Hey there, I’m Spencer Pugh, Founder of Form & Function. For years I've reviewed and explored products on a screen. Form & Function Magazine is the opposite of a screen - a printed, quarterly magazine interviewing the makers and founders creating objects worth keeping, and why. Thoughts straight from the founders, themselves, photography you want to linger on, matte pages made to be held, not scrolled.

Issue 001 ships July ‘26. Pre-orders are open now.

Alexander Häberlin is the co-founder and CMO of NoNormal, the Zurich-based outdoor brand behind the world's first coffee paste. It’s a Swiss-made, tube-packaged answer to the long-standing trail compromise between instant and a full pour-over setup. Before NoNormal, Alexander spent more than a decade in design and brand work, including a position as Head of Account Management at Notation Creative; his project credits span Sennheiser, Meta, and Leica. He holds an MA in Marketing Management and Business Development from the University of Applied Sciences of Northwestern Switzerland. He and co-founder Philippe Greinacher met as teenagers at a water-ski club outside Zurich and have remained close friends — and outdoor partners — ever since. NoNormal, now in its third year and shipping to more than a dozen countries, is the first business they've built together that cleared their own bar for product-market fit.

Website →
Instagram →
Hero product Classic Black →
Full outdoor coffee bundle →

Philippe asked a simple question: can we make coffee concentrate portable? That was it. No grand manifesto, just an honest frustration with how bad the options were.

We'd spent long days outside for years and had upgraded our gear—sleeping, clothing, navigation, etc.—but the coffee situation was always the same. Either you carry a bunch of gear which requires a whole setup and cleanup, or you bring instant coffee and accept the low-quality taste. Coffee was the one category where the honest answer was still "bring a sachet of Nescafé or deal with it."

We took the question to the food science team in Zurich. Can you make real coffee into a stable paste that fits in a tube, survives a backpack, doesn't need refrigeration, and actually tastes good when you add water? They said yes, and we spent roughly six months on the formulation. About a year later, a Swiss outdoor retailer committed to 600 tubes, and that was the moment we became a real company.

Philippe and I have always wanted to start a business together, and we have explored a few ideas in the past, but we have always reached a point where we realized that our ideas were either not doable or lacked product-market fit. That moment has never arrived with NoNormal; we are in our third year and selling in over 12 countries.

The easy version of this product would have been a better instant coffee. You can source powdered coffee from a dozen suppliers, put it in a nice pouch, and be done in three months. We didn't do that because instant always felt like the compromise we were trying to get away from.

So we went the other way and created something that had never existed before: a coffee paste. Not powder. Paste. And because we were the first to do this, there wasn’t a playbook. Every single decision came from scratch.

The packaging. Nobody had put coffee paste into a tube before, so there was no reference for what the tube needed to do, how it needed to seal, or how the paste would behave over months inside the aluminum. Moreover, the production process had to be designed around a format that the manufacturer had never ran. Also, we had no precedent for the shelf-life question, so we had to test it. Even something as basic as how a customer uses it in the field — cold hands, bad light, a cramped tent — had to be thought through because nobody had done this before us.

That's the constraint that shaped everything: not the tube specifically, not the recyclable material, but the fact that being first meant we couldn't take a single assumption for granted. Most product development involves decisions that have already been made for you. Not ours. Every answer had to be earned, which made the whole thing slower and harder and, honestly, more interesting than we expected.

If you walk into any supermarket right now and look at the new and trendy products, you’ll see things that are very good at being noticed: big illustrative fonts, bright colors, funky designs.

We went in the opposite direction, and I had to defend that constantly.

Our tubes are reduced to the point where they appear almost as gear: black, monospace type, a strict grid, and nothing that isn't load-bearing information. There are no illustrations, no decorative geography, no visual metaphors for the outdoors. People saw earlier versions and asked why there wasn't at least a small mountain somewhere. Or a sunrise? Something to signal the category.

