At Milan Design Week 2026, KRILLMAT joins forces with SLIDE, Starbucks Italia, and Favaretto & Partners to showcase circular design
Milan, March 25, 2026. KRILLMAT (formerly known as Krill Design) announces its participation in Milan Design Week 2026 (April 20 – 26) as a material innovation partner in one of the event’s most sustainability-oriented initiatives. In collaboration with SLIDE, Starbucks Italia and the creative studio Favaretto & Partners, KRILLMAT brings the principles of the circular economy to life within the Starbucks store at Via Durini 28, Milan.
At the heart of the project is REKRILL®, KRILLMAT’s patented compound obtained from recycled spent coffee grounds. REKRILL® transforms what would be an organic byproduct of the coffee supply chain into a high-performance bio-based polymer with wide applications in industrial design and furniture. For KRILLMAT, this collaboration represents a significant milestone: the debut of its material technology in the real world within a globally recognized retail context, proving that recovered materials can have a second life, meeting the aesthetic and functional needs of contemporary hospitality design.
The project took shape through an extensive creative partnership with SLIDE, a Milanese design and production company renowned for its collections of furniture and accessories, including those made from innovative materials. The Reborn collection, created with ecoBirdy (a project dedicated to the second life of materials and circular production), serves as the backdrop for the installation. Each piece of furniture installed in the Starbucks store demonstrates that design with recycled materials can be lightweight, durable, and visually appealing at the same time.
KRILLMAT and SLIDE share a common language: the belief that waste is not an end, but a beginning.
“Milan Design Week is the perfect stage to show what REKRILL® can do in the real world,” says IVAN CALIMANI, CEO at KRILLMAT. “Working with SLIDE was natural from the start: we share the same conviction that materials born from waste can be beautiful, functional, and commercially viable. This project marks the beginning of what we intend to build as a long-term partnership, founded on shared values, industrial ambition, and a common commitment to making circular materials a standard in contemporary design.”
For Starbucks Italia, the project represents a further step in its journey toward increasingly sustainable innovation, while simultaneously strengthening dialogue and collaboration with the creative community. The project interacts with an initiative already active in Starbucks stores, Grounds for your Garden, where customers can pick up spent coffee grounds for free from special containers. The coffee grounds thus become part of a broader path of awareness toward reuse practices and waste reduction.
Those same grounds now find new life as REKRILL®, closing a local circle from the cup to the material to the design object.
The creative direction and product design for the installation are by Favaretto & Partners, an internationally renowned studio active since 1973. For the occasion, the studio has designed TOGETHER, a completely new product debuting at this year’s Design Week and available in three versions (ice bucket, vase, and side table) born from the meeting of Ambrogio and Amanda. The installation’s color palette consists of two shades inspired by the different stages of coffee, from the raw bean to the finished espresso, reinforcing a coherent and immediately recognizable narrative through material, product, and space.
A three-meter-tall sculpture of Ambrogio, created as a unique piece for the occasion, welcomes visitors outside the Starbucks store as an iconic sign of the collaboration. The sculpture is made in a coffee shade that chromatically recalls the universe of the beverage, while the apron is finished in institutional Starbucks green. Conceived as an urban landmark, the intervention amplifies the project’s visibility during Design Week, transforming the store’s outdoor space into a point of attraction and storytelling for the public.
