brand to know
More than just a cookware brand, Our Place is on a mission to make the kitchen toxin-free and culturally inclusive. We met its co-founder Shiza Shahid to hear her recipe for success
Accept an invitation to the home of Shiza Shahid and her husband Amir Tehrani and you can be sure of a good meal – perhaps prepared using fresh ingredients from the farmer’s market just down the road from their LA house – but, admits Shadid, ‘I’m not one for too much small talk.’ After founding Our Place in 2019, with the help of fellow business partner Zach Rosner, the entrepreneurs have been busy turning their ‘Always Pans’ and ‘Perfect Pots’ (as well as tableware) into some of the most covetable pieces for today’s kitchens. It’s not just about the products though; for Shahid, the aim is to effect change. It’s no surprise she doesn’t have much time for idle chit-chat.
‘Ultimately, we believe that a business is just a set of decisions. The more times you choose to do a slightly kinder thing, whether that’s something as small as where you’re ordering lunch from or as big as donating over two million meals to food charities worldwide, it all adds up,’ says Shahid. For every new collection Our Place launches, she selects a charity to benefit, and her altruism began long before she founded her company. Growing up in Islamabad, Pakistan, Shahid became a student activist and refugee-camp volunteer and, in 2013, after having moved to the USA to study, she quit her job to become co-founder of the Malala Fund with her friend, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Malala Yousafzai.
It’s an experience that has, no doubt, shown her the power people have to disrupt the status quo. And that’s just what she aims to do in the kitchen. Her first task was to make a stand against toxins. Every Our Place pan features the brand’s own non-stick coating, made without any potentially toxic materials such as PFAS (the family of harmful compounds found in Teflon), PTFEs and PFOAs. ‘We believe th
