Berlin-based Open Funk is tackling throwaway culture with a blender that's as easy to fix as to replace.
The idea for Open Funk was born in 2018, when Anca met his cofounder, design engineer Ken Rostand, during a circular-economy event in Berlin. Aside from their shared interest in sustainable supply chains, they realized they had something else in common—both of them had broken blenders that they found impossible to repair. Seeing a pattern, they dug deeper.
“We asked on a Facebook group for broken mixers from people—and we just got flooded with requests,” says Anca. They went around Berlin collecting the damaged blenders, disassembled them, and determined why they weren’t working. Those discoveries informed the design process behind Open Funk’s first product: the re:Mix blender. The small box-blender is almost like a puzzle, with different pieces slotting together—just as easy to make as it is to take apart.
One of the major differences between re:Mix and other blenders is that it is open source, meaning that anyone can find the blueprints for how to build one online. The rationale behind that is to make it as easy as possible for people to replace any part that might break. No matter how simple you make it for a layman to take their tools to a product, if they can’t source a replacement part, the task becomes impossible.
Using widely available parts is another important part of the design. The knob, for example, is standardized for music equipment, and it’s possible to use your own glass jars from the supermarket with the blender, as long as the opening is the correct diameter. Instead of using glue to bind parts together, they opted for screws. “Once you glue a product, you cannot disassemble it anymore, and it's just a waste of materials,” says Anca.
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