In a bid to update its 40-year-old line of Tokkia birds, and to give the series a little cutting-edge social media juice, the 135-year-old Finnish glass house Iittala is launching a limited edition of its famous blown-glass birds only available in select markets for which they were named. Only 200 numbered examples of the blown-glass "City Bird" collection will be hand-made, and obsessive collectors must travel to Shanghai, Toyko, Paris, New York, and Helsinki to buy them all.
In an impressively forward-looking step for a company that was founded in 1881, Iittalla partnered with "social media influencers" in each of the urban centers to send images, ideas, and thoughts to designer Oiva Toikka to help in the design of these birds of various size, shape, and chromatic pattern that are billed as representing the essence of each location. For New York, for example, the social media partner was former I.D. magazine editor Monica Khemsurov, who currently edits the influential design blog Sight Unseen.
Whether the social-media input is more a marketing ploy or not, the final design decisions were left to the emminent desiger Toikka (pictured at right at the debut of his birds series), who over four decades, has created nearly 500 handcrafted glass bird "species" for the brand. The bird series debuted in 1973, and was surprising for its success and, ultimately, for the longevity of the line. It was also a break with the previous design aesthetic of such esteemed Iittala designers as Alvar Aalto and Tapio Wirkkala. Toikka's colorful, playful, and ornate birds are less typically Nordic in look and feel. In fact, when asked about what defines his aesthetic, Toikka has reportedly said: ”Baroque is exactly the right word to describe my work."