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Outdoor Voices' color-blocked, tri-tone warmup leggings did the near-impossible: made workout pants seem cool. Now, with a new line of fitness accessories—made not of the usual plasticky foam but of cork—the company is upping the looks of your workout regimen again. That’s what happens when a Parsons School of Design graduate gets into fitness.
The $150 Shapes Bundle includes a rectangular block, a triangular block, and a roller, all of them made entirely from cork. You could leave them on your coffee table and they'd look like art.
That's a potentially revolutionary idea in that market. "Those things are pretty unattractive, and you don’t want to leave those ugly foam pink shapes lying around," says Joey Guerra, who co-founded New York studio Visibility and handled the industrial design of the Shapes Bundle. “We looked at wood, felt, and other holistic materials, but we drove cork home pretty early on,” Guerra says. “Cork is sustainable, it grows in the bark of trees, is antimicrobial, and can be milled really easily into any shape you need.”
Everyone on Outdoor Voices' staff---and folks from Sky Ting Yoga in New York---tested the new shapes. The feedback resulted in nips and tucks to the standard yoga block, which Guerra says often are arbitrarily sized. These blocks are a tad bigger and have handles to encourage a wider range of motion. (And the roller has facets; the triangle is just unusual.) Guerra says he hopes the shapes encourage users to find new poses and new ways to stretch. Until then, they're going to look darn good even when they're on the floor and you're, um, "posing" on the couch.
