Made of Tomorrow’s Matt Genefaas on building a homewares brand

Matt Genefaas: My passion for creativity started back in high school – it must've been year 12 when I first started taking photography classes. There was a course that was offered through high school and I fell in love with it: I picked up the camera and thought, yes, this is me. I think part of that was based on my parents' passion for photography – they had both spent a long time travelling the world, and they had these incredible, now vintage Pentax 35mm film cameras. In year 13, the class then switched to digital and I really loved the creativity side and the manipulation you can do in Photoshop. The first time you get into Photoshop, you kind of go wild with all of the possibilities that you have because it's absolutely endless.

From there, I started taking photos wherever I was going. I haven't been to uni and haven't done any further education, but when I moved to Auckland when I was about 19 or 20 I knocked on the door of Remix magazine, and luckily met an amazing photographer there, Oliver Rose, who gave me an opportunity to work on a photoshoot with him. Eventually, I got a job there as a photographer, and then moved into graphic design not knowing where my career would go. It's great that my career has ended up being instilled in the design industry.

MG: Dan and I met in 2013. We're both really creative and eventually started Made of Tomorrow because we wanted to design cool homewares and furniture. We designed some small items and it just grew from there.

I was able to use my photography skills to shoot the campaigns, and designing products came really naturally. My Dad has been a sheet metal fabricator my whole life, so designing furniture out of steel was really easy – I knew the capabilities and how we could bend it and weld it.

I taught myself how to do 3D drawings and CAD drawings to render products and design products, and every day I learn something else. I would have never dreamed to have designed a dining table five years ago, and now we've got our own dining tables and coffee tables. We’re really trying to rethink the product design industry for people like us who want something really cool.

MG: I think it's cool for him to see that steelwork can be cool because his work is extremely industrial, making vats for dairy factories and other extremely industrial steel work, but we're taking steel and applying it to a homeware application. He doesn't think as creatively as us – he thinks literally and functionally, whereas we consider aesthetics. We're looking at the same material in completely different ways and I think he enjoys seeing what we can do with it.

MG: So much. The business side is wild – running a business, hiring staff, the legal stuff with commercial leases and contracts. Without going to business school, there's nothing you can do to prepare for it. It sounds glamorous owning a product design business, but I spend the majority of my day doing admin or accounting. But I think that's just part of our growth.

Soon there will be a time where I offload a lot of the accounting duties and some of those admin duties and be able to spend more of my time where it's most valuable – designing products and being creative. But as a small business, you wear all of the hats – you're calling customers, you're the sales team, you're the delivery driver, you're everything.

MG: I love being creative. I love being a business owner and I've learned that I really thrive in learning things – even when we are going over a contract with our lawyers, I love being able to have a strong grasp on that. And I think that's important as a business owner, to understand all of that and have a thorough understanding of it.

But for me, being creative is my passion. I love creating products. I love building sets to be able to shoot and I love getting hands on. I even enjoy the process more than I enjoy the finished product, that's for sure.