Designed Gravity: Igor Duc on Native Union and the Quiet Intelligence of Objects That Stay.

There are brands that chase innovation, and then there are brands that quietly discipline it. Native Union belongs firmly to the latter. Since its founding, the company has operated on a deceptively simple premise: if technology is going to live with us - on our desks, in our bags, beside our beds - then it should behave like a well-mannered guest. Useful, unobtrusive, thoughtfully dressed, and never demanding attention for its own sake.

At the centre of this philosophy is Igor Duc, co-founder and CEO, whose approach to design has always been less about spectacle and more about longevity. Native Union emerged not as a reaction to tech, but as a corrective to its disposability. In an era of fast upgrades and plastic ephemera, the brand asked an unfashionable question: what if accessories were built to last, age, and belong?

That question has shaped everything from material choices to form language. Native Union’s products are recognisable not by logos, but by restraint. Leather is chosen for how it patinas, not how it photographs on day one. Aluminium is weighted, not hollowed. Cables are braided and anchored, not left to coil into entropy. Even the brand’s colour palette avoids trend cycles, favouring tones that recede into domestic life rather than shouting over it.

Nowhere is this more evident than in The Weighter, a small object that feels almost philosophical in its intent. It solves an everyday irritation - runaway charging cables - not with clips, adhesives, or clever marketing language, but with gravity. A solid, tactile counterweight that simply stays put. It is design as common sense refined, a reminder that sometimes the most intelligent solution is the one that asks least of the user. You don’t learn The Weighter; you understand it instantly.

This same logic runs through Native Union’s broader ecosystem: wireless chargers that double as desk objects, travel accessories that privilege calm over complication, everyday tools that disappear into routine rather than interrupt it. These are not products chasing novelty; they are products designed to be kept. In that sense, Native Union feels closer to industrial design traditions of the mid-century than to contemporary tech culture - a lineage that values proportion, tactility, and use over announcement.

Designing the pause between upgrades.

Yet what makes the brand compelling is that this restraint is not conservative. It is quietly radical. In an industry driven by speed, Native Union insists on tempo. In a market addicted to iteration, it designs for endurance. And in a landscape crowded with “smart” objects, it remains committed to intelligence that is felt rather than declared.

The conversation that follows with Igor Duc is less an interview than an examination of that mindset. It moves through questions of scale, material honesty, sustainability without slogans, and the discipline required to design objects that do not beg to be replaced. Duc speaks with the measured confidence of someone who understands that good design rarely announces itself loudly - it earns its place slowly.

What emerges is a portrait of a brand that treats everyday life as its true testing ground. Not the showroom. Not the unboxing. But the desk at 9am. The bedside at midnight. The cable you reach for without thinking.

Native Union does not aim to reinvent how we live with technology. It aims to make that relationship calmer, heavier where it needs to be, and - in the best sense of the word - settled.

And perhaps that is its most subversive quality of all.

Native Union’s aesthetic feels closer to quiet luxury or contemporary furniture design than to the traditional tech-accessory landscape. How did your early experience in furniture and object design inform the brand’s devotion to tactility, proportion, and restraint - and do you see Native Union as participating in a broader shift toward “soft tech,” akin to the material intelligence seen in brands like Muji or Norm Architects?

Igor Duc: Transforming a functional product into a desirable one, considering both desirability and experience, while making sure we remain extremely relevant technically, is not an easy job.

We are addressing a product category that used to be purely functional and utilitarian, and has now become a daily essential we interact with multiple times per day, and often carry.

While our intention has always been to create an emotional connection with the user, getting him to love his Native Union product more than just use it, people tend to not have the same level of affect for a tech product as for a fashion product or a nice object for home. The emotional value is often triggered by materiality and by an aesthetic design point of view (often minimalist for us), but the experience is really what removes friction and makes people incorporate our product into their daily lifestyles. We admire the consistency with which Muji and Norm Architects operate. They both manage to bring value and a deep connection with their customers via understated design and minimalism, which is not easy.

