Design Night week, 28 September – 4 October, was a full one for us. We took the stage at a fashion show, hosted two evenings of conversation at the studio, and at the end of the week our cellulose fibre tote won the product design award BRUNO 2026.
DOM – Design Is in Fashion
On Monday, 28 September, Stella Soomlais was one of four brands in DOM – Design Is in Fashion, the Design Night show in Hangar 2-3 of the Põhjala factory. Mekoome, Kairi Getman and Hannes Rüütel were on stage the same evening.
The lead role in our show went to the Mild Librarian – one of the best-known bags to come out of our studio. The first ones were made in 2016, then under the name Go to the Library, and ten years on, some of them are still in everyday use – like Grete's.
That is also how we measure design: in wearers and generations, not in seasons. Every bag is made in our Telliskivi studio, carries its own number and the name of its maker, and stays maintainable and repairable decades from now. In Instagram you can watch the videos of the show.
In September we asked in our newsletter whether anyone with a light brown Mild Librarian at home would lend it to us for the show. Almost all of the backpacks on stage came from our community – thank you to everyone who trusted us with their bag!
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Thank you: Sander Mölder, ETA Tantsukool, Tartu Uus Teater, Liisi Taimre, Tiina Teemägi, Kati Ots, Aune Mark, Aili Aamisepp, Tõnu Runnel, the show team and the Design Night festival.
An evening with the architect of our shop
On Tuesday, 29 September, architect Margit Aule (LUMIA) was our guest at the studio shop. The new wing of Telliskivi Creative City is clad in reed – a traditional Northern European roofing material, here brought strikingly onto the façade. The evening centred on why reed, what sun and weather will do to it over the decades, and what building such a façade actually took.
Anu Samarüütel × Stella Soomlais
On Wednesday, 30 September, we launched our collaboration with artist Anu Samarüütel at the studio. Anu is an artist and fashion designer who studied at Central Saint Martins in London. Her work is marked by simple forms, symbols and motifs from Estonia's wild nature.
The collaboration produced bags, wrist straps and coasters. There is one of each piece – there will never be another exactly like it. The first pieces are now in our web shop: see the collection.
BRUNO 2026
The same evening DOM took the stage, the BRUNO 2026 exhibition opened, with our cellulose fibre tote among the works on show. On Friday, 2 October, the winners were announced at the Estonian Design Awards gala: our tote, designed by Stella Runnel and Henna Hintsanen, won the lifestyle product design category.
This time the award did not go to a leather piece, the material our studio has worked with most over the past 15 years, but to a bag made of a strong plant-based material – cellulose fibre, the same family of material used for the label on the back waistband of most jeans. The bag can go in the washing machine, and Stella has carried the first prototype every day all summer. Each bag is cut from a single sheet of material so that nothing is left over, and when a part wears out, that part is replaced, not the whole bag.
The tote is now available for pre-order.
DOM photos: Richard Gabriel Moritz