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It is said that to survive in the startup industry, one must be incredibly adaptive. For Mylo, this meant going so far as to change their name. Previously known as MIJLO, the Dutch-based design collective first launched in 2013 with A Better Backpack, a timeless bag built to last a lifetime. After successfully raising CAD 81,000 on Kickstarter, founder Daniel Eckler launched his next product: the Springwise-featured Everyday Watch, a timepiece that enables 10 variations with two different faces and five straps. Like its predecessor, the designs took from of the universal appeal of lasting fashion, and the again surpassed its goal of CAD 63,000.

Next came the Where’s Wallet, which saw an incredibly playful interactive Where’s Wally style website, and a smart, simple wallet embedded with tracking chips so users will never lose their cards and cash. But though the campaign was funded successfully, Daniel cancelled the funding to focus on his next big thing.

“We always knew we wanted to find something technically and culturally innovative,” he tells us. “Ultimately, we knew we wanted to merge Gap and Ikea by leveraging new technical and cultural trends.”

“There’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do. Or robots do. Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.”