He strengthens and elevates Edmonton’s design community through the business that he owns and operates, his involvement in his field and his commitment to quality
Age: 36
Nick Kazakoff’s grandfather drove around town in the 1960s with a pink chesterfield strapped to his Cadillac to advertise his small furniture production and upholstery shop, Kazakoff says. “He was an old school entrepreneur, and he believed in quality.” So Kazakoff’s own interest in design and furniture-making is no surprise.
When he took a design elective at university, “I fell in love with it,” he says. Still, he didn’t think he’d end up owning a furniture company. “My business partner Brendan and I didn’t make a concerted push with Loop until a few years after we’d built the first.” He’s talking about the Loop Phone Booth, an elegant, glass-doored quiet booth for open-concept offices, where users can take video calls.
In 2015, he and Brendan Gallagher co-founded Onetwosix Design, a full-service industrial design and fabrication company.
“I share our design ethos and our Edmonton way of making things with leading companies and smaller organizations.” He says when the team at Google X in San Francisco discusses a top-secret project virtually, “they are probably sitting in one of our Loop Phone Booths.” Ditto, he says, for the team at the Centre for Autism Services Alberta in Edmonton when they need a quiet place to think about client support services. “We’ve delivered thousands of booths to organizations around the world, each a hundred per cent Edmonton made.”
Everything Onetwosix makes is built to last. “It’s simple: buy things you need and choose quality that lasts, from construction to aesthetics,” Kazakoff says. “Fix things if they’re broken instead of throwing them away, and source materials locally.”
He served on the board of MADE (Media Architecture Design Edmonton) and teaches industrial design at the U of A. He wants to make Edmonton a design epicentre, where people want to create an aesthetic difference. “I love this city and I am proud to use design to not only make it better, but to show it off.”
This article appears in the November-December 2026 issue of Edify
