It started with a no.

I wanted to buy a vase. Seven thousand euros, and I was ready to pay it. The artist turned me down. It had already gone to Heidi Klum. A few weeks later the same thing happened again, this time with a ceramicist in England.

That is when it became obvious, and it was not about money. Art is a club. Access runs through networks, waiting lists and status. Being willing to pay does not get you in. Someone more famous is always standing in front of you.

So I made the objects myself. I researched production, wrote to workshops, found ceramicists in Italy and Ukraine who could build what was in my head. It was meant for my own apartment. Then people saw the pieces, laughed, and asked where they could get one.

That reaction is the whole company.

Why it still matters

meloni has been going since 2025 and nothing about that first no has changed. Collectible design still belongs to roughly one percent, and often not even to them. The objects that carry a point of view, the ones that start a conversation in a room, are still priced as membership rather than as objects.

We think that is a design problem, not a law of nature.

Every meloni piece is made by hand in Europe. No waiting list, no approval, no relationship required. The pieces are provocative, funny and occasionally uncomfortable, because an object that has nothing to say is just decoration with a price tag. And they cost what they cost on purpose.

Yes, it costs less. That is the point, not the compromise.

Where this goes

None of this is finished by selling more objects. It is finished when a piece with a point of view is something you can simply decide to own, and when those objects turn up in the rooms they were never let into.

So we grow the way the argument demands. Every store is chosen one by one, because the rooms a brand is shown in decide what it is allowed to mean. Ten right rooms beat fifty convenient ones.

And then rooms of our own. Part store, part gallery, part dinner party. A place where nothing sits behind glass and nobody is checked at the door. After that, a platform for cultural objects: collaborations, capsules, artists we have no business affording yet.

Every one of those steps is the same argument as the first vase, only louder. As long as access to culture runs through status, there is work to do.

The club is not going to open itself. Fine.