Hasta La Ideas

It’s every pizza lover’s dream to have a wood-fired brick oven in their kitchen. So far Jimmy Kimmel’s the only guy I’ve heard of to install one. He’s got the money to do that. Most of us don’t.

A team of designers in Slovenia looked at pizza-making as a problem they could solve with intelligent design. First off, the wood-fired brick ovens that self-respecting NYC pizzerias all have are extremely resource-intensive. Between the bricks and the wood that you shovel into the thing, there’s a lot of wasted energy. So the designers of Ironate opted instead for high-carbon steel and a much-smaller footprint. Here’s what they came up with:

I love the simplicity of the design. I was also interested to see that they’re producing it locally to them, rather than farming it out to China. Here’s why, according to them:

First of all, the price wouldn’t be much lower [if we manufactured in China]. We are proud of the design we made and materials we chose, we don’t want to compromise. If we wanted to make IRONATE in China, we would have to spend a lot of time and money on quality control. Also, the transport from far east is expensive and takes a lot of time.

The other reason is much simpler and it doesn’t have to do with business. We just love making stuff. We proudly dig in and get our hands dirty, that’s what drives us. We will automate some processes when the time comes. But we are committed to keep the production as close to our home town as possible.

The $129 object has proven to be a hit, with $62,000 pledged at press time on a $20,000 goal. Pizza lovers have got 20 days left to pledge. The early birds start shipping next month, but those are all gone; the rest of you will have to wait until March of next year.