Page 31 - 07_Sept-2025

AFFORDABLE STUDIOS. HANDS-ON TRAINING.
AN ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET. THE TALENT FOR
A FLOURISHING DESIGN INDUSTRY IS HERE — BUT
IS THE DEMAND?
Nick Kazakoff and Brendan Gallagher
became friends during their second year
in the Industrial Design program at the
University of Alberta. United by a shared
passion for product design and hands-on
prototyping, they teamed up on several
school projects — though at the time, they
had no intention of starting a business
together. After finishing the four-year
program in 2013, they went to work for
separate companies — Kazakoff designing
cranes and heavy machinery, and Gallagher
designing medical equipment.
In their off hours though, they’d still hang out in Gallagher’s
residential garage on 126th Street, designing and building
furniture. They participated in contests and competitions —
including the Edmonton Outdoor Furniture competition, a
part of Edmonton Design Week — and eventually invested in a
3D printer and a small computer numerical control machine,
which gave them the opportunity to learn some of the basic
programming involved in manufacturing. It also helped them
manufacture the Selkirk table, a sleek design made of solid
hardwood and powder-coated metal legs.
They sold the popular design to residential clients, and in
2015, they decided to submit one of their tables to Nuit Blanche,
the now-defunct art and design festival. That move, paired with
the attention Gallagher and Kazakoff had started to garner,
prompted the pair to incorporate as Onetwosix Design. Within
six months, the two designers had quit their day jobs.
Ten years later, Onetwosix has moved out of Gallagher’s
garage into a dedicated studio and manufacturing space with
24 full-time employees in Edmonton. As Kazakoff tells it, their
success is owed to a passionate commitment to innovative
and functional design amongst the whole team and the city they
call home.
Edmonton has a strong track record of producing top-tier
industrial designers, many of them graduates of the U of A’s
renowned program, which has long emphasized both conceptual
thinking and practical design skills. This, Kazakoff says, gives
students not only the ability to imagine new things, but also a
concrete understanding of how to actually make them — a
skill that’s becoming increasingly rare as similar post-secondary
programs shift further toward theory over practice. “It’s one of
the only programs that still focuses on teaching students the
fundamentals of design for manufacturing,” he says.
Complemented by the city’s robust manufacturing culture,
Edmonton has been fertile ground for scores of talent like
designer Geof Lilge, who has built such companies as Pure Design,
On Our Table and Division Twelve; Jordan Tomnuk, the founder of
the contemporary lighting company Tomnuk Design; Zoë Mowat,
whose eponymous brand of furniture and home goods has
garnered international acclaim; the modern furniture company
Izm, whose designs have repeatedly been named Interior Design
Magazine’s Best of the Year; and the four founders of Loyal Loot,
the design company famous for their playful wooden bowls.
Like many designers in the city, Onetwosix embraces
Edmonton’s blue-collar roots, moving from research to prototype
as fast as possible. While acknowledging the importance of
conceptual design, Kazakoff says designers often spend too
much time on small details rather than prototyping. Onetwosix
would rather get to the shop sooner rather than later. This,
they believe, helps avoid pitfalls like when materials don’t
work as anticipated. “We’ve found it has helped get products
to market quickly.”
And that they have done. Their Loop Phone Booth, originally
designed in 2015 to create private spaces for a local client’s
open-concept office, has been sold to the headquarters of
Disney, Google and Pokémon. Onetwosix’s success signals the
potential for creatives in Edmonton and other cities often
overlooked by the design world — but it’s also a reminder of
the ongoing challenges of building a design career far from
established hubs.
AT A BASIC LEVEL, THE ESSENCE OF MANUFACTURING
starts with a physical space — and Edmonton has a lot of
vacant spaces, says Geof Lilge.
The furniture designer and U of A graduate has been syn-
onymous with Edmonton in the design world since cofounding
his first business, Pure Design, right out of school in the early
1990s. “We set up our own shop, started making things, and
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