Our Mission & Story
Creating a Bigger Table
Who We Are
A Brand Built on Purpose
Our Place was founded in 2019 in Los Angeles with a mission that goes far beyond making a good pan. The brand was born from a belief that the kitchen is one of the most powerful sites of culture, family, and identity — and that cookware should honor that significance rather than be treated as a purely utilitarian commodity.
The phrase "a bigger table" is at the heart of everything Our Place does. It means expanding who gets to be seen in aspirational home cooking imagery. It means designing products that work for a studio apartment in Brooklyn just as well as a large kitchen in suburban Texas. It means building partnerships with organizations fighting food insecurity so that the act of cooking together is available to every family, not just those who can afford beautiful kitchenware.
Our Place is a certified B Corp candidate and has been recognized by TIME, Fast Company, and the CFDA for its approach to design, ethics, and community impact. Every product in the lineup reflects the same set of values: non-toxic, multi-functional, beautifully designed, and built to bring people together.
We believe every family deserves a seat at the table — regardless of background, income, or heritage. Our Place was built to celebrate the diversity of home cooking across every culture.
Every piece of Our Place cookware is 100% PFAS-free, PTFE-free, lead-free, and cadmium-free. We refuse to compromise on materials that touch your food and your family.
One pan that does the work of eight means less clutter, less consumption, and less waste. We design for the real constraints of today's kitchens — especially smaller spaces.
Buying less and buying better is the most sustainable choice. Our Place cookware is built to last for years, not seasons — reducing the cycle of cheap, disposable cookware.
"Home cooking is a cultural act. Every recipe is a story, and every meal is a way of saying: you belong here."
Shiza Shahid, Co-Founder & CEO
The Founder's Journey
Shiza Shahid & the Bigger Table
Shiza Shahid grew up in Pakistan and immigrated to the United States, where she went on to co-found the Malala Fund alongside Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai and later became a prominent investor and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Her path to founding Our Place was deeply personal: she saw a gap between the home cooking she grew up with — rich, communal, culturally layered — and the world of aspirational cookware, which largely reflected a narrow, homogenous vision of what cooking looked like.
Together with co-founder Amir Tehrani, Shahid set out to build a cookware brand that represented every family's table. The "bigger table" idea encompasses both the physical — a product line designed for small apartments and large gatherings alike — and the cultural: a commitment to celebrating the full diversity of home cooking traditions, from South Asian dals to Mexican moles to Southern stews.
The Always Pan launched in 2019 and sold out within days. Within two years, Our Place had become one of the fastest-growing direct-to-consumer brands in the United States, celebrated not just for its product design but for the community it had built around a shared belief: that cooking at home, for the people you love, is one of the most meaningful things a person can do.
Today Our Place operates at the intersection of design, activism, and food culture — and Shahid remains one of the most prominent voices in the consumer goods space advocating for ethical materials, inclusive design, and mission-led business models.
The Why
Home Cooking as a Cultural Act
Our Place does not sell cookware. It sells the conditions for connection — the pan your grandmother used, adapted for the kitchen you actually live in.
Research consistently shows that families who eat home-cooked meals together report higher levels of connection, children perform better in school, and individuals experience lower rates of depression and anxiety. Cooking at home is not just healthier from a nutrition standpoint — it is one of the most reliable ways to build the kind of daily rituals that hold families and communities together.
Our Place's founders observed that the barriers to home cooking in modern life are rarely motivational — most people want to cook more. The barriers are practical: small kitchens with no storage, cookware that is intimidating or difficult to use, a sense that cooking "from scratch" requires a professional setup. The Always Pan was designed to dismantle every one of those barriers.
By combining eight functions into one pan that weighs under four pounds, fits in any cabinet, works on any cooktop, and looks beautiful enough to serve from directly at the table, Our Place removed the friction from home cooking without removing any of its joy. The goal was never efficiency for its own sake — it was to make it easier for more people to gather, to cook, and to share.
This philosophy extends to Our Place's marketing and brand voice. The brand's campaigns have consistently featured multi-generational families cooking traditional recipes, home cooks of all backgrounds sharing their heritage dishes, and stories of the cultural significance of specific meals. In doing so, Our Place has built a community that is unusually emotionally connected to a cookware brand — because it reflects their lives back to them.
Social Impact
Fighting Food Insecurity
Our Place's "bigger table" is not a metaphor — it is a practical commitment. The brand has formed long-term partnerships with Feeding America, the nation's largest hunger-relief organization, and with regional food justice organizations across underserved communities. A portion of every Our Place purchase supports these programs, which fund school meal programs, community kitchen access, and fresh food distribution in food deserts.
The brand has also partnered with organizations focused on food sovereignty in immigrant communities — recognizing that for many families, cooking traditional foods is not just a preference but an act of cultural preservation. By funding access to community kitchen spaces, Our Place helps ensure that this tradition can continue across generations regardless of economic circumstance.
Our Place has additionally contributed equipment donations — including Always Pans and Perfect Pots — to community organizations, shelters, and food programs, ensuring that the same quality of cookware available to consumers also reaches families who need it most.
Design Philosophy
Less Clutter, More Meaning
Our Place products are designed around a single constraint: every new piece must replace multiple existing ones. This is not just a marketing claim — it is the central design brief that governs every engineering decision, material choice, and dimension. The result is a collection where each piece does the work of many, without sacrificing a single point of performance or beauty.
Multi-Function Over Single-Use
The average American kitchen contains over 20 individual cooking tools — most used fewer than five times per year. Our Place was founded on the conviction that beautiful, intelligently designed multi-function pieces could replace this entire drawer. The Always Pan alone replaces a fry pan, sauté pan, steamer, skillet, saucier, saucepan, spatula, and spoon rest. Every design decision starts with the question: what can we eliminate?
Space Efficiency for Modern Living
Today, a significant and growing share of the population lives in apartments with small kitchens and limited storage. Our Place products are designed with this reality in mind: pieces nest inside each other, handles fold or stow, and the overall footprint of the entire collection fits in a single cabinet. This is not a coincidence — it is a core design constraint embedded from day one.
Designed to Stay on the Stovetop
Most cookware is designed to be stored out of sight because it doesn't look good. Our Place reversed this assumption. The signature matte color palette — Spice, Sage, Steam, Char, Blue Salt — was developed specifically to complement a wide range of kitchen aesthetics and look beautiful left on the stovetop or countertop. When your cookware becomes a decorative element, you stop needing to hide it.
No Compromises on Materials
PFAS chemicals — including PTFE, PFOA, and hundreds of related compounds — have been used in non-stick cookware for decades. Research has increasingly linked chronic low-level PFAS exposure to thyroid disruption, immune system effects, and other health concerns. Our Place's ceramic coating achieves a naturally slick non-stick surface through a mineral-based sol-gel process that requires none of these compounds. The result is a coating that is genuinely safer and still performs beautifully.
The most sustainable product is the one you never have to replace. We build for decades, not for seasons.
Our Place Design Principle
Shop Our Place on Amazon→As Recognized By
Ready to Start Cooking?
Join the Bigger Table
The full Our Place cookware collection is available on Amazon — with fast shipping, easy returns, and the assurance that every piece is genuinely 100% PFAS-free.