MATERIAL STUDIES 01 – SUN

What happens when we stop protecting the things we make?

Before something becomes a TANN product, we spend a lot of time trying to find out what is wrong with it.

Prototypes are worn, washed, packed, carried and given to people whose everyday work is considerably harder on them than ours would ever be. We ask them to use things normally, but we also ask them not to be particularly careful.

We want to know what happens.

Where does a fabric soften first? Which seam takes the most strain? Does a pocket still make sense after using it every day? What becomes annoying after eight hours? What happens after the tenth wash rather than the first?

Some of these tests are deliberate. Others simply happen through use.

Material Studies is where we take that curiosity a little further.

 

Testing before selling

There is a point in developing an object when a prototype looks finished.

That point can be misleading.

A new piece of canvas can look beautiful on a table. A jacket can fit perfectly for ten minutes. Hardware can feel substantial when it is new. None of this tells us particularly much about what the object will be like after months or years of use.

So we try to get our prototypes out of our hands.

We give them to people. We travel with them. We wear them. We wash them. We fill pockets with the things they were designed to carry. Whenever possible, we put them into the environment they are actually intended for.

The aim is never to preserve the prototype. Quite the opposite actually...

A failed prototype can teach us more than an immaculate one.

SUN STUDY 01

For this study, the experiment was remarkably unsophisticated.

We took one of our heavy canvas aprons and hung it outside on a balcony in Berlin.

Then we left it there.

No chemical bleaching. No artificial ageing. No attempt to make the result look particularly beautiful.

Just canvas, air, weather and weeks of summer sun.

The way the apron was hanging created a fold across its front. Part of the fabric received considerably more direct sunlight than the area beneath it.

Eventually, a line appeared.

A large diagonal section of the original colour began to fade while the protected canvas remained much darker.

The apron had recorded the way it had been hanging.

Accelerating time

Normally we want this process to happen slowly.

Our apron is made to change. Heavy cotton canvas softens with wear. Washing alters the surface. Friction leaves traces. Sunlight changes colour. The places you touch most often eventually become different from the places you do not.

Usually all of this happens simultaneously and almost imperceptibly.

You notice it when you put an old apron next to a new one.

This time, we isolated one of those forces and exaggerated it.

Sunlight became a tool.

What would normally be one small part of several years of ageing was allowed to dominate the material for a short period of time.

Patina is information

We talk about patina quite a lot, but not because we think everything old is automatically beautiful.

Wear tells you something about an object.

A faded area tells you where light reached it. A polished edge tells you where a hand repeatedly touched it. A stretched pocket tells you what was carried inside. A repair tells you where something failed and somebody decided it was worth keeping anyway.

The object gradually becomes a record of its circumstances.

That is difficult to reproduce convincingly in a factory because the interesting part isn't really the appearance.

It is the cause.

This apron looks the way it does because it spent part of a Berlin summer hanging in one particular position on one particular balcony.

Another apron subjected to the same experiment would already be slightly different.

Why we test

Testing is sometimes treated as the unglamorous stage between designing something and selling it.

For us, it is part of designing.

We don't want to know only whether something works when it leaves us. We want some idea of what it might become afterwards.

That means occasionally doing things to materials that we wouldn't necessarily recommend doing to your own.

Leaving them outside.

Washing them repeatedly.

Exposing them to weather.

Giving them to people who will work harder in them than we do.

And sometimes simply waiting.

Because an object designed for everyday use should not depend on remaining new.

Quite the opposite, again.

We want to make things that can acquire a life after they leave ours.

Material Studies documents what happens along the way.

Study 01: 50 days of sunlight.
Berlin, summer 2026.