When I was growing up, there was one drawer in our kitchen, just below the gas stove, that seemed to contain almost everything.
Open it and you could find the pakkad, spoons, knives with those familiar plastic handles, spatulas, stainless-steel tools, strainers and assorted gadgets accumulated over the years. Everything had a place, technically. The place just happened to be the same drawer.
I don't think I ever considered it disorganised. That was simply what a kitchen drawer looked like.
What I certainly couldn't have imagined was that more than 30 years later, I would still see versions of that same drawer in modern Indian kitchens - and that I would be bringing a brand to India that began by trying to solve almost exactly that problem.
That brand is madesmart.
We solved storage. Did we solve organisation?
Indian kitchens have changed enormously since then.
We moved from shelves and standalone cupboards to modular kitchens. We plan drawers, cabinets, corners, pantry units and appliance spaces before the kitchen is installed. Kitchens themselves have moved from being closed utility areas to increasingly visible, social spaces connected to our dining and living rooms.
And yet, once the carpenter or kitchen company leaves, we begin filling those beautifully designed cabinets.
Slowly, the drawer becomes the drawer again.
That is because storage and organisation are not quite the same thing.
Storage answers: Where do I put all these things?
Organisation asks: How do I arrange them so I can see them, reach them, use them and put them back without thinking about it?
That distinction matters even more in India, where kitchen space is precious. In research we commissioned from Kantar, lack of kitchen space emerged as the most commonly cited barrier to purchasing kitchen products - mentioned by 45% of consumers overall and 53% of thinKitchen users.
If we cannot endlessly create more space, perhaps we have to become considerably better at using the space we already have.
There is a little Marie Kondo in this
Marie Kondo made the world think differently about clutter. But beyond the famous idea of whether something 'sparks joy', there is a very practical principle underneath it: similar things should belong together, and every object should have a defined home.
That philosophy makes particular sense in a kitchen.
The objective isn't to create an impossibly perfect Instagram kitchen. It is simply to reduce the number of tiny irritations we have accepted as normal - searching for the peeler, lifting three things to reach the fourth, finding duplicate gadgets because we forgot we already owned one, or leaving wet brushes and bottles around the sink because there is nowhere sensible to keep them.
Good organisation shouldn't make you think more.
It should make you think less.
Which brings me back to that drawer
There is something almost poetic about the fact that madesmart itself began with a drawer.
In 1990, founder Devee Joy McNally created the Original Junk Drawer Organizer. From that first product, madesmart spent the next 35 years developing organisation solutions for drawers, cabinets, pantries, refrigerators, sinks and other parts of the home. The company's philosophy has remained remarkably consistent: solve everyday problems that are often unseen but felt.
They were also early in treating drawer organisation as a designed product category rather than simply putting plastic dividers into a drawer, introducing drawer organisers with soft-grip overmoulding and later clear versions with overmoulding.
The Gadget Tray is therefore one of the products I immediately relate to.
It takes my childhood 'everything drawer' and gives different objects defined spaces. The version we are introducing in India is designed specifically for the mix of smaller kitchen tools that otherwise inevitably migrate into one pile.
This is not revolutionary technology.
It is simply someone looking at an ordinary irritation and saying: this can work better.
Sometimes the innovation is in the material
One of the madesmart innovations I find particularly interesting is Drying Stone.
Think about the area around an Indian kitchen sink: the soap bottle, sponge, scrubber, cleaning brush and, very often, the small pool of water that permanently seems to live underneath them.
Madesmart developed its Drying Stone range in 2019 using diatomite - a highly porous mineral that rapidly absorbs moisture and allows it to evaporate. Rather than simply collecting water in another plastic tray, the idea is to help the area around the sink stay drier.
We are bringing the Drying Stone Sink Station into India, and this is exactly the kind of innovation we look for at thinKitchen: not innovation for the sake of saying something is new, but a different material solving a familiar everyday problem.
Explore the madesmart Undersink Drip Tray for a practical under-sink organisation solution.
The idea has since extended into countertop drying stones, sink trays and even Drying Stone water-bottle stands, where washed bottles can be placed upside down to dry while the stone underneath deals with the dripping water.
Again, a very small problem. But one you experience almost every day.
Organisation should also adapt as our lives change
Another idea I like in the madesmart catalogue is its Stack & Slide system.
Rather than deciding permanently that one large container will hold one category of things, smaller bins can be combined to create compartments appropriate to what you actually own. It turns organisation into something modular rather than fixed.
That feels much closer to how homes actually work.
Our kitchens don't remain static. We buy something new. Children grow up. Eating habits change. Appliances arrive. Gadgets disappear. What was once a baking drawer becomes a snack drawer or a coffee drawer.
Organisation therefore cannot only be about fitting products into fixed boxes. It should be modular, adaptable and capable of changing with us.
The same thinking appears across the wider collection - from fridge bins and lidded egg holders to under-sink trays and expandable drawer organisers. Not every one of these products will come to India immediately. Nor should they. Our job is to understand which problems Indian consumers actually want solved.
Why we are bringing madesmart to India
At thinKitchen, one question comes up repeatedly in our discussions: what problem are we solving?
That is also what attracted me to madesmart.
It is a woman-founded brand that has spent more than three decades looking at ordinary spaces and asking how they can function a little better. It isn't really about selling storage boxes. It is about bringing greater clarity and efficiency to everyday spaces by combining function and design.
That fits closely with what we want thinKitchen to stand for.
We aren't trying to create a perfect kitchen where everything is colour-coded and nobody ever leaves a spoon in the wrong place.
Homes are meant to be lived in.
But if opening a drawer no longer means digging through the pakkad, three spatulas, four knives and everything else to find what you need; if the sink area stays a little cleaner; if bottles dry better; if a cabinet uses its space more intelligently - then the kitchen has become slightly easier to live with.
Thirty years ago, I didn't know there was anything wrong with that drawer under our gas stove.
Today, I realise that perhaps the best organisation solutions are precisely for the little problems we have lived with for so long that we stopped noticing them.
And that, more than anything else, is why we are bringing madesmart to India.
