Interview with Dan Popa
Dan Popa is an ambitious and creative enterpreneur and designer. He sees opportunities for improvement everywhere.
Designer Interview
4 May 2021
I was always attracted by shaping things – be they events, situations, or objects, so I guess I always wanted to be a designer. As a professional designer, I am self-taught and never graduated any design school. My background as a designer I can say, starts in childhood, when I was always building and crafting objects for play or for practical purposes. I could say I became a professional when I started working with my company, in 2015, for developing the pieces of furniture I am producing and selling now.
I founded Leea Toys in 2015-2016, after being very enthusiastic about what I was creating in my backyard for my little giirl Leea. Encouraged by friends and family, I put all my energy into this absolutely new and unknown domain for me – kids furniture, starting from scratch. I opened a workshop and started selling locally online. I was amazed by the results, the warm and enthusiastic feedback from clients, and especially by the fact that the buyers were highly educated people , especially in the fields of architecture, design, child care and child education. In 2017 I listed my products on marketplaces offering them to the European Union market and to my surprise, I got the same enthusiasm from there too. Since then, I was constantly improving my work and growing the sales, reaching the 1M Eur salles figure in 2020, selling more than 5000 units, and running a 10 workers mini factory.
Design for me is purposefully giving meaningful, beautiful and new shape to things. I think it is an ancestral achievement of humans, since they started building tools, or even earlier, since they started knowingly and consciously shaping a situation in their advantage. I think there is a difference between how a bird designs its nest and how a human designs its tools. In my opinion, consciousness, planning, pre-determined purpose and beauty are inseparable from design.
My design is practical and minimalistic. Mostly I like to improve things in a practical manner, and I am fascinated and like to work with mechanisms. Aesthetics comes second, but it is also important.
I guess it would be an aerodynamic object, maybe a boomerang, or a high speed vehicle
a multifunction piece of furniture called The Toddler Station
at 3AM when I wake up with the solution I could not grasp one evening before :)))
practicality and shape for a purpose
I feel a state of flow and focus I can not acheive otherwise.
I feel like coming home from a long trip. But I never unpack.
I think its the appreciation it gets from users
Is it useful? Is it new/unseen before? Is it beautiful? Does it surprise me? Does it have a bit of genius?
The responsibility is huge. Everything starts with design. It actually is the way we shape our world. We have grown so powerful that our impact on the planet we live on is no longer insignificant. We should consider the way our planet will look like in the future as a design project.
Design has the huge task to ensure and secure our future. It is a way of controlling reality and the only way to get us out of the way of randomness