elsewhere, Mr. Hay theorized, it was satisfying to see form and style brought to supermarket basics like dishwashing brushes. “It’s a strong design sense dealing with small categories and taking all objects serious,” he said.

HAY doesn’t have stores in North America, and its products are sold in only a few boutiques, like the Future Perfect in Manhattan. That may soon change. The couple are “extremely passionate” about expanding into North America, Mr. Hay said.

And as Mr. Plat reminded, the MoMA Design Store has helped introduce a beloved foreign brand before, as when Muji debuted there several years ago before opening stand-alone stores.

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