Once the initial design idea has been evaluated and has proved itself to be fit for production, it moves on to the next stage of the Alessi design process. This is managed with a variety of tools and techniques, not least the metal manufacturing tools Alessi has retained to produce metal items in-house.
If a design is approved for development, it will be assigned to a design assistant, who will work with the designer and the production engineers to take the project forward.
Today, the company has two engineering departments – one for the stainless steel production process, whose engineers complete the detailed engineering of stainless parts to full production readiness. The other engineering team works with suppliers to engineer parts of plastic, silver and the other materials used in Alessi production today.
Alessi makes prototypes of most designs at an early stage. Sometimes these are produced by the designers as part of their internal processes. In other cases Alessi will manufacture a prototype from the designers’ drawings in order to better facilitate discussion of a given design.
‘If we can understand the drawing, we will make the prototype ourselves,’ says Alessi, ‘if the concept is not clear, we will ask the designer to oversee the production of a prototype themselves to ensure their concept is articulated properly.’ Prototypes stored at the company museum range from very rough concepts constructed from paper or clay to production-representative models.
Manufacture
Alessi retains a policy of producing a very wide range of designs, often in small production quantities. Today, these items may be in any one of a very wide range of materials. Metal items are manufactured in-house and can be produced in volumes varying between 100 and 60,000 per annum. Alessi’s suppliers are located all over the world, from the US to China.
Two classic designs from Alessi: The Anna G corkscrew (left) and the Tigrito cat bowl
A key challenge, says Alessi, is to find suppliers who can produce items at the right levels of quality and in the low quantities required by the firm. ‘Manufacturers usually have no problem working with the materials we need to use,’ explains Alessi, ‘but they often struggle to achieve the surface quality we require.’ Designers, he explains, often have very particular requirements for the surface texture of their concepts and manufacturers are placed under a lot of pressure to get this aspect of their process right.
Evolving consumer demand
While for functional items, at least one test is carried out on a prototype, sometimes two, the majority of testing at Alessi is informal and is carried out by the market itself after launch. Content to produce models in low volumes and keep them on the market for a long period, Alessi will scale production up and down depending on demand for the product.
In fact, once in production, Alessi products typically have a very long lifespan, sometimes measured in decades. As Alessi explains, however, the product’s customer base, price and performance against its measuring formula all change during its lifespan.
The company considers a product’s market lifecycle in two phases. In the first phase, most often spanning the product’s first three years on the market the customer is ‘the design aficionado or design victim’. These customers, says Alessi, are very concerned by the two central parameters in the formula and less by price and function. They are ‘very forgiving,’ he notes.
In the second phase, beginning after the product has been on the market for around three years, the customer base changes subtly. With a perhaps previously avant-garde product now more familiar, customers treat the objects not merely as a piece of design, but as a functional item that must compete with equivalents from other makers. Now the two central criteria are still significant, but the function and price take on an increasingly important role.
Tools
Alessi keeps a private museum of past and present output. Since 1998 all designs, prototypes and products have been represented here, and the collection includes nearly 17,000 items, most of which are prototypes. Designers working for Alessi can ask for access to the space to look at previous output, including items that never make it as far as production. For all products, there is also an archive of information including sketches, notes on production processes used, and a dossier including details of press coverage, any museum collections that include the product and even a list of films where the product appears on set
With thanks to Alessi
We spoke to Alberto Alessi, the company’s owner and Metaproject Responsible, and to Gloria Barcellini, Assistant Metaproject at Alessi.
To find out more about Alessi, visit www.alessi.com