Marin Sawa has used her passion for material to show the
identity of the brand. The philosophy of Radboud is to
make the coffin and the body one,to understand the
structure of the body as part of other natural resources.
Marin sawa has been able to take this a step further and
litteraly go into the structure of human skin and wood,
and to visualize this through biotechnologies.
The video is placed in the showroom of Radboud Spruit.
It has a very personal purpose as the viewer gets the
opportunity to get close to a small sized screen in a
huge space. Only one person can watch at one time so it
feels like this person completely gets into the materials
and experiences the suttle movements one on one.

Radboud makes coffins which are very different than what we’ve used to see within ages. If we look back we can see that coffins in general didn’t change a lot and it is something which is strongly grounded in our mind that we are not risking to change. Despite all the fears and traditions Radboud is willing to change and he is very glad this change is being appreciated.
The reason he started doing this work is the death of his mother. From a very young age he grew up without speaking about death as it wasn’t an open discussion at home. Death became a mystery to Radboud and he started to feel fear for it. As a child the traditions required him to go to church and sometimes also see funeral ceremonies which was also full of fear to him. When the day came that his mother passed away and the funeral took place he was all the time haunted by the thought about how bad and uninviting the coffin of his mother was looking. He didn’t want to get close to it while he wanted to be close to his mother. So this is how strong the negative energy of the coffin actually was. At that moment he started thinking that one day he will make a perfect coffin in which his mother was supposed to be buried in. This idea kept on turning in his head every day. Not losing anymore time he started making. Many many versions were just being destroyed. Still he didn’t stop trying till one day he finally thought “This is it, this is the one which belonged to my mother” and he called the coffin Petronella (his mother’s name).
The next step after reaching the expected results he thought about selling it. And so he started calling funeral homes. After several  rejections he finally convinced a director to take a look at the coffin. The visit was worth it as the man was positively surprised by the work and asked immediately for a quick delivery date. So this is where it all started.
Though Radboud prefers more to work with clients personally since his approach is very personal. He gets in touch with his clients, they visit his workplace and choose a coffin. Often the client is the person who is actually going to be buried in the coffin. So Radboud is used to meet very ill people,  people who are in deep mourning and he educated himself to deal normal with terrible stories and extremely sad situations. He found the ability to not only communicate with these people but also share their sadness without suffering every single time.
“it is their sadness and I respect it, I share it and I want to feel what they feel, I don’t hide my emotions but when these people leave my workplace they take their sadness with them. It is their story and they are the ones have to keep it.”
While Radboud has a very personal tension to every coffin he makes, he also wants to deliver by himself. Again he gets in a very personal  contact with the clients, with relatives and friends and even puts the body in the coffin with his own hands. To him a coffin is just a cover for the body, it is an extra layer on the body so it has to feel soft like the human skin and look beautiful like the human body. Within years long experience helped to not only get rid of the fear he used to have but also find the beauty in it. Radboud discovered the beauty and the natural part of death. It was beautiful when he said “I realized that death is just a natural part of life”, unconsciously he called it “part of life” and not “end of life” so the scare factor of the black ending is replaced by the beautiful process of nature where death is an unpredictable and unescapable thing.
When it comes to the selection of materials Radboud has to be very careful. It took him a long time to research the body composing process and what it requires for a natural process of composing. Of course the main material is wood as it doesn’t affect nature and just becomes a part of the ground while the wood that was used for coffins 50 years ago was very resistant and stayed longer in its shape. Most of the factories produce coffins made from wood types which are deforming because of the weight pressure of the ground. Radboud  pays good attention to all these aspects when choosing material. He also looks for the warm and soft feeling of the texture. Another reason for choosing this certain multiplex wood is its bright color because sometimes people customize their ordered coffin by painting or decorating. He prefers to give their choosen design and allow them to make changes rather then getting change make another design by a custom request. Within time he came up with new design ideas but didn’t manage to do that since he’s working alone and has barely the time to finish the current tasks.
Radboud started a project in Pakistan years ago, while he used to work with drug addicts in his previous job, he gave ex-addicts in Pakistan the opportunity to feel better through collaborating with him. So he gave them the task to create the wooden butterflies which are a way to close a coffin manually by children during the funeral. The butterflies are meant to give children the chance to have a connection with the coffin and so feel free to see death. They can attach a butterfly themselves, experience the situation with participating in it and make a memory of the ceremony. This is what he was missing as a child and wants to change it for the upcoming generations.
The sizes of the coffins used to be made standard but then Radboud figured out that there cannot be a standard as body types are very different and the body is ridiculously deforming in a short term when the client is facing death so most of the time the sizes are custom made.
The smallest coffin radboud has ever made was for an early born child. Besides this he has made many other coffins for babies and children. His vision of these coffins is also beautiful. He created an egg shaped coffin for an unborn symbolism. Another example is the cradle coffin which is again very symbolic and communicates the softness of the death.
According to Radboud his ideas have been copied several times by other producers but have never shown the same results as he is the only one who puts so much care, attention and personal connection to every piece. This is also the reason why his recent collaboration with a furniture factory didn’t work out. “They were missing the mindset which I’ve created within so many years” so it wasn’t the right team for him. Once again it made him realize that he has to go on alone and keep the personal approach as an identity of his product.
“The day when my work will not make a change anymore I will stop this job. My intention when making a coffin is to have a beautiful result, another original piece and not the thoughts about making money”.
 So he has never really focused on his product as something expandable. Reaching the success he has now took very very long, almost ten years of hard work.
 “For people who want to start making coffins and ask advice about the industry I tell them they have to be patient as it grows very slow and unpredictable.”
Giovanni Maisto Ferreira, Veronika Babayan

Marin is a designer and researcher, practising at the intersection of design and biotechnology. She is particularly interested in the synthesis of art, science and technology in the context of the urban environment and ecology.

She previously studied at the Architectural Association for her BA (Hons), Architecture and RIBA part1. She spent several years in Tokyo working for various architects firms and charismatic designers, including Taisuke Higuchi (Mackintosh/Globe Trotter Marunouchi), the renowned architects office, Kengo Kuma and Associates (Tokyo Agricultural University Museum, Designers Mansions 'Ajito', exhibition designs, the web design for the Kengo Kuma office), which led her to explore her passion for material structures culminating in a master's degree at Central Saint Martins entitled Design For Textile Futures, from which she has graduated with distinction.

Recent awards include the 2012 UAL International Graduate Scholarship, for funding her research degree at CSM, and 2012 Color in Design Award sponsored by Pantone.
Currently, as of the duration of her PhD (2011/12-2015), she is an appointed visiting reseacher and the Designer in Residence at Biochemistry Dep. (The Nixon Group), Sir Ernst Chain Building – Wolfson Laboratories, Imperial College London. This unique collaboration has been forged through the Energy Futures Lab, Imperial College, based on the commonality, algae, between her best-known work, Algaerium and their algal research: she continues to explore an intersection of design and algal biotechnology.