By Layla Wei

I’m still trying to process this: we won a Red Dot Product Design award for Piper Oudo.

Not “I studied design, interned at a legendary studio and then created a design solution.” More like: I had zero experience designing physical products, got obsessed with pepper grinders, made a thousand slightly unhinged iterations, and somehow the universe let it work.

If you’re reading this, you probably already own a Piper, or you’ve at least fallen down our little pepper rabbit hole. I want to take you behind the scenes of how our pepper grinder happened.

A peppercorn, a new home, and an itch

(Skip Intro here if you’ve seen our videos on origin story)

It started with a tiny peppercorn: Jeremy (my co-founder & chief pepper officer of Piper) brought some pepper back from a trip to Cambodia. I tasted them and had the kind of reaction normally reserved for perfume: aromatic surprise.

At the same time, my husband (not Jeremy, lol) and I had just moved out of our rental into a new home of our own. Suddenly, I cared way more about objects I touch every day.

So naturally I went looking for a pepper grinder. Ivisited all designer shops in Denmark, combed vintage stores in Thailand, and doom-scrolled everything from Etsy to Taobao.

I found plenty of “pretty enough to display” collectibles. But I could not find something that hit both ends of the spectrum: high aesthetic and high performance.

My little cabinet of curious pepper grinders, display-only for good reasons

And that’s the dangerous “scratch-your-own-itch” moment. The moment you realize: Maybe I should make it.

The quiet dread of imposter syndrome

Here’s the part I’m not proud of but will say anyway: I felt wildly under-qualified.

I’ve been a creative for most of my career. Brand, comms, campaigns. I build mood boards in my sleep. But designing a physical product? That felt like a different species of competence.

Here come the forking paths for redesigning the pepper experience:

1. Raise money and pay a design firm.
2. Take a leap of faith and try to make it happen myself.

Guess what I picked (kudos to Jeremy for hyping me up in true entrepreneurial spirit).

Form and function, in parallel (since I couldn’t decide which comes first)

The work wasn’t a neat step-by-step process. It was a messy parallel sprint where form and function kept arguing, and I played mediator.

Here’s what our design process looked like:

• Unpacking the full experience around pepper from a home chef’s POV
• Rapid prototyping using AI-generated mockups from pencil sketches, then Photoshop manipulation to push shapes.
• A little “Design Committee” made up of friends who matched our customer profiles. We basically held an informal user study with people whose taste we trust.
• An MVP approach: 3D printed samples mixed with coffee grinder parts.
• Iterations over generations. So many generations.

Somewhere in there, Piper Oudo started to look less like hobby project and more like “a design system.”

Wait, where did the coffee grinder parts come from? That’s a story for another time. In a nutshell, we found our manufacturing partner, Timemore who brought coffee precision grinding expertise to the table, dining table to be exact.

The Design Considerations

Here are four aspects of design considerations organized in hindsight, happened subconsciously during the making of Piper Oudo, in no particular order of importance nor linear sequence:

#1: user experience

We ruled out electronic grinders immediately as we want to keep the manual grinding satisfaction and lose the battery charging hassle.

We deep-dived into:

Ergonomics: the mechanics of twisting, the grip, the torque. We build clay models to test these.

Tactile feedback: the weight and balance should feel grounded, not flimsy. The wood finishing was optimized between matte versus sheen across batches. The angles of curves, the tightness of fit, the magnetic strength and other details you don’t notice until they’re wrong.

Ease of refill: we got rid of the screw top that takes forever to open, fixed peppercorns bouncing all over the place, and nitpicked on how a perfect pack of Piper pepper should feel like.

 

#2: the designer’s selfishness

Let me be honest: I wanted it to be sexy.

Anthony Bourdain said food is sex. If food is sex, the tools around food should not look like medical devices.

I’m a firm believer that form can be playful and fluid without losing elegance. So my references included: massagers & sex toys, as well as fine art sculptures (I studied art history and can’t stop being annoyingly referential).

Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Han Sai Por, Isamu Noguchi

I also like designs that feel impersonated, like animated characters. Another key influence was Noguchi’s Akari lights that look like a house of warm & friendly creatures. I pictured Piper dining tables with objects that feel almost alive. I loved it when people told us what our grinder looked like:

We named it Oudo after this popularity vote. Thank you, 157 of you who contributed.

Both Jeremy and I also cared about something else in particular: cultural adaptability. As global Asians with East and West influences baked into our taste, we wanted a grinder that could sit in homes across cultures and still feel like it belonged. Today, we’re proud to share that Piper’s sitting in homes across 30 countries.

#3: market-ability

Contrary to how product design is often taught and done, Piper did not start from industrial design solutions for user problems.

Piper actually started from brand design.

It’s an ongoing exercise in world-building around pepper lovers and flavor creators. The grinder isn’t the whole story. It’s a building block in a larger Piper universe. I guess that was my previous occupational hazard laying the foundation and carving out a niche for us.

Also, I used to moonlight as a filmmaker, so yes, we designed ASMR features with video in mind.

If you’ve ever seen (and heard) Piper crunching pepper into black snow falling on a plate and felt your nervous system calm down… you get it.

#4: production feasibility

We were lucky to have precision grinding expertise and deep support from Timemore. We zoomed in on everything with their R&D and manufacturing team:

• which type of wood,
• magnet size and distribution,
• top & body attachment mechanisms,
• and a thousand micro-decisions that would never make it into a BTS video.

It also helped that I speak native Chinese, so we could iron out nuances that would have been lost in translation. That includes our heated discussion over if the grinder should be in wood, and we are glad we held our stand. More about that here on Instagram.

The weirdest part: my unrelated past turned out to be training

Over time, I realized more dots of my “random” interests connected:

• I obsessed over AI art workflows for a year. That iteration muscle ended up being the backbone of how we explored form so quickly.
• I’ve been doing ceramics since COVID, making little pottery trinkets. It gave me a better grasp of physical form.
• I’m an XR design enthusiast and a beginner in 3D. A friend helped model the base shape of Piper Oudo, and an intern with industrial design training helped iterate the CAD. But I was able to review it every step.
• My husband bought an archaic Bambu Lab 3D printer on clearance for fun. It was working day & night at snail speed to print our early prototypes. That $150 “angel investment” was pivotal.
• And yes, I’m a dormant homeware shopaholic who got unleashed after getting a home. Scrolling shopping apps gave me an edge in understanding the consumer brain.

All of it, somehow, led to a Red Dot. I’m genuinely grateful, and still a little stunned.

How the old Bambu printed prototypes. Thank goodness we have a new printer now.

What’s next

We’re not done, obviously.

• MagPlate v2: We’ve gotten feedback that for certain hands, the current MagPlate can feel a bit hard to grab. We’re working on an improved version.
• Salt grinder: The highly anticipated salt version is in progress. I’m excited to share updates as soon as it’s ready.
• More flavor creation objects in the piperline.

My lesson: If you have taste and grit, you’re allowed to start.

If you’re someone who cares about design, you already know this: the objects you use every day shape how you move through the world.

I chased after this inkling of making a better pepper grinder.

The process was really messy, literally with pepper dust and rogue peppercorns all over my home, and figuratively as lined out above. But the exuberayting joy from all the Piper owners made it all worthwhile.

So if Piper Oudo sits on your counter, I hope it’s not just a grinder.

I hope it’s also a small permission slip: Spice up that thing. Make the version you wish existed.

(If you’re still with me, I love you. Hit me up to geek over pepper or design!)