Cordula Kehrer has a passion for practical yet unfashionable objects such as laundry racks and waste bins. She studies and then reinvents them, merging the unconventional with the functional while maintaining a sense of humour. Kehrer opened her Karlsruhe studio after completing studies in product design in Germany and Japan and working at Marc Newson's design office in Paris. She has received several grants, and her work has been featured at Maison & Objet in Paris, Salone Satellite in Milan, numerous galleries and in major design magazines.

Her whimsical waste baskets, designed for Areaware, are produced by the indigenous Aeta people of the Philippines. For the last several hundred years, they have faced racial discrimination and been driven off their ancestral lands, retreating to remote forested highlands where they live in small villages and engage in subsistence farming, hunting and gathering, and basket weaving. Basket making with sustainably harvested rattan has been an important part of their cultural and economic life.