The reason we didn't include these design elements was because NoNormal isn't like a pack of chips or ice cream. It's closer to precise Swiss-made gear. When someone puts a NoNormal tube in their pack, they're relying on it in the way they rely on a jacket or a headlamp. It has a job to do, and they need to trust it. Our gear design communicates trust through restraint and precision, and it looks like it was made by people who thought hard about what actually matters. A funky font and a little illustrated peak communicates something entirely different.

The reduction is the message. Everything on the tube is there because it needs to be there, and nothing else made it. I'm glad we held that line because I think it's the reason the product looks right in the environments that it's actually used in.

We removed the comparison to espresso machines and other "at home" coffee solutions. Early on, there was a temptation to say that this replaces your morning coffee at home; replaces the café; replaces the whole ritual. We cut that out completely. Our actual positioning became the opposite: we aren't trying to replace your espresso machine. We make coffee work where there isn’t an espresso machine available. That position was a deliberate decision, and we still protect it.

The expansion plan is genuinely open-ended. And our test question for new ideas is always the same: does this serve the moment you've earned after putting in the work? If it does, we'll consider it.

We have 3 new products in the pipeline that we are super excited about, and we can share more very soon.

The U.S. is the main commercial focus right now, and much of our energy over the next year will be getting the distribution and marketing infrastructure right. But we are also expanding around the world with the help of our distributors.

What won’t change is our manufacturing standard: Swiss-made, formulated with an uncompromising precision. There are many ways to make our product cheaper, but we always want to deliver the highest quality. Additionally, we are working on the discipline of saying “no.” That's harder than it sounds when you're a small company and every opportunity feels like it deserves a “yes.” The product is as good as it is partly because of what we refused to do. At the end of the day, we are a two-man show. Accepting one thing means not doing another, so we have to be super conscious about that.

Snow Peak. This Japanese outdoor brand has been around since the late 1950s. They make cooking equipment, cups, and everything for being outside. There is nothing decorative on their gear, and yet it is genuinely beautiful. They treat function and form as a single question rather than as two separate, negotiating departments. And they've held that approach for decades, which is the hard part. They have made purely functional objects like a plate or a stove into desirable objects while staying absolutely true to the function and quality of their products.
@snowpeakusa

My Riese & Müller cargo bike. These guys have perfected a functional, fun, and durable bike that lets me pick up my kids, deliver orders, do events, and much more while still being fun to ride.

Both coming from Switzerland with a product made in Switzerland, Swiss design for us is a core principle of our Brand and Product design. It surprises me again and again that the best solution is always the simplest, which is not always obvious from the get-go. It usually takes a whole loop to return to what really matters for the customer at each touchpoint. We are still learning everyday how to break it down to the pure essence of what really matters.  

I take a lot of inspiration for brands vs. from books: Brands like teenage engineering, Apple, Flos, etc. for products but more and more also from CPG and fashion brands such as Satisfy, David, Cadence, etc.

Also Industrial designers often think they are also graphic designers - and even if I am currently also covering that discipline I am realizing more and more how complex of a discipline is even if it might seem so simple at its surface. But I love diving into it and challenging myself to create consistent, yet exciting products and interfaces.

Simple but gold. Before doing anything at the office, I write down what I want to get done that day and sort them by priority (I use Apple Reminders to add any task that pops in my mind throughout the day and use it as the base to pull the tasks of the day; these then go on a piece of paper). If I can get 80% of the list done by the end of the day, I set the right amount.

My MacBook Air. These devices have gotten so incredible. I use it every day. I literally run my entire business on it, and it just works and never disappoints. I feel like these things are not getting enough credit.

Be laser-focused about who the product for. If you are making it for everybody, you are making it for nobody. The smaller the group to start off with, the better.

Espresso, macchiato, or flat white when a good café is available. If not, NoNormal ;)

Editor’s note: The name's Bond. James Bond.