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Tom Chapman, the co-founder of MatchesFashion, has a friend who throws what he deems the best pizza parties in America. So when this friend’s birthday came around, the entrepreneur knew what to give him: a hand-forged Ben Bodman pizza wheel made with Damascus steel. “The best pizza cutter for the best pizza-maker,” he tells me when we chat in Chapman’s hometown of London. This is Chapman’s philosophy when it comes to gifting—you have to know the person, and you have to think hard about what will make them very happy. But finding the thing shouldn’t be so hard. Sources for “smalls,” those items that are essential to turn a house into a home, can be maddeningly decentralized.
In the short year since it launched in December 2022, Abask—the name comes from the idea of luxuriating in the sun—has become one of the most delightful (and efficient) places to source items from 70 different countries. You can select something and receive it on your doorstep two days later, anywhere in the world. “It s creating the fashion experience that everyone is used to now online, and doing it with design,” says Chapman.
This November, Chapman and his co-founder Nicolas Pickaerts ventured into a more tangible space at the Salon Art + Design in Manhattan, which also served as the launchpad for 60 entirely new products, produced by and for Abask and available online after the fair. For the display, Chapman and his collaborators shipped in some 600 items, he tells me, sipping water from an elegantly off-kilter tumbler made by a glass company run by the daughters of Venetian glass artist Massimo Micheluzzi. (The typical Salon display, which admittedly often includes larger-scale furniture, might have some 20 items.)
The new offerings range from a one-of-a-kind Alexander Kirkeby hand-blown candelabra that looks like something Dr. Seuss might have designed if he worked in sparkling crystal to a jewelry box from Brazilian artist Silvia Furmanovich inspired by her travels through Uzbekistan to hand-painted crystal stemware from the Bavarian glassmakers Theresienthal—onetime favorites of the Russian tsars.
With all his delight in the colors and texture of his items, I am curious if he desires to set up a more permanent space where people can judge the heft of the pizza knives and delicacy of the drinkware carafes for themselves. He demurs, but doesn’t reject the possibility. “Retail is in my blood,” he tells me, “I just want to put myself in front of people and understand what they are engaging with.”
Salon Art + Design, takes place at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City from November 9 - 13, 2023.
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