Product, system, service and website design deliver a sustainable business
The founders of Vitsœ, a furniture manufacturer, started the company on the understanding that good design would deliver a sustainable and common-sense product that would sustain a long-standing business.
The vision for the company, begun in 1959 by furniture entrepreneur Niels Vitsœ to market a system designed by Dieter Rams, is sustained by current managing director Mark Adams, who continues to deliver products that demonstrate that good design means long-lasting products paired with quality service.
The overarching message, which is delivered through all Vitsœ products and service interactions, is that we can all live better with less. Mark says of Niels and Dieter: “Their vision for this company was to create furniture that would last a long time. Furniture that was simple but adaptable with as few finishes as possible. That very simple vision was to encourage customers to start with it, to stick with it, to add to it, to take it with them when they moved house, to rearrange it. That simple vision was all about making the furniture last as long as possible.”
Watch a Vitsoe video, all about the company's ethos and how this is demonstrated by its products.
“In the ‘50s they weren’t sitting there thinking, the world’s got a resource problem. We should make our furniture green, eco and sustainable. They were just thinking, this is what we should do. It’s a common-sense way of running a business. Of course, if we are going to run a business selling furniture shouldn’t we make it last as long as possible? Rather than devise a business model whereby customers will be throwing their furniture away in three years' time and then we’ll be there to flog them some more furniture. It was absolutely a common-sense notion at the beginning. The original Vitsœ vision, what we are now talking about today with a sustainable moniker on it, was always, why not do it the right way? We’re not just ducking the need to do something new for Milan [furniture design fair] each year. Maybe we’ve got a point about not always producing something new.”
Designer Dieter Rams was acutely aware that the output of the companies he was designing for was potentially contributing to the earth’s environmental problems. So he asked himself the question: is my design good design? The answer formed his now celebrated ten principles, which stress the long-lasting and environmentally-friendly credentials of any design that can be considered ‘good’.
Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles for good design
Good design:
- Is innovative
- Makes a product useful
- Is aesthetic
- Makes a product understandable
- Is unobtrusive
- Is honest
- Is long-lasting
- Is thorough down to the last detail
- Is environmentally friendly
- Is as little design as possible
Watch a video interview of Dieter Rams.
Continuing the good design ethos is Mark Adams, who uses Dieter’s ten principles to design the business’s strategy and service, as well as its products, its marketing and more. “It would be utterly irresponsible of us if we sat around all day trying to dream up something new,” he says. “But we are using that word ‘innovation’: to improve an original idea rather than trying to invent a totally new idea. Our shelves aren’t the same as they were when first designed. But they’re totally compatible.”
Vitsœ’s 606 shelving system is designed with an aluminium structure, shelves, cabinets and tables that, when put together, allow the 606 system to act as storage, display or a room divider. Mark explains why the 606 system uses the materials it does: “You could be critical that we’ve got aluminium in our structure. But aluminium is being used where aluminium is appropriate. It is not being used for aesthetic reasons. It’s there because it works best. It will last many lives and then it can be recycled. (70% of the aluminium ever smelted in the world is still in use.) The eco debate has got so skewed. It’s all about the materials a product is made from. And it’s nothing to do with the fact that the product is probably going to be thrown away in two or three years' time.”
Obsolescence is a crime
You may think you see similarities between the Vitsœ shelving system’s kit of parts and the self-assembly flat pack furniture many of us buy today. But the contrasts between the business model of Vitsœ and the products and the services offered by other companies are determined by design says Adams: “The fundamental difference is that one is designed not to last because it intentionally has obsolescence built in to it. The other way of doing it is to design a business, a product and a service that strips out obsolescence as far as possible.”
Watch a Vitsoe video about planned obsolescence: the design and manufacture of products that are deliberately intended to have a limited useful life.
Sustainability = service
“We are a service business that happens to make a product. We regard ourselves as 80% a service business and 20% furniture manufacturer. There’s absolutely no way you can make something in this country and sell it around the world, unless you are putting fantastic service on it,” says Adams who says it is by designing the tools that enable Vitsœ staff to deliver a fantastic service to its customers that the company can protect itself and its intellectual property from competition or plagiarism.
The company’s sales, design and project management software is the core of the business. It has been designed to enable Vitsœ to offer quotes and design suggestions to customers around the world within minutes of an enquiry being made online. “90% of our money is now taken over our website,” says Mark. “In many respects we are a web business but nobody looks from outside and would say we are a web business. But we don’t have dealers dotted round the world. We deal with our customers via the internet. We term our shops as being about supporting what we’re doing on the web. The web is not a brochure for the shop.”
The website has recently been redesigned with the help of digital design consultancy Airside. And the philosophy for the site is the same as the philosophy behind the 606 shelves. “In everything we do at Vitsœ, we think about how to make it last as long as possible,” says Adams. “I think that should be top of the list for any business thinking about behaving sustainably.”
The new website features films, glossy images and product stories. And it has cost more to make it as sustainable and long-lasting as possible. But this is an investment, and a period of re-educating suppliers, that Vitsœ wasn’t afraid to make. “The whole mentality of how to deploy resources and make that thing last wasn’t part of their way of working. When they presented to us how they were going to deploy resources and make a film for the site, it was really all quite expensive to do but absolutely short term, one-off stuff. And I kept pressing them. ‘Surely if we made a lot of the elements digitally, as computer generated images, it’d take a lot of effort and cost now, but we can use those assets forever more? Could we, at the bottom of the recession in 2009, spend more money with your agency to do things properly, to create the digital assets that we can use evermore?’ And eventually they got it. And now every image on our website is computer generated [except case study shots of Vitsœ shelves in customer homes and offices]. So, we had to get them in the mindset of doing this job for the long term. We do that talking to all suppliers. Shall we do this properly? Shall we do it for the long term?”
Sustainable design = system design
Mark says the Vitsœ product and the company’s business model are an example of “system design at the deepest level”. “Because you are doing it for the long term, you can make the investment. We can build wooden stillages to store aluminium diecastings in our factories. In 1995/96, when we had these made, we knew we’d be using them still 15 years later. 15 years’ later how much have we saved with them? 100 times their value I imagine but you had to do it right to start with.”
From its Camden factory the company ships its shelves to customers around the world within days of an order being placed. “If you’ve got your processes right, and are buying your stock on a just-in-time basis, you can be taking an order from New York and starting manufacturing in Camden a few hours later so that it’s ready for the next container to be shipped.”
“I’m not rich enough to buy cheaply.”
Vitsœ is a business that has been designed to work with its manufacturing partners, its staff – sales people, designers and installers alike – and its customers to provide less, to undersell, to deliver better shelves that will last, be used for generations and then resold or recycled.
Mark argues that, because cheap things break, the far more cost-effective and intelligent thing to do is buy something that costs you more money immediately but that will last you a lifetime because it can be refurbished and maintained. Not that Vitsœ is that expensive to begin with, he says: “There is a huge perception that we are the expensive shelving company. And 20 years ago we were that company. The prices now are dramatically better value than they were then. Since we bought the production back to the UK we have been able to make the production processes a little bit smarter, more efficient and cheaper. In comparison with other furniture makers we are dramatically cheaper.”
So, is acting sustainably expensive? “In the short term yes. In the long term no. Of course doing what we’re doing is more expensive in the short term. But I argue that we can’t afford not to be doing it.” While cost is what many businesses worry about in the short term, Adams advocates a shift in thinking to appraising the value of a decision rather than the cost of an action. “Value is a longer term thing to appreciate and understand. We are good value for money even on day one,” says Adams. “But the minute you take a five year view on it we become dramatically cheaper.”