EgO – Cups & Saucers

I was walking down 2nd Avenue, Manhattan, at six in the morning – back home to the East Village after an all-night party up on 86th Street. In desperate need for a large cup of coffee, I saw a café just opening. Perfect. I was served steaming hot coffee & milk from a huge cup with a very tiny handle. Trying to balance this dangerously hot bowl all the way from the table over my lap and up to my lips, I could see a serious burning accident happening… Scary. That’s when I realised my cup would have a functional handle for a firm grip. The year was 1997.

Half a year earlier I had flown to Helsinki to meet with the product directors of a brand manufacturer to receive the brief for designing tableware. At that point I still had no idea about what they had in mind. “A coffee cup!” they cried out with great enthusiasm.

Fuck. There are ten thousand coffee cups on the market, and they either have a handle or they don’t. End of. I was in shock. “Okay, if I haven’t come up with a completely new approach in three months, that in fact can be mass produced for a reasonable price, then you need to give this impossible task to someone else.”

Back to New York. A lot of frustrating work until that morning after the party up on 86th. My design was approved, and I was told the name for the collection would be “EgO”. (That’s when I got my second shock…) Thanks to the product development people all manufacturing issues were solved, and the rest is history.

In 2024 we decided to re-produce this collection of cups for our own new brand stefanlindfors®, and in 2025 we found a great factory to make this possible. So now the old EgO is new. But I’m still the same.

Stefan Lindfors