The company traces its start to a bag from Madagascar.

rice, written in lower case, is a Danish homeware and accessories brand. Its own account of where it came from begins in 1998. The company says that in that year Charlotte and Philippe Guéniau were living a busy life in Paris, with good jobs and a newborn son, and that after fifteen years in the city they began to want something slower, more colourful and freer. The idea for rice, the company says, had been forming quietly for some time, and it took its first real step over lunch at a Danish country property.

The first product in that story is a raffia bag from Madagascar. rice says it still makes exactly the same type of bag today, and that the bags sold so well at the start that it had to ration orders. Encouraged by the response, the company says, Charlotte and Philippe widened the range quickly, always with colour, playfulness and function in mind. rice sums up the approach in three Danish words, “Sjovt. Skævt. Funktionelt.” — fun, quirky, functional — and says the line is a way of thinking rather than a slogan.

The move from Paris led to Odense on the island of Funen. The Argentine newspaper La Nación, in a feature on Scandinavian colour published on 30 January 2015, visited the offices and the home of rice’s owners in Odense. It reported that the couple had lived together in Paris for fifteen years and chose Odense because it was where Charlotte came from, and it said that Charlotte designed the products.

Melamine, baskets and party goods.

By the 2010s the range had grown far beyond bags. The design blog decor8, writing on 6 June 2018, described rice as a Danish homewares and accessories company known for colourful melamine, baskets, party goods and storage. Party goods are not a late addition in that description but sit in the same list as the tableware and baskets, and the brand’s current Danish website still gives party items (“Fest”) a section of their own in its navigation.

The same decor8 post covered a move into a new material. It reported that rice had expanded into Portuguese porcelain with a collection called Everyday Magic, made in Portugal, and described designs including a watercolour floral plate, a pink marbled motif, and leopard and cockatoo patterns on plates and mugs. In the post, Charlotte Gueniau, named as the company’s founder and creative director, set out the aim in her own words: “Our wish is to surround you with objects that are down to earth but still funky, fun and functional.”

That phrase, repeated in different forms across the brand’s own writing, is the closest thing rice has to a published design brief. The company’s story page says it designs “with a twinkle in the eye” and with a love for small everyday moments, and it presents the business as still run in the spirit of the first bags. On where the goods are made, La Nación reported in 2015 that rice produces abroad; the porcelain line is the case documented by name, made in Portugal according to decor8.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make or sell the things people buy for a celebration: paper plates and napkins, balloons, banners, tableware, decorations and the catalogues and shops that bring them together. Party-supply brands sit at many different points in the trade, from small design studios that print their own papers to wholesale makers and national retail chains, and a single name can turn up on a supermarket shelf, in a mail-order catalogue and on a party table at home.

A party brand’s identity is usually carried less by one product than by colour, pattern and a recognisable name, because the company behind it may have changed hands, moved its production or widened its range far beyond where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its goods are actually designed and made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its goods are made and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A founder-led brand on Funen.

rice remains closely tied to the people who started it. The tourism board VisitOdense describes Charlotte Gueniau as the founder and creative director of the Odense-based interior design company rice, in a page where she recommends places in her home city, among them the Tidens Samling museum of twentieth-century everyday life and a boat trip on the Odense river that starts at Munke Mose. She says on that page that when the company has customers visiting from abroad, they take them on the river trip too. The page sums up her view of the city in a line of its own: safe, child-friendly and village-like.

The company’s web address has changed over time. The older rice.dk domain now forwards to ricebyrice.com, where the story page and the shop sit.

The brand’s own writing is consistent about what it wants its goods to do. Its story page says rice was born of a wish to make everyday life more joyful, “to design a life full of everyday magic”, and that the mission was clear from day one: fun, quirky, functional. The same idea of everyday magic gave the 2018 porcelain line its name, and decor8 quoted Charlotte Gueniau using nearly the same three adjectives — funky, fun and functional — to describe the objects she wants to surround people with. La Nación included the company in its 2015 feature on the colours of Scandinavian design, for which its writers travelled to Odense, the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen, to visit the rice offices and the owners’ home.

For a design guide, rice shows how a homeware brand can turn a mood into a system — a lower-case name, a loud palette and a short motto applied the same way to a plate, a basket and a party table. Compare an American paper-party brand in our Coterie brand guidelines and a British stationery and party-paper studio in our Hester & Cook brand guidelines. For this guide we use party pink, sunflower and lagoon with a berry-plum accent and a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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