How Set Designer Zane Priede Brings Wigiwama’s Mini Beanbags to Life

We’ve always had a soft spot for creatives who see everyday things in unexpected ways and Zane Priede, Riga-based set designer and photographer, is exactly that kind of creative. With a degree in Visual Communication from Design Academy Eindhoven, she brings an artistic sensitivity to the way she works with texture, shape and surprising material pairings.

This isn’t our first time working together. Zane has styled some of our favourite Wigiwama shoots, always with a curious eye and a storyteller’s instinct. So when we made Mini Beanbag, it felt only natural to invite her to reimagine them through her own creative world.

Where the idea began

For Zane, the starting point was the names of the Mini Beanbags. They didn’t just suggest flavours, but a whole mood and colour palette.

“The colour choice and the direction all came from the names of the beanbags – Marshmallow and Peppermint, Brown Sugar.”

That soft mix of white, mint, and warm brown became her visual base. A direction shaped entirely by the beanbag names themselves.

“Because the Mini Beanbag is so small – finally, something very small from Wigiwama – the scale of edibles is really kind of fitting together. And I thought it would be nice to work with interiors, but this time, it's made from edibles.”

What the sets are made of

Zane’s process begins in unexpected places like food store aisles. But she’s not looking for taste.

“I was really walking around the food store and kind of making a switch in the brain – not looking at what I'm gonna eat or how it's gonna taste, but just having this designer mind and looking... what is the texture, what is the shape, what is the colour, and how I could actually cut it or shape it into other design objects.”

With that mindset, she collects food elements based on form, surface, and tone. But it’s not only edibles. She mixes in materials from the interior world – wood, metal, and even glass – to create unexpected contrasts and compositions that feel slightly surreal.

“I wanted to build it not only from the edibles, but also add interior materials, so it kind of makes a weird look."

3 Simple Set Design Tips from Zane

Zane’s approach to building still life scenes is intuitive, playful, and grounded in how things feel when placed together. She doesn’t follow fixed rules but she does return to a few guiding ideas:

• Look for a main character or hero for the scene. Is it a material or shape? And then try to build around it.
• Look for rich textures because it always looks good in the pictures and kind of creates a vibrancy for the image.
• Try to find the uncombinable elements and see how they actually fit perfectly together and create nice and weird accidents.

Most of Zane’s creative process happens through doing. Once she’s in it, her mind opens up and she can stay in that space, experimenting and playing for hours. That’s exactly what happened while working on the Mini Beanbag sets. Each scene became an adventure, unfolding one shape, texture and surprise at a time.