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The Kitalma product family on a marble kitchen island: grater, press, salt and pepper mills, measuring cups, skillet, mortar, covered pot, griddle and tongs.

Kitalma

Cookware with soul: a culinary passport for the home kitchen.

A brand built to make an unfamiliar dish feel worth trying.

RKS Design partnered with Kitalma to build a brand, a design language and a product family for cookware that carries a cuisine with it. The factory and the range were already in place; the point of view was not. Guided by the Psycho-Aesthetics® methodology, our innovation consulting team found the barrier was rarely skill and almost never equipment. It was confidence.

Client
Kitalma
Markets
Consumer
What We Did
The full Kitalma range in a single line: pots, pans, steamers, grinders, mortars and tools in green, clay, sand and black.

“Cookware with soul: a culinary passport for the home kitchen.”

The Kitalma Collection film, from the brand’s own channel. The range as it reached market: cookware, tools and serveware drawn to one design language, shown in the kitchens it was designed for.

Ethnographic Research

Key Outputs

  • Ethnographic Field Research
  • Category & Competitive Audit
  • Persona & Behavior Mapping

RKS began in kitchens rather than the studio. Through ethnographic research, including in-home observation and interviews, the team watched people cook dishes from cultures other than their own: what they reached for, where they improvised, where they quietly gave up.

A category audit, tool benchmarking and a demand survey ran alongside. The obstacle was rarely skill. It was confidence, and that set the brief.

How We Used Psycho-Aesthetics® to Identify Unique Opportunities in the Project.

Using our proprietary Psycho-Aesthetics® framework, we mapped the cookware category against two axes: the consumer’s hierarchy of needs and desires, and their level of interactivity with the product. OXO, Dash and IMUSA sat low and center, where the promise is simply that the tool works; CRUXGG, Our Place and Joseph Joseph reached higher but stayed in the middle of the field.

The opportunity zone sat top-left, in the artful quadrant: high on aspiration, quiet in use. Cookware that carries a cuisine with it rather than merely cooking one. That zone became the brief.

Psycho-Aesthetics map of the cookware category, with OXO, Dash, IMUSA, CRUXGG, Our Place and Joseph Joseph plotted and the opportunity zone in the artful quadrant.
Slides from the Kitalma Psycho-Aesthetics research covering competitors, personas and category data.

Industrial Design

Key Outputs

  • Form & Mass Exploration
  • Silhouette Studies Across the Range
  • Material & Colorway Direction
  • Product Design Language

Our industrial design team worked the range in mass first: proportion, stance, how much of each object is body and how much is handle. Options were drawn flat so the family could be judged as a set, then rendered to test how a bamboo band, a cork base and a matte body read together.

What emerged is a design language: soft-cornered volumes, a banded middle, a lifted base, a warm-material handle. One silhouette per function, recognizable across a kitchen.

Two Kitalma grinder forms with dark ribbed bodies on cork bases.
Kitalma horizontal logo lockup, the rosette mark beside the wordmark.
Mass study of a Kitalma skillet and lid with a bamboo handle, seen from above.
Form study of the Kitalma press, closed, in matte black with a cork handle and knob.
The Kitalma box grater seen from below.
The Kitalma rosette mark.
Kitalma website design, hero screen with the line Discover cookware with soul.
The Kitalma press in five colorways lined up in a row: green, orange, rust, black and sand.
Kitalma mortar and pestle in green, orange and rust colorways on cork bases.

Brand Identity

Key Outputs

  • Brand Strategy & Positioning
  • Identity System & Lockups
  • Color, Typography & Pattern

Our branding design team built Kitalma to work as a culinary passport rather than a catalog. The identity had to carry a Latin American collection and a Southeast Asian one without flattening either, and sit as easily on a kraft sleeve as on a storefront.

One rosette mark, four colors drawn from raw material, and a slab serif with enough weight to feel inherited.

A rosette that reads as a flower, a spice and a sun

Eight petals worked around a center, close enough to a flower to feel domestic, close enough to star anise or a marigold to belong to the kitchens the brand borrows from. It holds at badge size on a handle and at full scale across packaging, and it works cut out of a color field as readily as drawn in line.

The Kitalma rosette mark, an eight-petal flower in terracotta red.
Kitalma brand board with food photography, typography, pattern and packaging in clay, green and sand.
Kitalma identity development: wordmark, rosette mark, badge lockups, cuisine mood boards for Mexico, India, Japan, China and the Philippines, and color direction.

Packaging & Digital Direction

Key Outputs

  • Packaging System & Structure
  • Stationery & Merchandise
  • Website & Social Direction

RKS extended the identity into packaging design and digital, where a system either proves itself or falls apart. Printed sleeves and cartons carry the pattern at full strength.

Online, the palette does the work that material does in the hand (clay and jungle green against sand), with the rosette used sparingly enough to stay an identifier rather than decoration.

Kraft packaging sleeves printed with the Kitalma wordmark, rosette and a clay and black pattern on dark green.
An open Kitalma shipping box with a patterned liner and a Kitalma card.
Hands holding a Kitalma clay pot of roasted vegetables on a green background, under the Kitalma wordmark and the line Cookware with soul.
Six Kitalma social media stories on phone screens, showing products, pattern and the rosette.

Outcomes

Key Outputs

  • Range in Market Across Three Collections
  • Identity, Packaging & Digital Direction
  • A Design Language for Ongoing Development

Kitalma reached market as three collections (Journey, Legado and Rasa) built on one design language and spanning cookware, tools and serveware.

The same silhouette logic runs from the clay pot to the press. New products join the family without a redesign, and each collection can lean into its own region without leaving the brand. See more of our work for the consumer market.

Perfect Press on YouTube
A Kitalma wok of greens and carrots seen from above, with its lid and a wooden spatula.

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