Core Home: Beyond Bamboo

Core Home is a seven-year-old company that has branched out in several different directions within kitchenwares to meet the needs of diverse retailers and customers alike. From its original bamboo products to colorful silicones, Core Home is seeking to become a mainstay in the kitchen, whether the look is modern and fashion forward or has a vintage feeling.

Since its establishment in 2008 with Core Bamboo, a line focused on bamboo kitchen products, Core Home has steadily increased its offerings to include Core Acacia, Core Root Crafts, Core Mango Wood and Core Kitchen. Samba is the company’s line of teak wood products, and Medici is an olive wood brand. Beginning with Core Bamboo, the company was able to stand out from traditional wooden kitchen products by introducing woven, spun and crushed bamboo, and then adding color to make the pieces pop.

With wood materials firmly covered, Core Kitchen began a few years ago to play on other popular materials in the kitchen. The Core Kitchen brand is aimed at Millennials with its colorful range of silicone tools, combinations of silicone and bamboo tools or silicone and metal tools, knives, glass prep boards, cast iron accessories and ceramic utensil crocks.

“One of the things that we’ve been pleasantly surprised by with the launch of that brand is that it continues to evolve. Given our depth of product range, as well as the constant innovation and the quick to market approach that our team has really been stellar at, it’s no longer just appealing to Millennials,” says Alan Bram, Core Home President. “We’re finding young customers making their first purchases of kitchen tools and gadgets are drawn to the colors, the textures or the materials. It appeals to everyone, all the way up to my grandmother, who’s one of my biggest fans, and she runs one of the most traditional kitchens you’re ever going to find. I think silicone in the past was done very marketplace, and very standard and just for function. I think what we’ve done is added a lot of fashion and color, as well as really great value for the price point.”

For product creation, Core Home approaches each brand as having its own identity while also maintaining a vision of who the end user is. For instance, the Medici brand utilizes olive wood, so products for this line take on an old world feeling through more traditional shapes. Function is also a key consideration, with a goal for the pieces to be stylish enough to become part of tabletop and kitchen décor.

“Each division has its own identity and its own customer in mind. There are many retailers that sell to different aesthetics, and we make sure that the merchandise reflects that,” says Bram. “On average, we’ve been creating over 100 new SKUs per month, just between the variety of colors and styles and finishes that we’re able to accomplish, and we’ve just gotten started.”

Bram points out that current range of Core Home products reflect current kitchenware trends. Core Kitchen, of course, covers the colorful kitchen tools trend. Core Bamboo plays on the trend of mixed materials that offer modernity and an organic look through the combination of elements like a bamboo serving tray with minimal stainless steel handles, for example, or a bamboo rolling pin with bright magenta silicone hand grips. Bamboo and ceramic serving pieces have been a mainstay of Core Bamboo since the beginning and are another iteration of the mixed materials trend.

Materials that take on different textures is another area where Bram sees Core Home products reflecting industry trends. From current offerings of textured silicones, woods and ceramics, the company is seeking to expand on this area with laser engravings for wood pieces that are currently in the pipeline to hit shelves in the fourth quarter.

Another area where Core Home is looking to the future is the realm of kitchen storage solutions. The company has already begun to tackle this space, but seeks to further expand on both food storage and organizing pieces for the kitchen that can be done across the multitude of materials that Core Home produces.

“The next big focus for us, and it’s been a focus for the last year or so, has been the storage and organization area. That covers everything from food storage to kitchen organization to general storage and maintenance within your drawers and cabinets,” says Bram. “We think of it as a big place for us to play across all the materials, from woods to plastics, that can add that same sense of function and style that we bring to the marketplace. As our staff continues to grow, we try to keep a kind of close upstart mentality throughout our work ethic, and continue to always bring a lot of innovation and ingenuity to new products on a constant basis.”

This story was originally published in the July 2015 issue of Kitchenware News, a publication of Oser Communications Group.