When designer Soranyi Soliver launched her bright and colorful rug brand Sosomo in 2020, the focus was on exploring Dominican creativity through contemporary design, bright shapes, and eye-catching colors that highlighted her desire for “transmitting sensations.” Herself a Dominican Republic native, Soliver’s brand showcases the work of local craftsmen and evokes a combination of “experimentation, risk, creativity, fun, and a bit of madness,” effectively bringing her country’s creativity and style to a much larger audience.

Now, Soliver is introducing her vivid brand’s first collaborative collection, a partnership with the American Prize for Design laureate Karim Rashid. The small collection continues Sosomo’s penchant for integrating the craftsmanship and creativity of rug weaving with bold colors and flowing compositions. And Rashid’s creative eye also shines here. A perfect pairing with Sosomo’s existing aesthetic, “the amorphous, intertwining forms create a liquid-like, fluid pattern that speaks of softness, minimal yet sensual and warm for any interior,” he recently said when speaking of the upcoming collection.

And Rashid’s vision has certainly found the perfect palette, as Sosomo’s craftsmanship and handmade aesthetic soften his usual propensity for more sharply defined shapes with a digital edge. Here, Rashid’s curvy, geometric shapes and eye-poppingly vivid colors are given an added warmth when paired with the homey, richly-made Sosomo rugs.

Standouts series include two incredibly colorful creations that are like a Skittles ad come to life — candy-colored confections intricately overlapping and morphing into multi-dimensional shapes that are almost psychedelic in their construction. For example, the “Ikona,” itself described as a “blobular formed rug,” features a scalloped edge rimmed in dark blue and vivid purple, colors that perfectly complement the more abstract amorphous shapes at its center. The fluidity of these shapes gives them a sense of movement, an undulating quality whose design contains some of Rashid’s self-confessed favorite icons: “time, body, love, fluid, and blobism.”

A second example, dubbed “Likuid,” is, by contrast more ‘traditionally’ shaped, comprising a deceptively simple white, square creation full of Rashid’s go-to color faves. Bright, burnt orange, complex crimson swirls, and deep, lemony yellows are offset by light blue highlights and splashes of purple that add to the rug’s retro 1960s appeal. The rug’s texture also contributes to its acute sensory stimulus, featuring different pile heights (a detail found in many of Sosomo’s rugs), the overall impression is one of three-dimensional depth and fullness.

Shining a light on local craftsmanship and Dominican creativity through brightly-colored geometric designs, the artisanal rug brand is ready to reach a global audience with its new collaboration with Karim Rashid. A veritable treasure trove of psychedelic swirls undulating against the richly-weaved pile creates a lava-lamp like sensation of movement; further highlighting the brand’s already established oeuvre of colorful compositions, highly harmonious hues, and ingeniously inventive designs that aim to spread the message of Dominican craftsmanship and creativity to the world in a refreshingly retro way.