Thirty percent of your life is in this chair. Look at the chair.
Listen, I'll be straight with you.
If you are a 9-to-5 type — and most of the working world is, the trains in Bombay don't run at 11 am for nothing, the metro in Manila doesn't either — you spend roughly thirty percent of your life at an office desk. We did the math one Sunday at a chai stall in Colaba. Forty-five working years, eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year. Thirty percent. Same as sleep. More than family, more than friends, more than the gym you keep meaning to start.
And what does this thirty percent look like? A laminated desk. A cracked office chair. A tiffin that leaks rajma onto your laptop bag. A water bottle from a giveaway in 2019. A pen that ran out in November and you're still using it. A backpack designed by someone who has never carried two laptops on a Mumbai local or a Tokyo subway.
This is the part that bothered us. The salaried people — the EMI-paying, train-catching, parents-calling, kid-dropping-at-school people — are the ones who run the day. And somewhere along the way, the world decided that their desk should be the most miserable square metre in it.
So we started Sobopad
We started in a one-room studio in South Bombay, three of us, a kettle, and a long list of things we wished existed for people like us. Not for design-magazine homes. For the real working desk: the one in a Powai office park, the one in a BKC tower, the one in a co-working space in Lisbon, the one in your spare room at 11 pm when the kids are asleep and the second laptop is still on.
We didn't want to make another "handcrafted in our atelier" story. We wanted to design proper objects, end to end, for the people who actually use a desk for a living. So we sit in the studio, we sketch, we prototype, we test for weeks on our own desks, and we ship the version we'd keep ourselves.
The standard is the only thing we don't compromise on: would we keep this on our desk for the next ten years, every day, even on the bad days? If the answer is no, it doesn't ship.
What we are trying to fix
Make the desk more happening. Stuff that's nice to touch, nice to look at, that makes a colleague stop and ask where it's from.
Make it more focused. An hourglass that says I am not free for the next forty-five minutes, a notebook that doesn't lose its notes, a phone that finally has a place to live that isn't your hand.
Make it more organised. One bag that holds two laptops and a tiffin and a charger and a small umbrella, instead of three bags doing it badly. One pad that holds the day's to-do list, your phone, your cup of chai, and gives them all a home.
This is not about luxury. It's about not hating the thirty percent of your life that pays for the other seventy.
Thirty percent. We keep coming back to that number. It is too much of your life to spend at a sad desk. We are designing that back, one object at a time.