Your work suggests that technology should blend into the rhythms of daily life rather than dominate them. In a world increasingly shaped by digital overstimulation, how consciously do you design against “visual noise,” and what role does material harmony play in restoring a sense of calm to the modern desk, nightstand, or travel kit?

Igor Duc: It’s all about “how it makes you feel.” When you enter a Norm Architects–designed space, your brain is almost thanking you for giving it that environment. This is what we are trying to achieve when we design and develop a new product. If we could measure brainwaves, we would hope it calms the brain, where other more traditional tech products would probably stress it.

It’s not only visual; it’s also very much about how the product will be used. When we add a small leather belt to all our cables, it forces the user to take 10 seconds to fold it neatly, and, in a way, to feel a bit better about himself compared to stuffing a fully tangled cable in a bag or in a drawer. This is where design can’t be reduced to the aesthetics of the product only; it’s also very much about the human–product interface.

Native Union operates at the intersection of craftsmanship and industrial precision - a tension reminiscent of Dieter Rams’ balance between warmth and logic. How do you ensure that each product contains both the emotional resonance of an artisanal object and the functional rigor of a tech tool engineered for daily friction?

Igor Duc: This is the most difficult part of our work and, to be honest, I’m not even certain we manage to strike that balance for all our products. It has to be a balance, hence a compromise, and our role is to set that cursor well. Some products are more functional than personal, just because they aren’t meant to be handled every day, but they need to be super reliable (a wall charger, for instance). Some others carry much more emotional and personal value than technology (a phone case, for instance). My personal favorite products are when they carry a high level of both, like our ANCHOR Cable, our VOYAGE, or our newly launched WEIGHTER.

Your global footprint - touching Parisian sensibilities, Asian manufacturing fluency, and a worldwide audience - gives Native Union a kind of cultural polyphony. How do you navigate the complexity of cross-cultural design languages while ensuring the brand retains a single, unmistakable voice?

Igor Duc: The design studio is based in Paris, and this is where all ideation and industrial design are born. There is clearly a strong European influence in what we do. After 16 years of running this brand, we have now managed to infuse most of the people working at Native Union (even in HK or elsewhere) with our design ethos, so even when initiatives have to be taken outside the design studio, they usually follow the brand DNA naturally. This is a real pride: having managed to set the Native Union design principles as a key company ingredient internationally.

You’ve spoken before about technology addiction and the need for healthier digital habits. To what extent is Native Union attempting to humanise the device ecosystem - and could we think of your work as part of an emerging counter-movement to the “always-on” culture that Silicon Valley helped create?

Igor Duc: It’s a big subject for me at a personal level, since I still consider myself way too addicted to my screens, and with 3 kids, I’m also trying to come up with solutions to keep them up to date with technology while also removing the inextricable screen-time trap.

Tech, domesticated.

Today, our minimalist designs and the “one product, one function” approach of Native Union are hopefully helping to reduce visual and cognitive overload, but we are in the tech accessory field, so we can’t say that we are making products to actively fight digital addiction (yet). We are working on a concept right now that is trying to address this modern problem, and we believe the people who will crack it will come from the object world, not from the screen world. It would be a personal victory if the Native Union team is the first to come up with a frictionless solution that people will enjoy using, rather than a punitive one that creates frustration, which has been the approach so far.

Native Union’s collaborations feel more like creative dialogues than commercial transactions. What qualities do you look for in a potential collaborator, and how do you decide whether a partner aligns with your vision of honest materials and enduring form - rather than slipping into what fashion critics might call “collab inflation”?

Igor Duc: We don’t do many collaborations, probably not enough, as we really enjoy working with other teams. It shakes our own convictions and opens perspectives; it’s very healthy. Most of our collaborations so far have come really organically via personal connections or brands we like, that we decided to contact. We have never approached it from a marketing or strategic standpoint; it’s really genuine for now, which could be one of the reasons it feels this way.

We always answer and consider any brand or creative person contacting us for a potential collaboration. Then come the quality of the personal connection, and obviously the relevance of the collaboration. To make it really interesting, we should actually find brands or people pretty far from our brand DNA, and combine our signature points of view rather than re-imagining something mixing our points of view together.

