Spencer Fried is the co-founder of REMSEN, a Brooklyn design brand rethinking the objects of aging. The idea took hold when Spencer and his co-founder Sam found themselves living with multiple generations under one roof during COVID. They watched up close how hard aging really is and how little the market offered this demographic. REMSEN was their answer, a growing collection of considered objects: a pill container, a grab bar, and more, designed to sit comfortably alongside everything else you’ve carefully chosen for your home. They want to keep the journey of aging something to look forward to.

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The idea took hold when my co-founder and I both found ourselves living with multiple generations under one roof during COVID. By watching our parents care for our grandparents, we saw the difficulty of the aging process, made worse by a lack of meaningful market solutions. It kept nagging at us; this was a space you could genuinely change with better designs. The lack of good options and the low quality across the board is exactly what pushed us to make what we make.

We spend our whole lives aspiring toward our future selves. So, it feels backwards that during the second half of life—right when our taste is finally honed and we know ourselves best—that the world hands us mediocrity. REMSEN is the opposite of that. We want to meet you in the second half. And for the younger generation, we want to keep the journey of aging something to look forward to.

I’d already spent a few years designing and project managing at the well-regarded Post Company, working on some deeply inspiring hospitality projects. Sam was doing the same at Herzog & de Meuron, the world-renowned Swiss architecture office.

We worked within a whole litany of constraints. The two biggest were that neither of us had designed for mass manufacture before, and we were complete novices at e-commerce and the corresponding marketing. However, we were committed to owning as much of the process as we could, rather than falling back on the old model of licensing our designs to a bigger brand. That meant learning fast and taking on a lot of firsts.

The larger and harder-to-pin-down constraint was the weight of preconception around aging and the products associated with it. Shifting people’s perceptions took real work, and it still does. Very few companies had challenged the status quo before us, so we drew inspiration from the design, fashion, and wellness brands that we’ve always admired. Then, we worked out how to bring those principles into our own age-focused designs.

We got pushback early on for how premium the products were. People found it hard to wrap their heads around a two-hundred-dollar pill container, mostly because they’d never seen one. But these objects should be considered alongside other premium furniture or fixtures. They are designed to sit comfortably alongside everything else you’ve carefully chosen for your home. That’s exactly where we recognized the opportunity for innovation, and it’s still there.

We resisted the temptation to launch a sprawl of SKUs and colorways. As a new, founder-led, bootstrapped brand, carrying a pile of variations on the same flagship product would have been a costly mistake. Every new color basically counts as a new product. Letting go of that pressure let us be far more considered and curatorial going forward, especially regarding how we approached color and material.

When we first launched, it was crickets on the sales front. We barely had the money to fund the first purchase order. But that’s the deal when you start a business; you’re always sitting with that risk-and-reward tradeoff. We had to stay persistent with the marketing until we had enough pre-orders to justify placing an order. A bootstrapped business is really just one make-or-break moment after another, and over time you get better at handling them. I don’t think there’s a single company out there that isn’t facing its own version of that on the regular.

James Dyson, Steve Jobs, Dennis Paphitis of Aesop, Hermès, Miuccia Prada, Alberto Alessi. All of them—the people and brands alike—come back to the same values we hold close: authenticity, quality, individuality, and longevity.

We have so many goals that the real discipline is figuring out how to sequence them. That being said, more products are certainly coming as well as services to go alongside them. I get genuinely excited about the world-building side of REMSEN. We have the chance to be part of people’s lives over a long stretch, and I keep asking how we can keep showing up for them the whole time. In the same spirit, I want to keep reshaping how people think about aging across all kinds of media. But we have to move one foot in front of the other and hold a long view, focusing on one effort at a time and delivering fully on the first before reaching for the next.

I’ve always held Craighill in high esteem. They’re remarkably thoughtful about their products and really good at building excitement around them. You can tell they have a lot of fun with design.

My great-grandfather’s ring, passed down to me by my grandfather. It’s from the early 1900s, quartered in rose and yellow gold with a round diamond at its center. It means the world to me because my grandfather was an entrepreneur and wearing it lets me feel that spirit.

David Senra’s podcast Founders—without question. It’s shaped how I think the whole way through building REMSEN. There’s so much worth learning from the founders who came before us.

A morning walk with my coffee. An absolute must.

My Breville Bambino. I didn’t expect to love the ritual of making my own lattes as much as I do, and no longer buying them doesn’t hurt either.

Focus on quality, learn how your product actually gets made, and simplify wherever you can.

A regular hot latte with whole or oat milk.

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The quarterly print magazine about things worth keeping. Matte, printed, made to be held. Ships August ‘26.