The soap dispenser could have looked like anything.
Most important to Flynn McGarry was to have a stylish vessel in keeping with the aesthetic of Gem Home, his new store and cafe in Manhattan. Its customers can nibble on lentils and slabs of parsnip cake at communal farm tables lit by tapered candles or browse shelves bearing a tight selection of comestibles and products like antique cutlery, cloth napkins and glass tumblers imported from Britain.
“My biggest thing was not just selling glass bottles of soap,” said Mr. McGarry, 25, a chef since his teenage years whom Vogue has called the Justin Bieber of food.
He went with a ceramic dispenser produced by hand in small batches and made in saturated colors and abstract shapes. Each is filled with a quince-scented soap from Ffern, a luxury fragrance company in Britain, and comes with a refill. A 10-ounce dispenser costs $190, and a 12-ounce version costs $210.
Since Gem Home opened in NoLIta three weeks ago, it has sold 24 dispensers, an average of one a day. (The product is currently sold out; new stock is expected this weekend.)
“I didn’t know I wasn’t going to be able to keep them on the shelves for more than 25 minutes,” Mr. McGarry said. “They’re not cheap,” he added. But the dispensers have seemed to resonate with people willing to pay a premium for objects aimed at “elevating the most mundane elements of life,” as he put it.
Created by Shane Gabier, a fashion designer turned ceramic artist, the dispensers are an offshoot of a version he made for the bathroom at Gem Home, which is attached to a wall to prevent people from stealing it. Mr. Gabier is also making a wall soap dispenser for the bathroom at Gem Wine, Mr. McGarry’s wine bar on the Lower East Side.
Mr. Gabier, 50, took up ceramics after shuttering Creatures of the Wind, the fashion brand he founded with Chris Peters, his life partner, in 2019. Their label was known for clothes that played with colors and proportions, and Mr. Gabier said that some of the references that had inspired its collections — which included paintings by Josef Albers and designs by Ray Eames and Ettore Sottsass — also informed his ceramics.
In addition to soap dispensers, Mr. Gabier makes bookends, light fixtures, vases and platters, some of which Gem Home sells as well. His products are also sold at Quarters, a store in TriBeCa, and at galleries like Pierre Yovanovitch in Paris and Spartan Shop in Portland, Ore.
Though the dispenser was not in stock during the lunchtime rush at Gem Home on Wednesday, the object was present in the minds of several customers who had heard of it or seen photos on social media.
Ali Neilon, 28, a merchandiser at Marc Jacobs, learned about the dispenser on TikTok. “They’re so eye-catching and intriguing,” she said while buying lunch to take back to her office. “In a basic bathroom, it’s something that feels like an art piece.”
Nikolaj Hansson, 30, the founder of Palmes, a tennis-inspired clothing line, offered a similar description. “It’s kind of like a sculpture,” said Mr. Hansson, who was visiting New York from Denmark. He added that Mr. Gabier’s logo-less dispenser stood apart from others bearing names like Aesop or Le Labo.
“Soap dispensers are normally branded,” he said. “They are almost a cultural position: I have this soap therefore this is who I am.”
The nascent interest in the dispenser was familiar to Sabrina De Sousa, 40, a founder of the restaurant Dimes on the Lower East Side. She has sold more than 1,000 of a $120 color-blocked pepper mill since releasing the product in 2017.
Ms. De Sousa said that both her pepper mill, which was inspired by sticks painted by the artist André Cadere, and Mr. Gabier’s dispenser were grounded in the same approach: “It’s taking a common utilitarian object and making it beautiful.”
She became aware of the dispenser through an Instagram post by Mr. Gabier, whom she recently asked to make ceramic tiles for her home. He had to defer the request, partly because he was too busy making the soap dispensers.
“It was a matter of time before he made something that really clicked,” Ms. De Sousa said.
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