This year, we were very excited to witness YiTile by Yi Design win the 3rd Kering Generation Award. The competition was created in 2018 by Kering, a global leader in luxury fashion with Maisons that include Gucci, Balenciaga, YSL, and Alexander McQueen. This year, our founder, Raefer Wallis, was invited to help expand the reach of the competition beyond fashion and into retail interiors.

Copyright @ Kering

It was an unconventional step and we had our doubts about the chances of a building material winning a fashion competition. We were thrilled to be proven wrong.

Kering's decision to award first place in a circularity competition to a building material marks a pivotal moment for the industry. In an increasingly digital world, boutique interiors serve as the primary physical connection between a brand and its clientele, allowing people to experience a brand's culture firsthand. This recognition from Kering underscores the significance of boutique interiors, elevating them to the same level of importance as the products they house.

Copyright @ Kering

A brand's boutique interior is, in essence, a product that can only be fully appreciated through experience. RESET’s mission and purpose are to guide those experiences toward becoming fully regenerative with quantitative ecological, social, and economic targets.

In this context, Yi Design secured first place by closing the circularity loop on a significant global waste problem while infusing the beauty and culture of ceramic into their solutions. Their winning product, YiTile, is also the highest-scoring tile globally per the RESET Embodied Standard.

RESET Scorecard for YiTile by Yi Design

While we celebrate Yi Design's success, we were also enamored by the achievements of the second and third-place winners; Cobbler's Suggest, which leverages reverse logistics to create a network of repair, reuse, and value maintenance for products; and PhaBuilder, with their bio-based and biodegradable plastic-like material created at room temperature, demonstrating the power and potential of biomimicry.

Finally, we are grateful to the Kering and Plug and Play teams for their efforts in creating this award, upholding a rigorous review process, and advancing sustainability in the industry.

About RESET®

RESET® is a data standard, accompanied by a set of assessment tools, created and managed by GIGA, to develop actionable, long-term strategies towards health and sustainability for the built environment. RESET focuses on creating a quantitative structure around embodied and operating data to generate opportunities for improvement and optimizations by combining the development of databases, continuous monitoring, and cloud software to increase the visibility of health and sustainability reporting and analytics in the built environment.

For more information about RESET, please visit: https://www.reset.build/.