About Designheroes
A warm welcome
What we are for
Designheroes exists so that authentic design is easier to recognise, easier to understand, and harder to lose.
That is the whole mission. Everything below is how.
The value of authenticity
Designheroes is a curated platform about authentic design — for people who buy it, specify it, collect it, or simply want to understand it.
Educating people about that value is the point of the place. Not education as a claim on anyone's material, but in the plain sense: an object is worth more to you when you know who drew it, why it was made that way, and what happened to it since.
We think choosing an authentic piece is a cultural decision before it is a commercial one. An original was drawn by someone, made to a standard, and built to outlast the season it appeared in. A copy is a picture of that decision with the thinking removed.
That is also why authenticity and circularity belong in the same conversation. A piece that is well made, stays valued and stays in use across generations avoids the logic of constant replacement. Longevity is an important part of the environmental case for good design — and preserving the knowledge that lets an object remain identifiable, repairable and valued is part of what keeps it in circulation.
What we do
We place products in context. A chair is easier to understand next to the chairs it descends from, and harder to overvalue next to the ones it copies. That context is the work.
We name the people who made things. Designer, manufacturer, year, edition. Attribution is how a design canon stays honest, and it is the first thing lost when objects are traded as anonymous inventory.
We make the fragmented findable. Design history is scattered across archives, galleries, auction records and brand catalogues that were never built to be searched together. We bring it into one structure so that a question can be answered.
We keep the record. A piece's story — who made it, when, what became of it — is worth preserving whether or not the piece is currently for sale.
Who is on Designheroes, and on what terms
Brands. Manufacturers whose current collections appear here have first met our editorial criteria, and then entered a commercial relationship with Designstandard. Both, in that order. Editorial eligibility cannot be bought, and the relationship does not change what we write.
Galleries and auction houses. We regard them as cultural stakeholders rather than suppliers. They archive, research and evaluate historic and current design objects, and much of what we reliably know about a piece survives because they did that work. They do not pay Designstandard for inclusion or verification of vintage and pre-owned objects.
Us. The writing, the classification and the judgement are ours. What that means in practice, including how our results are ordered and how our stories are made, is set out on two pages of their own — because the honest place for it is where you can check it, not in a paragraph about our values.
Who is behind it
Designheroes is a product of Designstandard AG, a Swiss company in Zurich. Designcatalogs and Designfinder are the other two.
Designheroes is the idea of Nils Becker and Susanne Fritz, who are married. It combines Nils's twenty-five years building digital platforms for the design industry — Stylepark, then Architonic — with Susanne's work as a practising architect.
Nils Becker — founder
Susanne Fritz — founder
Julia Lázaro García
Morgana Neves
More about the company: About Designstandard
Our shareholders
Archiproducts S.r.l. holds a minority shareholding in Designstandard, under 30 per cent, and acts as our commercial representative for brand partnerships in the European Union. Archiproducts also operates its own platform, which is separate from ours.
Archiproducts itself is part of the Mondadori Group. That is a strength rather than a caveat: our commercial representative in the European Union has an established media group behind it. We state it plainly all the same, because you should be able to see who holds an interest in an editorial platform and judge it for yourself.
We tell you this in the same place we tell you everything else about how this works. A shareholder who sells our partnerships is exactly the kind of relationship a reader should be able to weigh, and it does not change the editorial rule above: eligibility cannot be bought, by a partner, by a shareholder, or by anyone.
Founding partners
Designheroes would not exist without the brands who backed it first.
What we are not
We are not an auctioneer, a dealer or a broker. We do not sell the objects we write about, we take no commission on anything you buy, and we are not party to any transaction you enter into elsewhere.
We are not a comprehensive index of design. We are a curated reference, and that is a choice rather than a limitation — but it means the absence of something here is not a verdict on it.