Chances are while you’ve been stuck at home this winter (and last fall, and last summer, and last spring), you’ve done a bit of a reorganizing at home. (Or at least you’ve thought about it.)
Home organization guru Marie Kondo is launching a new collection of storage products with the Container Store, based on Kondo’s signature KonMari method.
“If anything, the pandemic has reinforced the importance of tidying and organizing the home,” Kondo tells Fortune via email. “Your home has become your office, your school, your day care, your gym, your everything.”
The Container Store x KonMari line features more than 100 sustainably sourced products, all designed with Kondo’s familiar theme, “To spark joy,” while keeping all of the rooms in your home tidy.
“When I moved to the United States, I wanted to learn about the storage and organization business in this country, so I visited the Container Store to do some research. I was beyond impressed!” says Kondo. “So when I was looking to develop products, I knew they could deliver a versatile line that would also spark joy.”
The assortment of products—including rattan wicker baskets, wall-mounted kids’ bookshelves, a three-tier bamboo expandable shelf for your kitchen condiments, and the light-gray–hued Calm & Clarity desktop organization set—is touted as being made from premium materials and touches multiple areas of the home, including closets, the kitchen, the home office, and children’s play areas, while complementing a variety of styles and pre-existing home aesthetics.
“I’ve learned over the years that people like different designs and have different tastes, so it was important that this collaboration offer variety but be made with high-quality materials,” Kondo says. “I am also delighted that we were able to imbue some aspects of my Japanese heritage into the collaboration. For example, the Shoji collection was inspired by the latticework in traditional Japanese room dividers. These bamboo organizers are both functional and elegant, just like traditional shoji.”
Kondo says she is especially partial to the Hikidashi storage boxes for keeping clothing orderly within drawers, which she describes as the “ultimate storage solution.”
“We tested many sizes until we landed on the optimal dimensions and configurations for drawers and closets,” Kondo explains. “Made from strong and sustainable paper, they’re perfect for organizing your clothes, accessories, and most treasured items.”
While Kondo has enjoyed enormous success and popularity through her books, home products, and the hit Netflix series Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, her brand’s expansion through consumer products has not gone without criticism. One of the pillars of her organizational method is to clean up the mess and throw out what you don’t need—or what doesn’t spark joy. That someone who has built her brand on the concept of decluttering your life and your home would then sell you more things strikes some as counterintuitive.
But Kondo has emphasized that the decision to throw something out or not is subjective, and that it’s not always about getting rid of whatever you might have in excess (see The Books Controversy) but perhaps giving it a new life.
The debut of the collaboration with the Container Store—also a favorite retailer of the hosts of another Netflix interior design series, The Home Edit—follows a little more than a year after the release of Kondo’s curated KonMari e-commerce shop, which features higher-end products, organized by activity (versus a breakdown by rooms), such as dinner parties, bathing routines, aromatherapy, and purification rituals.
The collection will be available starting this month at the Container Store’s website as well as in its brick-and-mortar locations currently open nationwide.
“My hope is that the items in my collaboration with the Container Store will keep people’s treasured items safe for years to come,” Kondo says. “Plus, there’s no better time to tidy up than at the start of a new year. So I wanted to make sure that we had the right storage and organizational tools for people to get the job done.”
