In Focus: Palet

Palet began as an experiment between longtime friends Gilles, Jaap and Niels. Drawing on backgrounds in graphic design, furniture and creative production, the three developed their own machine for applying glaze to ceramic tiles—and, in the process, created a visual language shaped by its limitations.

What started as a basement project has since grown into a surface design system used across homes, restaurants, shops and larger commercial spaces. Sitting between hand-painted ceramics and conventional mass production, Palet allows designers to create something highly customizable without losing the ability to produce at scale.

We spoke with the three founders about building Palet, turning technical constraints into a distinct aesthetic and preserving the original idea as the company continues to grow.

Photography by Olly Geary

  • Andrew: You each arrived at Palet through different paths across design, furniture and marketing. Can you tell us a little about your individual backgrounds, how you came together and what each of you brings to the business?

    Palet: Gilles and Jaap met at school around 18–20 years ago, when they both started studying graphic design. They quickly became friends and, not long after, roommates.

    Gilles and Niels met around the same time in their hometown. Niels was running a small creative shop, designing and printing T-shirts, and Gilles came in looking to get some of his own designs printed. That first encounter soon turned into the odd creative job together, from T-shirt graphics to visuals for events. Jaap joined a little later, and before long the three of us were working on all sorts of small-scale projects together.

    Eventually, we went our separate ways to learn, grow and pursue our own careers, while staying in touch along the way.

    Years later, Gilles and Jaap both ended up living in Antwerp, just around the corner from each other. Gilles was developing the first version of the initial printer at the time and, since they had always wanted to keep making things together, they started exploring what they could do with it.

    It turned out to be tiles.

    What followed was a long period of experimenting, testing and simply making things we liked. Over time, the possibilities became clearer and we reached a point where it felt like this could become something more than a creative side project. We decided to turn it into an actual brand.

    It didn’t take long to realise that we could use some extra help to make that happen, so Gilles and Jaap reached out to Niels again. A few days later, he flew over from LA to see what they had been working on.

    He was on board. And that became Palet.

    G: I used to be a graphic designer. I had a studio and worked for the usual list of suspects, sport brands and so on. That was only ever to pay the bills and fund experiments. Those experiments eventually got me obsessed with printing designs on ceramic tiles. That completely spiralled and became the beginning of Palet.

    My role at Palet sits between R&D and making sure production capacity grows faster than sales, including the infrastructure that makes that possible. We almost never sell the same product twice, so getting each order prepped, produced and shipped to the right client is a puzzle that still keeps me entertained every day.

    J: I dropped out of art school to start working for a small independent agency. One of their clients was Morentz, a high-end gallery specialising in mid-century furniture. From the first moment I walked in, I was sold. I eventually started working there, helping out with photography, restoration, sales, and basically a bit of everything.

    Later on, I worked with a few other smaller galleries as well, while continuing to take on design projects on the side, mostly just for fun.

    Niels likes to describe me as the “aesthetic compass” of the company. I’m involved in pretty much everything around the brand, whether it’s in-house design work, shoots or collaborations. I also manage our glaze collection and keep a close eye on the quality and finish of the product together with Gilles.

    N: I’ve spent most of my career somewhere between creativity and execution. I started out in advertising and digital production, and over the years moved into leading creative production and operations for larger international teams and companies, including Netflix. A lot of that work was about figuring out how to take ambitious creative ideas and actually make them happen at scale.

    Eventually, that career took me to LA. When Gilles and Jaap offered to show me what they had been working on, I was in a pretty comfortable place professionally. But saw the printer, the tiles and everything they had been experimenting with, and immediately felt there was something there. Not long after, I left LA and moved back to the Netherlands.

    That background still defines a lot of what I do today. I focus mainly on the commercial, operational and strategic side of the company: how we grow the company, reach more architects and designers, and build a design system capable of delivering something highly creative at scale. In that sense, my role is often about connecting Gilles and Jaap’s creative ambitions with the practical question of how we actually make them happen.

