A small studio in South Bombay, designing the desk back for the 9-to-5.

Sobopad started one Sunday at a chai stall in Colaba, where the three of us did the math on the back of a napkin. Forty-five working years, eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year. Thirty percent of your life. Same as sleep. More than family, more than friends.

And what does this thirty percent look like, for most of the world? A laminated desk. A cracked chair. A leaky tiffin. A water bottle from a giveaway in 2019. A backpack designed by someone in Stockholm who has never carried two laptops in a Mumbai local. The people who run the day — salaried, EMI-paying, kid-dropping-at-school, parents-calling people — have decided their desk should be the most miserable square metre in their day.

This is the part that bothered us. So we started a studio. One room in South Bombay, three of us, a kettle, and a long list of things we wished existed for people like us.

What we make

We design every Sobopad piece ourselves — the form, the function, the small details you only notice in week three. The desk mat that knows where your hand wants to rest. The backpack that carries two laptops and a tiffin without complaining. The hourglass that says, without words, that the next forty-five minutes are taken. Each piece is crafted with care, in partnership with the best manufacturers we could find, and signed off only when one of us would happily put it on our own desk for the next ten years.

What we are trying to fix

Make the desk more happening — objects nice enough that a colleague asks where it's from. Make it more focused — tools that protect attention instead of stealing it. Make it more organised — one thing that does the job of three. We are not designing for a magazine. We are designing for the desk you actually sit at, in Mumbai or Manchester or Manila.

What we don't do

We don't release a new product every Tuesday. We don't run sales for sales' sake. We don't ship in plastic, and we won't print on something just to fill a page. Thirty percent of your life is too much to spend at a sad desk. We are fixing that, one object at a time.