Our Place made one pan a phenomenon.

Our Place is a lesson in a product plus a mission. It was founded in 2019 by three people: Shiza Shahid (co-founder and co-CEO — also the founding CEO of the Malala Fund, which she co-founded with Malala Yousafzai in 2013), her husband Amir Tehrani, and their friend Zach Rosner. (An honest note: it’s three founders, not two.) Its breakout is the Always Pan — a multifunctional pan that replaces a stack of cookware. (Framing note: it launched around 2020 as an “8-in-1,” and is marketed today as a “10-in-1” — sauté, fry, bake, roast, sear, boil, braise, strain, serve and store.) Two more honest notes: no official brand hex is published, and the wordmark typeface is undocumented.

The Always Pan became an Instagram phenomenon in 2020: photogenic, in evocative pastel colourways, primarily marketed through social media. Its non-stick is a proprietary Thermakind® ceramic coating, made without PFAS (including PTFE and PFOA), lead or cadmium and third-party tested (a claim best attributed to the brand). The range grew into the Perfect Pot, the Wonder Oven, a Cast Iron Always Pan, and a newer Titanium Pro line (a titanium non-stick, distinct from the Thermakind ceramic — don’t conflate them).

What makes Our Place distinctive is that its cultural-inclusivity mission is genuinely central, not a bolt-on. The founders — immigrants themselves — frame the brand as building “a bigger table,” a “chosen family” idea of cooking bringing people together across cultures. That mission is productised as Traditionware™ — limited collections honouring specific traditions (an Eid tagine, Diwali and Lunar New Year collections), with explicit language about representing the traditions of BIPOC and underrepresented communities. It’s privately held and venture-backed. The identity is warm and inviting — “come over to our place.” The pan that went viral.

Our Place lives in warm, evocative pastels. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

Our Place’s identity is built on warm, evocative pastel colourways with poetic names — Spice (a warm clay-pink), Sage, Steam, Char, Blue Salt — rather than one signature colour. The palette is central to the brand: soft, photogenic and grown-up, it turned cookware into a display object and fuelled the Always Pan’s Instagram virality, while the warm, earthy, spice-and-sage tones evoke home cooking, gathering and global cuisines — reinforcing the inclusive “bigger table” mission. It’s a considered, editorial palette, refreshed with new and limited shades. The honest caveat: Our Place publishes no official brand hex, so the spice and sage here are an original, unofficial interpretation of its named colourways, not first-party values.

The lesson is an evocative, named palette can carry both aesthetics and mission. Our Place’s warm pastels are photogenic and evoke home cooking across cultures. For designers, it’s a reminder that colour and naming can serve beauty and meaning at once. The takeaways: use warm, evocative colour for a home-and-gathering brand; name shades poetically (Spice, Sage, Steam); and treat specific hexes as unofficial when the palette is expressive and rotating.

The wordmark is a warm serif spirit — inviting and human.

Our Place’s identity carries a warm, inviting, human spirit — a feel befitting a brand whose whole idea is hospitality and gathering (“come over to our place”). A warm serif captures it well: the humane, editorial letterforms read as welcoming, considered and grown-up, matching a house built on home cooking, culture and community rather than sport or spectacle. Set against warm spice-and-sage pastels, the type feels like an invitation — exactly the inclusive, “bigger table” personality Our Place cultivates. It’s warm and human rather than clinical or loud, mirroring the inviting brand. Because the exact wordmark face isn’t publicly documented, the honest description is “a warm serif spirit,” not a named font. The type behaves like the brand: inviting, human and warm.

Our Place set a bigger table.

Our Place is a lesson in pairing a breakout product with a genuine mission. The Always Pan was a brilliant product hook — one beautiful, multifunctional pan, in photogenic pastels, perfectly built for Instagram in 2020 — and that virality gave the brand reach. But what makes Our Place more than a one-hit DTC brand is that the product sits on top of a real, consistently-expressed mission: cooking as a way to bring people together across cultures, “a bigger table,” a “chosen family,” productised through Traditionware™ collections that genuinely centre underrepresented traditions. That coherence — a desirable product carrying an authentic, values-led story — gives the brand meaning and loyalty beyond aesthetics, and it’s reinforced by honest, specific claims (a named ceramic coating, third-party testing, no PFAS). The lesson is that a viral product can open the door, but a genuine, well-integrated mission is what turns a moment into a brand. Lead with a great product; anchor it in a real mission.

For designers and brand-builders, Our Place offers a clear takeaway: a breakout product plus a genuine, integrated mission outlasts a viral moment. The lessons: build a desirable, legible hero product (the multifunctional Always Pan); anchor it in an authentic mission expressed through the product itself (Traditionware™, the “bigger table”); and keep material and health claims specific and attributed. It’s also a reminder to keep the facts precise — Our Place was founded in 2019 by three founders (Shiza Shahid, Amir Tehrani and Zach Rosner), the Always Pan uses a Thermakind ceramic coating, and its inclusivity mission is first-party and central. Our Place set a bigger table — proof that product plus mission can build a brand.

Keep Our Place’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.