  • A: Neither of you came from ceramics or engineering, yet you spent several years developing your own machine to apply glaze to tiles. Can you briefly explain how it works, what kept you committed to the process and when you first felt it might actually work?

    A: Luckily, YouTube taught us a lot, and a good amount of dedication has brought us to where we are today. The system itself is quite simple: you select one of our patterns and two glaze colours, and the design is then printed onto bisque ceramic tiles.

    Back in the day, we used a different version of our printer which was a flatbed printer. Trays of 24 tiles were fed into the machine one after another, and the printer would move across them, applying the glaze according to the selected pattern.

    Of course, as a business, you’re always looking for ways to improve. We’ve spent a lot of time, and money, on R&D, particularly on making the production process more efficient. This eventually led to the new generation of machines we’re working with now, which are semi-automatic.

  • A: You built the machine and developed the visual language of Palet alongside it. How have the two continued to influence one another?

    A: The machine dictates what we can make. In essence, it is a very low-resolution printer, which means it comes with quite a few limitations. However, with our background in graphic design, we’ve managed to turn those limitations into our own aesthetic, using them to create unique patterns that have become quite recognisable and characteristic of what we do.

  • A: You describe Palet as a “surface design system” rather than simply a tile company. What does that distinction mean to you and how does it change the way you think about a space?

    Palet: What we do is a little different from other manufacturers in the industry. We have developed a system that allows you to design your own tiles, making them a much more intentional design choice compared to standard off-the-shelf options.

    We saw that traditionally there were two ends of the spectrum: fully custom, hand-painted tiles, which can be beautiful but are often priced more like pieces of art, and large-scale bulk production, which offers far less flexibility. Our system sits somewhere in between. It allows you to easily create your own tile design, which can then be produced from as little as one square metre (~10 square feet).

    In addition, as mentioned earlier, our patterns have developed a recognisable visual identity of their own. We are always interested in exploring how these patterns could translate into other objects, materials and applications.

    We think it would be particularly interesting to explore how they could be applied to textiles and surfaces such as rugs, for example, and to see how the character of the patterns changes when translated into a completely different material.

  • A: Palet has grown from basement experiments to producing work for homes, restaurants, shops and large commercial projects. What has been the most challenging part of that transition and is there a project that changed how you saw the potential of Palet?

    Palet: It’s not really one specific project that has changed things, but more the way we approach finding solutions that can best serve the different demands we see coming in.

    I think one of the biggest lessons has been the importance of staying focused and not getting distracted along the way by all the other things that might also be interesting to build. Obviously, highly customizable options are great to have, but they tend to make things much more complex and difficult to scale. We had to start thinking much more in terms of systems and repeatable solutions, and that became crucial as we grew.

    It goes without saying that scaling the company has come with its challenges. We sometimes joke that, because of the pace at which we’re growing, the company looks completely different every three months.

  • A: Away from Palet, what do each of you find yourselves drawn to and does any of it find its way back into the work?

    G: The past five years feel like a blur where every second was tiles and nothing else. Now that we actually have a factory, my brain is starting to go in different directions again. Recently I’ve been making tiles that resemble my older work: more figurative pieces, pieces, and collages that feel closer to paintings. Some of that research stays personal. Some of it opens doors for future Palet products.

    J: I’m obsessed with vintage furniture and objects, and with interior design in general. I often catch myself imagining our tiles in certain interiors or interiors or in places I’ve visited. I then try to translate those ideas into something tangible, experimenting with options and doing little tests to see how they might work.

    N: I’m very much a creative cheerleader. When it comes to taste, I look up to my partners and enjoy seeing the ideas they come up with. I love the challenge of helping an original idea grow without losing what made them interesting in the first place. Outside of Palet, I try to help other founders where I can. I learn something from almost every conversation, and those different perspectives inevitably find their way back into how I think about Palet.