Congratulations All Around!

The entire RKS team would like to congratulate our very own Young Bang for her IDEA Gold win. 

Young (seen here at the awards ceremony with Helen Walters of Business Week), picked up her win for her Cheers Menstrual Cup project.

Cheers was completed while Young was a student at Academy of Art in San Francisco, under guidance from Tom Matano.  With Cheers, Young addresses one of the complications of sustainability – how do you sustain a business when you replace a one-time-use product with one that lasts 10 years?  Young developed a business strategy to encourage increased rates of adoption by building an online community of consumer evangelists.

While we’re congratulating Young, we’d also like to congratulate ourselves for having incredibly good taste in hiring designers.  Last year, before we began this blog, RKS team members Soyun Kim and Agustin Zea took top honors in the 2008 Spark awards.  (Though Agus has since escaped back to Spain, we will always consider him “our Agus.”)  Soyun and Agus won a SPARK! for their Vite Rescue Stretcher, which originated as a student project (along with fellow student Jason Lin) while at Academy of Art, under Tom Matano.

Hmmm… there seems to be a pattern here.  Thanks, Tom!