Everyday Life Should Be a Little More Fun: A Message from the Founder

There's a scene in the movie *Big* that I've never quite shaken. A toy company executive stands before a conference room and pitches a robot that transforms into a building. Tom Hanks' character — a twelve-year-old boy named Joshua Baskin, who is  stranded inside a grown man's body — raises his hand and asks, simply, *"I don't get it."* The robot that turned into building didn't do anything. It just existed.

I remember watching that and thinking: if I ever make products, they have to actually make someone feel something. Not just look interesting sitting on a shelf. That belief became the foundation for Everyday Objects. The idea behind it is simple: everyday life should be a little more fun. Not novelty for novelty's sake. Not fake fun. Real moments of joy tucked inside ordinary routines. A dish brush shaped like a cactus. A sponge that looks like it wandered out of a cartoon forest. A pizza cutter built like a tiny hatchet. Objects that make you smile while you're doing the dishes — because, honestly, most household products feel like they were designed by people who have never experienced happiness.

The Guy with One Thousand Ideas

I didn't come from the traditional design world. For more than a decade, I worked in the gift industry with brands like Genuine Fred, Paladone, Unicorn Snot, and Hipsterkid — building relationships, pitching products, and developing a feel for what made people stop, laugh, and connect. At trade shows, someone once started calling me "One in a Thousand Tyler," which sounds like a compliment until you realize it was mostly a reference to the relentless volume of ideas I generate on any given day.

   

I'll be honest about what I look like walking into a room: I'm a tall, broad-chested guy with a shaved head and a beard. People form an impression. I can look intimidating. Then I start talking and, hopefully, the impression shifts. I've always led with humor — it's how I connect, how I sell, how I think. Where most people look at a kitchen sponge and see a kitchen sponge, I'm already somewhere else, wondering whether it might be a donut, a mushroom, a cactus, or some kind of emotional support cleaning companion with a tragic backstory. Some people unwind by watching television. I unwind by asking myself whether a rolling pin should look like a bottle of wine (Potential new product I’m working on... Shhh!).

After years of channeling that energy into other people's brands, I reached a crossroads. I knew I wanted to build something of my own — something that reflected who I was. But like a lot of creative people, I carried a quiet, persistent self-doubt underneath the ambition. I wasn't sure I could do it. The answer, when it finally came, didn't come from me. It came from my wife, my family, and my friends. Their belief in me was what gave me permission to go in my own direction. I don't take that lightly. I genuinely don't know if Everyday Objects exists without them.

Where Pop Art Meets the Kitchen Sink

The visual language of Everyday Objects is drawn from all over my life — comic books, surf culture, skateboarding graphics, vintage packaging, Saturday morning cartoons, graffiti, New York City itself, and artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Joshua Vides. I became fascinated by the idea of pulling flat, illustrated artwork into three dimensions: bold outlines, graphic shapes, exaggerated color — but applied to things people can hold and use every day.

   

The rule I set for myself, though, was that visual cleverness alone wasn't enough. The products had to function exceptionally well. I call it "The Josh Baskins Test," for obvious reasons. If something was witty to look at but didn't improve the experience of using it, it failed — full stop. What I wanted was a brand that felt playful without feeling disposable. Genuine design intention underneath the humor. Products meant to live in kitchens, bathrooms, apartments, dorm rooms, and offices — all the places where actual life happens — and to make those places feel, if only slightly, more alive.

The Bigger Reason Behind the Brand

I want to be honest about something, because I think it matters.

Finding joy in small things isn't just a philosophy for me. It's something I've had to learn to survive. Over the years, I've experienced serious bouts of depression — the kind that can make ordinary daily life feel impossibly heavy, and that, at my lowest, left me in places I don't like to think about for too long. What carried me through, more than anything, was the people around me. My wife. My family. My friends. Their support was not incidental — it was, in the truest sense, lifesaving. Every day I count my blessings to be surrounded by people who care for me.

