Dieter Rams’ sustainable shelving unit, designed to last a lifetime, was originally made in Germany. Mark Adams, who gave up a ‘sensible job with a company car’ to work in a West End design shop, first came across the product in 1985.
Mark was in regular contact with Vitsœ’s office in Frankfurt and when the design shop went bankrupt three months after taking the job, Adams decided to take a risk and import the product to the UK, himself. ‘I wasn’t passionate about shelves but about the thinking behind the product,’ he says. ‘I was 25, it was very risky and I must have been stark staring bonkers. I went to the bank and got a £10,000 overdraft.’
But it was immediately clear to the fledgling entrepreneur that making his business viable meant having to sell the 606 system at prohibitive prices. Negligible business was the result. So Adams got Vitsœ’s permission to manufacture in the UK and, once that operation got underway, he discovered he could make significant cost savings of up to 30 per cent per shelf.
‘The more we looked round the product, the more we found we could improve it,’ he says.
Trouble ahead
More trouble lay ahead, however. After limping through the recession in the early 1990s, Adams got a letter from Vitsœ’s German bankers telling him the business was three weeks from closure. It was decision time again.
‘I could walk away or get on the first plane to Frankfurt,’ says Adams. He chose the latter. Looking through the company’s books he was shocked to discover that despite a large product portfolio, Vitsœ’s turnover was only five million Deutschmarks. Significantly, the 606 system generated half that sum by itself. The solution seemed obvious – close down production in Germany and stop making everything but the 606, which is exactly what Adams did after securing control of the company in 1995.
Since then, the new UK-based Vitsœ has focused on generating steady growth by constant, incremental improvements to the quality of both product and customer service, which the company is able to control fully by selling direct. ‘The first question we ask in meetings is not how we can make more profits but how we can do things better for the people who use our product. Get that right and the profits will follow,’ says Adams.
His approach has worked. Since moving production to the UK, sales have risen year-on-year by 20%. Many of Vitsœ’s clients are architects who appreciate not only the brand’s aesthetic qualities but also its sustainability, and recommend it to their clients.
