Is Taking Risks The Best Way to Succeed In The Design Industry?

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True design stars rarely take the traditional path when it comes to their career. With that amount of talent, who needs a well worn career track when you can just create your own?

Adelaide’s Tiff Manuell is no different – at the age of 26 she went straight from finishing her degree in fashion design at Melbourne’s RMIT to creating a product design business. Known as “Happy House”, her bright designs found fame around the globe.

While that would be success enough for most designers, Manuell wanted to push herself further into new areas. She was tired of sitting at her computer, wanting to use her hands for more than clicking on a mouse. What she wanted was to truly connect with her passion for every aspect of creativity – getting her hands messy with paint, fabric and thread.

As Manuell says: “I gave myself an opportunity to create with freedom and I think that’s where young designers create the best.” For her, this is where true creativity and design merge.

Her opportunity came “three years ago with one bag I made for a girlfriend” – an opportunity to create the best that opened a whole new path of creativity.

Manuell’s one-off gift to her friend has spawned a design range. Manuell says she’s gone from one bag to “up to 22,000 bags we’ve made by hand out of this small studio!”

“We hand paint all of our individual canvasses and then cut them into handbags, clutches and neck pieces”, she says. The use of hand painted canvasses makes for more than a unique range – it means each product is one of a kind and part of a truly limited run.

Her individual approach also means Manuell doesn’t have to repeat designs and can truly revel in her creativity, building a business through amazing work rather than dry strategy. Manuell told the Design Files “I paint every day now which is the most amazing job. Job implies work, but it never really feels like work! The way the business has unfolded feels like it’s been a creative awakening, I just love making these products!”

Manuell describes her wearable art simply: “We set a colour palette, start throwing paint onto a canvas whether the canvas is hung on the wall or laying on the table”. From there, they are cut and hand stitched into an array of bright accessories and jewelry.

A visit to her Unley, Adelaide studio shows how she keeps her work fresh. Her painting is based on instinct and balanced precision, without the anchor of planning weighing everything down. She just knows which paint to use and where.

There’s a sense of colourful alchemy at play with Manuell’s work – she can take ordinary paint and just mysteriously transforms them with rich balance. While so much of it is based on years of experience and experimentation, you get the feeling Manuell just already has this riot of colour within and simply waits for the right spark of inspiration to let them stream out.

Naturally, Manuell says it simply, saying she “gets a bit of inspiration out and about” by watching “the street scenes”. Instead of looking for graphic elements, she looks for colour to “absorb” and “draw”.

Her advice for inspiration and creative business sound like one and the same: “be inspired by the unexpected, which is just out there in front of you”.

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