Potato Head reimagines waste as design material with launch of WASTED Collection 001

Bali-based hospitality and lifestyle brand Potato Head has launched its debut homeware range, Collection 001, through its sustainability-forward design arm, WASTED. In collaboration with acclaimed British designer Max Lamb, the project reframes waste not as a by-product, but as a design imperative.

Available online from 4 August and in-store from 8 August, the collection is the culmination of a five-year collaboration between Lamb and the Potato Head creative and sustainability teams. More than just a product drop, it is positioned as a vision for regenerative design - one deeply rooted in local craftsmanship and material circularity.

“Designers have a responsibility to justify every product we bring into the world,” Lamb said in a statement. “With WASTED, we’re not just rethinking materials - we’re celebrating the human hands and knowledge that shape them.”

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The launch is a natural extension of Potato Head’s broader mission: a blend of environmental ethics and cultural expression encapsulated in its guiding philosophy, “Good Times, Do Good.” Nowhere is that ethos more evident than in Desa Potato Head’s radical shift toward circularity - including a 99.5% landfill diversion rate and island-wide initiatives such as the Community Waste Project.

While the resort’s architecture and operations have long embraced repurposed materials, Collection 001 distils those values into tangible, household forms. Each item is handcrafted in Bali, merging Lamb’s process-led approach with traditional Indonesian techniques.

The materials are as storied as the process: retired hotel linens dyed with marigold and indigo; discarded plastic cast into marbled chairs; broken glass mouth-blown into sculptural vessels; used cooking oil turned into refillable candles. Even oyster shells and Styrofoam find new life in composite furnishings, while hand-woven bamboo reinforces the connection to local ecology and artisanship.

The result is a dynamic body of work made up of eight material families, each evolving in response to what’s available. No two pieces are exactly alike - a direct challenge to mass production, and an assertion that locality and limitation can drive innovation.

This model, said Potato Head, is meant to be scalable and replicable - a call to designers and brands to turn regional waste streams into culturally resonant, commercially viable products. “WASTED by Potato Head is more than a homeware range; it is a manifesto for conscious living, a fusion of global vision and local tradition that proves design can be both beautiful and regenerative,” the brand said.

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