Your Next Decor Purchase Might Be Coming From a 3D Printer

By Abigail Glasgow

When I thought of the wavy Wooj lamps that seemed to be all over my Instagram feed this past year, I never would have guessed that the man behind them was a former programmer who became a designer-woodworker and started the brand in his closet. As I spoke with Sean Kim on Google Hangouts, I wanted to pour a beer and talk shop as he showed me around the team’s new design studio, 3D printers, and wires foreign to my non-technological brain scattered throughout. I assumed that a studio founder whose product packaging can biodegrade when put under water would be, perhaps, inaccessible in dialogue, but Sean was just the opposite. His down-to-earth demeanor made me excited to learn about how exactly the terms CNC router and knife rack could fit into the same sentence.

The company’s name is a shortened version of Sean’s Korean name, Woojin, which has been his nickname amongst close friends for many years. At 31, Sean only recently committed to Wooj full-time this summer. So far, his Brooklyn-based studio, whose manufacturing is selective, ecological, and made possible by robotics, has produced Wooj’s popular lamps alongside knife racks and turbine clocks.

This month, the brand will have even more products dropping, including a new line of clocks in three different styles, candles designed with Nlumec, and, down the line, a ceramic plant vase. I sat down with Sean to discuss how he navigates the friction between affordability and sustainability, how he permeated the design world in the first place, and how the hell 3D printing actually works.

A headshot of Wooj founder and owner, Sean Kim.

The wavy lamp proudly on display in a home.

CLEVER: So, how exactly did you get here?

Sean Kim: In undergrad, I was learning how to code and got really into building apps. I moved to San Francisco and worked as a software engineer for a while, but in doing digital work it became apparent to me that I was actually more interested in the physical. I was reacting to being in an app-driven world. I needed to touch something and not be on the computer all the time.

I always had an interest in design and a fascination with objects around me. I felt very affected by them, and wanted to know their background. How is this made? Where did it come from? Why are we making a million units of this? This thinking would interrupt my day to day. And so I wanted to have some sort of role in participating in the material culture of things. If I was going to have these criticisms as it pertained to object culture, I wanted to validate what was in my head—which required me to have more knowledge about design and more knowledge about system manufacturing.

How did you hone in on the type of design you wanted to pursue?

At the time, woodworking was my outlet for making physical things. I was fortunate because there’s a fairly big maker community in the Bay Area, but at a certain point, it didn’t feel sufficient to me. So I ended up applying to grad school with a couple of things under my belt—a crazy web bot and a CNC router, which is a spinning tool that cuts through wood like you see on our knife rack. I was creating intricate designs with these tools for my portfolio, and I got accepted into Pratt where they kind of throw you into the deep end. In the first year you’re learning how to draw, how to make things out of clay, how to 3D model.

A corner of 3D printers set up in the Wooj studio.

How did you come up with the concept for Wooj?

I started actively using a 3D printer for prototyping. I didn’t pay that much money for the machine, and yet it had the ability to produce all of this stuff. Once I got to my second year, we had what all the students called a Kickstarter class. Not everyone actually launches a campaign, but I really wanted to. I wanted to use the CNC machine to make our wavy knife racks. That’s where they came into fruition, and the launch was successful. I bought a domain, I had a logo. The lamps came to be in the summer before my last year.

I designed the Wooj lamp as part of a class where I was fixing this broken lamp. Everything started taking off, which was a little bit difficult because I was getting all these orders for lamps while trying to finish my thesis, and working another part-time job. It was pretty gnarly.

Why do you think your design and products resonate with so many people?

I think it’s a combination of things. First, I think the design is pretty novel. I haven’t seen anything like it. But the price and the story are what really communicate with our audience. With small boutique design companies, you quickly start getting into thousands of dollars when it comes to price point. Comparatively, we’re very accessible, which is obviously tied to the method of production we’re using with our 3D printers.

And in terms of our story, I wanted us to present as what we were: a tiny, closet company. Literally we started in a closet. We’re anti-opulence here. We are self producing and we’re upfront about what we are—we’re not a direct-to-consumer-y brand. We wanted to be honest, and I think a lot of people have seen that.

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A wavy knife rack from Wooj.

I think someone like you who came from outside the design world, and then made your way in, can open more doors and allow different types of people to get their hands on quality design.

There’s a lot of gatekeeping in the design community—someone needs to let you in, or you need to find a manufacturer. We bypassed that, and that’s the promise of 3D printing. It was very possible to be self-funded, which is not typical. Traditionally, either your products have to be super expensive or you have to work with a big manufacturer. And there are trade-offs with that process, and you lose control over how something is made. So I think that working alone could be encouraging to many other small design firms or people who are trying to have an impact in the material sense. Don’t go through the institution, start something small.

Where do you find inspiration for your pieces?

Rarely do I ever have a sketch or a specific idea of where I think a prototype is going to land before the process starts. I’m throwing a bunch of things at the wall, and then some of them will stick. I have to think about designs that will print, of course. For the lamps, that means a round geometry with structure, which we achieve through their pleated, ridged edges. But ultimately I feel like the designs look best when they feel the most naturalistic. I like to find organic phenomena and attempt to capture them through printed structure. Like our pleat lamp, which looks like a folded tablecloth.

What products or collaborations are you currently working on?

We’re about to release a new line of clocks, launching with three different styles. We also have a candle collaboration with Nlumec, similar to the wavy lamp. They do all of these maximalist, crazy candles, made with ethically sourced beeswax. They’ve got a very wild look to them, and I think their design and the way they’re made really fit with what we’re doing.

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The Wooj lamps on a decorative tablescape display.

How exactly do you go about printing your lamps, clocks, and the molds for these candles?

There are several techniques when it comes to our 3D printing. With the candle, for instance, we’re using this high-resolution type that’s much slower and messier than what we use for lamp production. But it makes sense to use it when we’re making molds, because you make one mold for multiple candles. The molds we print are flexible to all kinds of materials: Wax, ceramic, etc.

And then when we print lamps, it’s basically as if you were to draw a circle on a piece of paper with a hot glue gun. Then you’d stack another circle on top of it, and continue to go up a centimeter with the glue gun until you had a cylinder. With the lamp, the hot glue is this filament, which is just a spool of a corn-based bioplastic in our case. The concept of 3D printing is a computer dictating—through a motor—where that hot glue, or the filaments, go. You print layer by layer. When we make the knife racks or the clocks, it’s a subtractive method that chips away material from a block of wood.

You’ve previously mentioned how this process is both affordable and sustainable, but there’s certainly a tension between price point and ethically made products. How do you go about navigating that?

We have to be very cognizant of that tension. We want to make things more affordable and more accessible, but we also don’t necessarily want to make a million of something. Part of being a creator that values sustainability and accessibility is setting reasonable scope limitations that help the team make a living and that are flexible as the moving target changes. But I think that is the tension that anybody in any creative field under capitalism has to deal with. What do you compromise, or do you have to at all? I don’t know if I have the answer.