Material

Eunice Byun grew up behind the scenes of her parents' Korean restaurant in San Diego, absorbing food as a love language before she had words for it. She went on to build a career in luxury fashion -- Chanel, Valentino -- learning what it meant to design objects with intention, and then came back to the kitchen when her first daughter was born. She walked into her tiny NYC apartment kitchen one day and stopped. Every cabinet was full of unopened wedding registry gifts. One-offs from old roommates. Hand-me-downs from her parents. All of it well-intentioned, none of it loved. She called her friend Dave Nguyen, who had grown up with the same relationship to food and the same frustration, and they started asking a question nobody in the cookware industry seemed interested in: what would a kitchen look like if you only had the things you actually needed, and everything was beautiful? Material launched in 2018 around a radical premise for a cookware brand: sell fewer tools, made better. Nine core tools that cover almost every cooking scenario, each one designed for casual home cooks who sauté vegetables while FaceTiming their parents or reheat soup after a long day -- not chefs performing for an audience. The brand has since expanded into knives, cookware, ceramics, and the cutting board that somehow became an icon. Featured on The View, donated nearly $200,000 through their annual Kinder Kitchens campaign. Women-owned, AAPI co-founded, built from day one with community giving in their DNA. On a registry, Material is the category that solves the problem Eunice walked into that day -- a kitchen full of things you actually love, chosen with intention, built to last.