Somato's Folding Reformer receives an Honorable Mention in SF Design Week's 2025 Design Awards
Contact: Hannah Fink | 216-571-9389 | hannah@somato.fit
SOMATO IS HONORED AT
EIGHTH ANNUAL SAN FRANCISCO DESIGN WEEK AWARDS
International design competition honors projects encouraging thought leadership in design
Design Awards Theme:
“REFORM”
June 2, 2025–San Francisco, Calif.
Somato is honored with a prestigious San Francisco Design Week Award, announced today by the nonprofit organization San Francisco Design Week (SFDW). Somato received the Honorable Mention award, which recognized The Folding Reformer and the whole project team for its ground-breaking design and commitment to thought leadership in meeting the needs of a positive future for society.
Somato was recognized for its flagship product, The Folding Reformer, which is the most compact, lightweight Pilates reformer on the market today. Folding to just 6" thick and weighing less than half of a traditional studio reformer, it stores under any bed, sofa, or in a closet-- bringing studio-quality movement into the home. But what truly sets Somato apart is what it makes possible: movement on your terms. A practice that doesn’t require a commute, expensive memberships, or perfect planning. Paired with a companion app for expert-led classes, Somato reflects a belief that wellness should be accessible, sustainable, and beautifully integrated into daily life. They didn’t just design a reformer, they reformed the experience.
“We are extremely excited San Francisco Design Week Awards is returning this year,” says Design Bay Area CEO Dawn Zidonis. “As with previous years, the quality of the many entries exceeded our expectations of our theme, ‘REFORM’. Congratulations to this year’s outstanding winners.”
San Francisco Design Week (SFDW), is the premier gathering of the world’s most active design community. The theme, “REFORM” was met by award winners from leading design firms, in-house teams, and creative individuals, who are honored today.
SFDW Design Awards is an international design competition seeking to encourage thought leadership by supporting designers whose works can contribute towards a positive future for society. The Design Awards celebrates and recognizes exemplary work in all fields of design, including architecture, interior design, industrial design, communication design, and user experience design.
Seventeen winning projects and twelve honorable mentions were selected by a jury comprised of distinguished professionals, who reviewed submissions from an exceptionally competitive pool of applicants from USA, Europe and Asia.
The winning projects were awarded in the following categories include Architecture; Communication Design; Health and Wellness; Industrial Design; Interior Design; Emerging Technology AI, Design Systems, Experiences/Activations, Transportation, Lighting, Student and Wild Card.
The 2025 Design Awards are juried by top industry Bay Area professionals and seek to encourage thought leadership by supporting designers whose work can contribute to a positive future for society.
Each winning project displayed the following characteristics:
Impact—Design that represents a substantial shift in the way a particular process is created, executed, perceived, or experienced.
Singularity—Products and ideas that go above and beyond contemporaneous work being done within distinct fields of design.
Inclusiveness—Work that empowers those previously underrepresented in the design community and emboldens social mobility at all levels.
Social Responsibility—Design that offers solutions for people with needlessly insurmountable barriers to entry in all walks of life.
Ease of Use—Design that can be easily understood and applied by the end user.
Visual Appeal—Projects, ideas, and processes that not only solve problems, but do so with aesthetics that accentuate and elevate the experience from start to finish.
Feasibility—Design that can be sensibly funded, implemented and embraced.
The esteemed 2025 SFDW Design Awards jury comprised top industry professionals:
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Erica Tanov, Founder, Erica Tanov: Relaxed Luxury for the Wardrove and Home
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Alana Washington, Director of Product Design, Tinder
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Junko Nagai, Co-founder of Koncept 22
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Owen Starr, Global Head of Design and Research, Amazon Design
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Clement Mok, Co-Founder Sugarfish, former Apple and Studio Archetype/Sapient
The 2025 winners’ entries are displayed prominently and permanently online at San Francisco Design Week.
About San Francisco Design Week
The Future Started Here:
Launched in 2006, San Francisco Design Week (SFDW) is an essential week-long regional festival that showcases the unique intersection of ideas, design, business & entrepreneurism that makes the Bay Area the birthplace of the future.
Now a global phenomenon, San Francisco’s international success is born from a historically free-spirited entrepreneurialism, coupled with the imaginative vision of contemporary design and state-of-the-art technology. Pioneers of new ways of looking at the world, nimble Bay Area start-ups are now among the world’s most influential design-led companies, producing products, services and experiences that profoundly influence the daily lives of billions of people globally.
Through approximately 150 events, SFDW celebrates this spirit of newness by providing approximately attendees unique access to conversations and virtual tours with the designers who are shaping the future — from architecture to fashion, product design to digital services, and everything in between.
San Francisco Design Week is produced by nonprofit organization Design Bay Area.
2025 THEME PARTNER:
The SFDW theme, visual identity, and campaign has been created in collaboration with design firm Pact Studio, a San Francisco-based branding studio committed to developing distinct and strategic brand identities with intentional points of view.
2025 Major sponsors include: Rivian, IRG, Anthropic, Pact Studio, Adobe, Chef Tu David Phu, GaeaStar, Four One Nine, Mucho, Robert Half, Retronyms, and others.
@sfdesignweek #SFDW #sfdesignweek #Reform
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For more information, visit: www.sfdesignweek.org or the SF Design Week Blog.
About Somato
In 2025, women’s healthcare in the U.S. is under increasing threat, and many women are responding by reclaiming their physical autonomy in quieter, deeply personal ways. One of those ways is Pilates, which has surged in popularity as a result. In 2024, nearly 13 million people in the U.S. participated in Pilates– its highest total in over a decade– and ClassPass named it the most-booked workout for two consecutive years.
This surge isn’t just a trend. It’s a response to something deeper.
Pilates offers benefits uniquely attuned to women’s needs: it supports core and pelvic health, builds strength without spiking cortisol, and adapts to the physical shifts of each menstrual phase, pregnancy, and postpartum recovery. But while demand has surged, access has remained limited– held behind high studio costs, restrictive schedules, and equipment too large or expensive for home use.
Somato changes that.
Somato’s 60-lb folding reformer stores to just 6 inches thick, making it the most compact on the market and the first to truly fit into the pace and space of everyday life. But they didn’t stop at the equipment. Their app offers cycle-aware programming, postnatal recovery classes, and workouts that prioritize sustainability over toxic gym rhetoric.
Over the past 12 months, they’ve built a brand grounded in empathy and design. Without paid ads, they’ve grown through word-of-mouth, founder storytelling, and early adopters who see their realities reflected in Somato’s voice and product. They’ve created not just a reformer, but a sense of agency– allowing more women to move on their own terms, in their own homes.
In a time when external control is rising, Somato is helping women reclaim internal strength– not with meaningless platitudes, but with tools that actually fit their lives.
Somato is built for women but open to everyone. It reflects the way many of us live now: in apartments, with busy lives and shifting priorities. It’s the kind of reformer that makes space for your practice– not the other way around.
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