Remove, Roast, Rinse, Return, Repeat

What marshmallow sticks can teach us about the design of everyday joy. 🔥

Good design isn’t just about beauty or utility in the big moments.

It’s also about the little details that quietly make everyday life easier, or even joyful. Like a drawer that shuts softly, a pen cap that snaps on perfectly, a digital transit card that automatically reloads…or marshmallow sticks that slide neatly back into their case.

I live in California and on chilly coastal evenings, I love to gather my family around our outdoor fire pit. We talk, laugh, and roast marshmallows, just enjoying the time together.

But, somewhat oddly, another part of this ritual I also love is putting away the roasting sticks the next morning. That may seem weird, but the sticks and their storage case are designed with just enough care and detail that putting them away brings me joy every time.

The roasting sticks themselves are great. They are made of robust stainless steel with good heft and the perfect length for roasting. Generally, I might expect tools like this to come with a flimsy bag or some sort of storage tube where I have to wrestle them in and shake them back out (if they came with anything for storage at all.)

But these roasting sticks are different. Someone clearly thought through how a person would use them: Remove them from their case, roast things over the fire, let them cool, clean them, return them to their case, store them, and then do it all over again. In short:

While roasting is what the sticks are designed for, someone took the time to think through the user’s entire journey and design a product to elegantly meet their needs at every step. These a few key design decisions:

• Clear instructions: Simple outline illustrations explain what goes where. They aren’t printed in every location, just at each end, which is enough for people to understand the pattern.

• Perfectly sized compartments: So many pouches seem designed to hold an item exactly once (in the factory) and never again. These pouches are each perfectly sized for the intended tool with enough space for easy removal and return.

• Sets stored together: Each roasting stick splits in half for storage. Each pair of upper and lower ends is stored together, so you can take apart the stick and put it into the pouches without any sorting or fuss. The same goes for removing the sticks to use the next time.

• Alternating sides: The sticks alternate sides so that you end up with a well balanced case, both in weight and size.

The case isn’t fancy — is just a vinyl pouch with a simple buckle. But all of these thoughtful choices make it feel refined. They elevate all of the mundane, supporting tasks around the main event of roasting marshmallows by the fire.

And that’s really the point: good design isn’t just about grand gestures. It’s about the small, repeated moments: the cleanup, the reset, the “again and again.” Someone at Solo Stove cared enough to design for all of these mundane moments, and I’m grateful for the joy it brings me.

The world needs more of this. So the next time you catch yourself smiling about something simple, pause and notice. That’s design at work.