A pastel 8-in-1 ceramic nonstick pan from a three-person founding team that became the first viral kitchen object, with 30+ sellouts and over a million products sold.
The Always Pan is a ceramic nonstick, PFAS-free pan with a modular steamer basket, beechwood spatula, and pouring spouts, priced around $145, claiming to replace a fry pan, saute pan, steamer, skillet, saucier, saucepan, non-stick pan, and spatula. It sells DTC at ourplace.com and later through retail partners, in muted Instagrammable colors that rotate as limited drops. The health angle is substantive: unlike Teflon-based nonstick, the ceramic coating is free of PFAS and 'forever chemicals,' which let a $145 pan compete on safety against $30 alternatives. The design goal was explicit - make a pan pretty enough that people leave it on the counter, turning every kitchen into a billboard. Our Place has since expanded into bakeware, tableware, drinkware, and appliances, with 200+ patents and over 2 million meals donated.
Shiza Shahid grew up in Islamabad, won a scholarship to Stanford, worked at McKinsey, then co-founded and ran the Malala Fund with Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai. In 2017 she and her husband Amir Tehrani, plus friend Zach Rosner, began developing cookware inspired by the gathering rituals of her multicultural upbringing, raising only about $7.5 million total - a modest sum for hardware - from backers including Will Smith's Dreamers VC. The Always Pan launched in October 2019, was profitable within roughly six months, and sold out over 30 times while building a 30,000-person waitlist. Oprah's Favorite Things, coverage in 1,000+ media stories, and celebrity kitchens (David Beckham, Selena Gomez collaborations) made it the defining DTC cookware of the era. The company sold over a million products and grew to about 150 staff, and has expanded into a full five-category kitchen ecosystem while retaining its hero-product identity.
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