How we work
How our results are selected and ordered
Designheroes is a curated design reference, not a comprehensive index of products on the market.
Designheroes is published by Designstandard AG, the Swiss company behind it. Where you see both names below, the distinction is deliberate: the editorial judgement is Designheroes', and the commercial relationship a brand enters is with Designstandard AG, the company.
That is the first thing worth knowing, because it explains everything below. We are not trying to list what exists. We are trying to gather what we think is worth knowing about — objects with a named designer, a reason to exist, and a good chance of lasting.
Editorial selection
Designheroes independently determines which brands and products meet its editorial criteria. Editorial eligibility cannot be purchased.
A brand cannot buy its way past that judgement, and no fee changes it. We carry brands with no commercial relationship with us, and we have declined brands who wanted one.
For new and currently produced products, we select designs we believe have the potential to become future vintage design classics.
That is a judgement, not a measurement, and we make it in the open. It is the whole editorial proposition of Designheroes: not everything in production, but the pieces we would expect to see in vintage galleries in thirty years.
New and currently produced products
New and currently produced products are published only from brands that first meet Designheroes' editorial criteria and then enter a commercial relationship with Designstandard.
Both conditions, in that order. Passing the editorial gate does not put a current collection on the site; the commercial relationship is what makes it available here. We would rather tell you that plainly than let you infer it.
Paying does not change the editorial decision that comes first. A brand that does not meet the criteria cannot reach this stage by paying, and paying does not change what we write.
Vintage, pre-owned, sold and archived objects
These are selected separately on editorial grounds. They are not subject to the commercial condition that applies to new and currently produced products. Galleries and auction houses do not pay Designstandard for inclusion or verification of vintage and pre-owned objects.
They are chosen piece by piece rather than brand by brand, on what the object is. This is the larger part of what Designheroes shows, and no money is involved in any of it.
We regard galleries and auction houses as cultural stakeholders rather than suppliers. They archive, research and evaluate historic and current design objects. Much of what we reliably know about a piece — who made it, when, in what edition, and what became of it — survives because they did that work. We list them for that reason, and we check their claims like anyone else's.
How search results are ordered
Results are organised according to factors including relevance to the search, availability and commercial status. Commercial relationships can influence candidate retrieval and the order in which results appear.
In plain terms: the relevance of your search, whether a piece can actually be obtained, and a brand's commercial relationship with us all bear on the results. That commercial relationship can affect both which products we show you and where they appear.
We would rather say this than claim we are neutral when we are not.
No personalisation
Results are not ranked according to an individual user's behaviour, profile or search history.
We do not change the order for you personally, and we do not build a profile of you to decide what you should be shown.
If the site does not match this page
Tell us: info@designstandard.ch. This page is what we promise. If the site does something different, that is a mistake in the site, and we will fix it.
Last reviewed: 25th August. Reviewed whenever the ranking or selection model changes.
How Designheroes Stories Are Made
Every Designheroes story begins with an editor, and ends with one.
An editor chooses the subject, decides why it matters now, and sets the angle: the questions the story must answer, the connections worth chasing, the claims that will need proof. That direction is the creative act. A story about a Ming folding chair could be an auction report, a craft history, or an argument about where Danish modern actually comes from. Deciding which one to write, and what evidence would make it true, is human work and stays that way.
We should also tell you who we are. Designheroes is made by design people — decades spent around furniture, brands, archives, and the industry itself. We are experts in design. We are not trained writers, and we won't pretend to be.
Knowing why a chair matters is one craft. Writing two thousand words that make you feel it is another. We were only ever apprenticed to the first. So we use technology to give us a voice: the knowledge, the connections, the opinions and the taste are ours, and AI helps us put them into prose that does them justice.
In practice, that means we use AI tools in the stages between the editor's decisions. Under our direction, they help us assemble research across sources, structure material, and produce drafts in the publication's voice. We treat the technology the way a designer's workshop treats any powerful machine: useful in skilled hands, and only in skilled hands.
What the tools do not do is decide. They do not choose subjects, form the opinions, or judge what is true. Every draft is edited by a person. Every load-bearing fact, every date, price, attribution, and quote, is verified against live primary sources before publication: museum records, archives, auction results, the institutions themselves, not a model's memory and not another AI's confirmation. Claims we cannot verify do not run. Direct quotes appear only when we can trace them to their original source. Where accounts conflict, we say so in the text.
We hold our own material to the same standard as anyone else's. When research arrives with a convenient narrative attached, including from auction houses, brands, or our own tools, the editor's job is to push back on it, and our stories keep the pushback visible.
A named human editor is accountable for every story we publish. If we get something wrong, we correct it and say we did.
Every story carries that editor's name at the top, alongside a note that AI tools were used in the making. The name is the more important half. It means a person read every line, checked every load-bearing fact, and put their name to the result. If the story is wrong, you know whose door to knock on.
We tell you all this for one reason: Designheroes exists to be worth trusting on design. How a story was made is part of whether you can trust it, so the making should not be a secret.
Last reviewed: 25th August. Revisited yearly as tooling and norms change.