Project
Sobro
Identity
Stationery
Catalogue
2025
The brief
Sobro makes stools, side tables and benches from solid cork in a workshop outside Coruche, using the offcuts of bark harvested in the cork oak forests around it. Six people make about 2,000 pieces a year, most of them sold through design shops in Madrid, Paris and Copenhagen, under the shops’ own names. Buyers who loved a stool had no way to find the maker. Sobro wanted its name on its furniture, and a catalogue for the shops and its first trade fair, in Milan in April 2025.
The idea
Cork is the bark of a living tree, stripped by hand and grown back over nine years, and it shows its age in rings the way timber does. So the mark is three rings, printed in the dark green of a cork oak’s leaves on paper the colour of cork. A green tag is tied round every piece, so a stool carries the maker’s name, and the year its bark was stripped, to whoever buys it.
The pieces
An hourglass stool, a low side table, a bench and a family of plain stools, each turned or cut from pressed cork, light enough to carry in one hand and warm to sit on in winter.
From the forest
Each cork oak is stripped once every nine years, the year painted on its trunk. Sobro uses what the stopper makers can’t, offcuts pressed into blocks in its own workshop.
Paper
Cards on cork-coloured board, a green hang tag on every piece, and kraft boxes printed in the same green.
The catalogue
Thirty-two pages for shops and the Milan fair: one photograph and one line drawing per piece, with its size, its weight and the year its cork was harvested.
What changed
Sobro’s first stand in Milan was three stools, a bench and a stack of catalogues, and it came home with 41 new stockists. Shops now sell the furniture under Sobro’s name, and two of them asked for the tags to be left on in their windows.
Credits
Okapi: Tomás Reis (lead designer), Ana Pires (catalogue), Marta Lobo (copy)
Sobro: Manuel Carvalho (founder), José Pinto (workshop)
With: printed in Évora; photography by Rafael Costa in Coruche
