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OVERVIEW

The Field Company skillet was born out of a desire of two brothers to create cookware with the craftsmanship of vintage skillets and to make them here in the USA. We liked the challenge of how to try and improve on something so simple and we believed in the company’s vision, so we invested in the project and got on board for the ride.

Field Company

WHAT WE DID

Industrial Design, Manufacturing Liaison

DESIGN TEAM

Stuart Harvey Lee, Jochen Schaepers, James Kwon, Juan Jimenez, Troy Yoshimoto

work designed by Prime Studio

BRIEF

Bring Vintage Back

Quite simply the question that the Muscarella brothers had was “Why don’t they make them like they used to?"


Field Company came to Prime Studio for our help in solving that question and our guidance in how to go about creating a product and a brand from scratch. In addition to our skills as designers, they recognized that we bring a huge amount of experience in launching products in a variety of categories and they knew they’d need some ‘hand-holding’ along the way.


Once they found out we were avid cooks and that our founder, Stuart, started his career as an mechanical engineer in a UK steelworks there was no turning back.

PROCESS

Getting the Ingredients Right

The first thing on our agenda was to visit the Foundry and Machinists to talk shop. We wanted to make sure that whatever we designed could be manufactured consistently and efficiently. The clients had spent over a year researching vintage skillets, metallurgy, seasoning techniques etc., so we also got a deep knowledge dump from them. And of course, we did lots of cooking in vintage cast iron. Research can be a lot of fun sometimes.

Prime_studio_harrys_analysis.jpg

We walked into Prime having never made a physical product—but having extremely strong opinions on what we were trying to create with the Field Skillet. Prime helped us refine our ideas, guided us, pushed back and really functioned like an extension of our team. They also had incredible patience and equally high standards—we couldn't have been luckier to have worked with them.

CHRIS MUSCARELLA

FOUNDER, FIELD COMPANY

Video by The Culinary Fanatic

The actual design process was pretty straightforward. Sketches and renders led to handcarved foam models before we turned to CAD to check weight, proportions and run 3D printed prototypes. From an aesthetic perspective we wanted to be respectful to the traditions of cast iron but to modernize (for example with longer handles) where appropriate.