The idea of my new business is to produce maybe 10 designs to begin with market, and sell them online. Put so simply it sounds doomed to failure, so I better elaborate!
I'm sure I was always meant to be a furniture designer, I have a degree in it, have always loved woodwork etc, and then somehow I became a graphic designer by mistake! I've been a graphic designer for the past 12 years or so, and I've become pretty much fed up of the selling people stuff they don't want/advertising nonsense and I've been yearning furniture design and making again.
Over the past couple of years I've built the biggest workshop the planning and building regs chaps will allow and have been equipping it and coming up with a plan, it's now time to come up with some prototypes for the designs I have.
I call myself a designer rather than a maker because I don't necessarily intend making everything myself, if a design takes off I intend to subcontract, initially when sales are limited I will have to make the stuff myself.
My years working as a graphic designer and web site designer are going to help no end... I can do all my own advertising, image and most importantly, a full eCommerce website - the website is the key to the businesses success, I have a client who makes furniture who I designed and built the website for and even though they has a shop, the vast majority of sales are generated by the website. The site will be very modern, more habitat than New Yankee Workshop! I also do professional quality digital photography so I can present all the designs accurately.
My designs are very modern but built with quality throughout (I s'pose similar to the stuff produced by
www.delaespada.com ) and having a specific range means I can limit the size of products to those achievable in my shop. There could be an issues with storage although the larger designs will have a 3 week lead time so they'll be made once ordered. Finishing is another issue I have to address, subcontracting is a consideration but I'm not sure yet.
I will still keep up the graphic design but hopefully scale down the amount I do, just keeping the nicer stuff, this means I don't have to worry about making a full living from the furniture to begin with.
So there you go, that's roughly the idea, hope you're not all laughing your heads off!!
While typing this my Axminster delivery arrived so I'm off to get those boxes ripped open...!