Tech accessories often age poorly, both physically and aesthetically, yet Native Union products seem almost designed for patina and longevity. How do you approach materials - from leather to recycled polymers - in a way that anticipates ageing gracefully, and to what extent do you think about your objects becoming “future classics”?

Igor Duc: It’s a never-ending topic, since we try to have a modern and innovative approach to materiality, and there are more and more interesting options. Our point of view here is now very clear: beyond sustainability, the durability parameter comes first. Because if you have a very sustainable product that doesn’t last, and you have to replace it every 6 months, it totally defeats the purpose of sustainability.

After that, we do a lot of testing, because testing a material in a lab is very different from testing a product in real life made with that material. For instance, a material could be very resistant when used flat, but become very fragile when put under tension, wrapped around an iPhone case for instance. This lengthens our development cycles because we need longer field testing to really see how the product is aging in real life.

Then, while some products can potentially last for dozens of years (WEIGHTER, DESK LAPTOP STAND…) with no technology obsolescence, some other products will have a shorter lifecycle (iPhone cases), and we need to calibrate the material we use to the lifecycle of the product. For instance, we will not use very expensive crocodile leather on an iPhone case that will usually be used for 1 to 3 years, that would be nonsense.

The rise of hybrid work has effectively turned airports, cafés, and kitchens into new-age studios. How does Native Union interpret this shift, and do you see yourselves designing for a new design typology - the 'nomadic workspace' - comparable to how mid-century designers reimagined furniture around postwar mobility?

Igor Duc: This is one of the most exciting parts of our job: reading our modern times and translating our contemporary needs into great lifestyle solutions. This is also what makes our business a pretty healthy one, as lifestyles are evolving really fast nowadays, creating many needs for new types of products, every year.

The more work happens outside an office, the more work-related products will have to look good. And the more work happens on the go, the more work-related products will have to feel personal and be reliable. This is also where having a “designer mindset” in an industry where most brands have a performance and tech mindset is a real advantage. In the end we are all making similar types of products, but the starting point is different: we start with our customer in mind (and ourselves :), and we need our product to look and feel really good, while traditional tech brands usually start their projects with a technical specification list. And this changes everything.

Scaling a design-led brand typically forces difficult decisions around purity versus practicality. As Native Union continues to expand globally, how do you protect the conceptual core of the brand - the insistence on simplicity, tactility, and coherence - from the dilution that often accompanies growth?

Igor Duc: First of all, we remain a pretty small company, which helps maintain the original spirit. Moreover, I have a very talented and loyal team. Fabien, our Design and Brand Director, for instance, has been working alongside me since the beginning of the adventure, preserving the integrity of our mission across the years.

We often have healthy disagreements about the need for design-first purity vs practicality, or sometimes commercially driven requests. The objective is to be able to discuss that openly, with an open mind, and considering that each person’s requirement has value and can be defended. Basically, the ability of a company to perform at a “what’s best for the Brand” level instead of a “what’s best for my department” level is, for me, the key to make sure the decisions we take are the right ones. While we still often have those conversations, we usually handle them pretty well now, with a lot of respect and consideration for each other.

Looking ahead, where do you see the most exciting frontier for Native Union? Whether it’s new materials, new product categories, or new philosophies of human-device interaction, what future direction - conceptual or technical - feels most aligned with your long-term vision?

Igor Duc: Without any hesitation: new philosophies of human–device interaction. We can feel we have reached a level of saturation, and I’m not sure implementing Neuralinks into people or even wearing Meta glasses, is the best answer for the world. So conceptual comes first; then we need to use the best technical way to achieve this work, in the most visually appealing and desirable way.

It means dedicating enough time to ideating, imagining, and dreaming about a future that doesn’t have to be more screen-based and more digital, but can hopefully reconnect people without a device in between them.

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Words and questions by AW.

Answers courtesy of Igor Duc.

Photos courtesy of Native Union.