What also helped, in a way that surprised me, was the small stuff. Not grand turning-point moments, but small ones — a warm cup of coffee, a song at the right time, a ridiculous object that caught me off guard and pulled an involuntary laugh out of me while I was washing dishes at the end of a hard day. I realized those tiny moments mattered more than I had given them credit for. Sometimes even a small smile can interrupt a really dark stretch.

That realization is now embedded in everything Everyday Objects does — not in a heavy-handed or preachy way, but as a genuine belief that joy has value and that humor belongs in the spaces where we spend our most ordinary time. It is my hope that through the products themselves and the simple act of making someone smile while they're doing something mundane that we can provide a flicker of lightness in a dark moment is not nothing. Sometimes it's everything. 

My dream for Everyday Objects is that one day the brand can actively raise awareness for people living with depression and support organizations that can help those who are suffering. I was lucky to find some incredible group therapy and organizations that helped give me the tools to manage those moments when I feel overwhelmed. Connecting with others was a lifeline for me.

The Ocean Changed Everything

If the kitchen sink shaped Everyday Objects, the ocean shaped me.

I grew up on Long Island, surfing with my older brother Jamie from an age when I could barely explain why it pulled at me the way it did. By seven, I was studying surfers on VHS tapes the way other kids studied baseball cards — memorizing styles, absorbing the culture, treating the whole thing as something closer to obsession than hobby. When the swell was flat, Jamie and I burned through surf magazines and films, rewatching the same footage over and over, building a mental archive of the sport and the life around it.

   

Then I went looking for it in person. For nearly a decade, I traveled — surfing massive waves in Chile, breaking my foot in Morocco, sitting with a shaman deep in the Amazon in a ceremony I'm still processing in some ways. These weren't curated travel experiences. They were formative, occasionally chaotic, perspective-reshaping stretches of time that I wouldn't trade for anything. Surfing taught me patience, timing, and the art of wiping out and paddling back. All those lessons followed me, directly, into building a company.

Surfing also gave me access to a world I never would have found otherwise. Through the culture — especially in New York — I found myself in conversations with artists, filmmakers, photographers, and designers from completely different worlds. People like graphic designer David Carson, painter Richard Phillips, and photographer Richard Avedon. Those encounters shaped how I saw the relationship between art and everyday objects in ways I'm still drawing on. I went on to co-found the New York Surf Film Festival and later SMASH Productions, building events around surf culture, storytelling, and independent creativity.

I also host two podcasts that let me keep living inside that world. *Swell Season Surf Radio* is a New York-based show exploring the intersections of surf, art, music, and community. *Hardcore Surf History*, which I produce alongside Jamie on the Surf Splendor network, is something more archival — the two of us excavating surfing's past, present, and future together, which feels like a natural extension of all those hours we spent as kids rewatching the same tapes.

Making the Ordinary Feel Less Ordinary

I run Everyday Objects out of New York, continuing to build something where household products can be playful, artistic, functional, and unexpectedly human all at once. The mission is simple and I don't think it will ever really change: make useful things, make them beautiful, make them funny, and make everyday life feel a little less routine.

But underneath all of it is something more personal now — a conviction, earned through experience, that small moments of joy are not trivial. That a smile in the middle of doing the dishes is not nothing. That for someone moving through a hard day, or something harder still, the right small thing at the right moment can matter in ways that are genuinely difficult to put into words.

Somewhere out there, someone is standing at their sink after a long, grinding day, absentmindedly scrubbing a pan with a cactus-shaped brush. For a split second, they smile. They didn't plan to. They couldn't have predicted it.

But there it is.

I built this company for that moment.

I believe it's worth it.

 

A Note on Mental Health

If anything in this piece resonated with you — if you're going through something heavy right now, or you've been in a place where the light felt very far away — I want you to know that you're not alone in that. I've been there. And I know how much it matters to have someone in your corner.

Please don't carry it by yourself. Reach out to someone you trust or reach out to someone whose entire purpose is to listen. It can make all the difference.

If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available 24/7.

Call or text **988** to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — free, confidential, and always there.

https://988lifeline.org