He Wants to Turn "Amateur" Product Designers' Sketches Into Things People Can Buy. It's Harder Than It Looks

The hardest part is that there doesn't seem to be much money in it.

Isaia Pruneddu, an Italian, has been in Beijing only two years. His "real" job is chief designer at the architecture firm GZ Architects, but now and then his hands itch to do product design. His first piece was a table lamp in a spare, industrial style: an inverted U made from a single bent steel plate, plus a bulb and a socket. From a distance it looks like a small, old-fashioned British telephone box.

Before he came to China, Pruneddu had shut himself in his studio in Italy and built the design into a model with his own hands. But turning the sketch into an object left him with exactly one of them — a model he could look at, and nothing more.

After a year in Beijing, Pruneddu met Feng Jie, who trained as an architect. At the time Feng and his close friend Wang Kun, also a former architect, were putting together a company called Seventwo. The two had decided to quit architecture — "a bit boring, and too hung up on seniority" — for the product design they had been itching to try since they were students. They then helped Pruneddu find suppliers for the lamp's various parts.

Six months later the lamps came off the line in red, green and blue — five of them in all. In a sense, thanks to Seventwo, Pruneddu's first lamp had reached "mass production." The next step was to turn a product into something that sells.

Pruneddu's lamp was the first piece from Seventwo, a company that calls itself a publisher of home products. Its name nods to the Monkey King's 72 transformations, and so far this young company has made 13 items for "amateur product designers" like Pruneddu, among them a ceramic speaker, a frog-shaped stool, a bone-china cup and a tangram set. The method is simple: a designer supplies a design, Seventwo finds a factory to make it, and then sells it.

At first glance, what Seventwo does is not new. In design, nobody can resist crossing into another field. The industrial designer Marc Newson may be the extreme case of that restlessness: he made his name with the Lockheed Lounge chair, and has since designed tables, clocks, bicycles, restaurants, a recording studio and a private jet, most recently a new line of four-wheeled suitcases for Louis Vuitton. It is not only the masters who behave this way. After finishing the lamp, Pruneddu did not stop either; he is now tinkering with a folding toolbox. In this market, whether or not shoppers are clamoring for home goods, designers have as many needs as they have ideas.

The internet has also produced platforms that match design with production at every stage. Seventwo's thinking closely resembles that of Quirky, the creative-product community and e-commerce site that filed for bankruptcy in 2015. Quirky ran the whole chain by crowdsourcing: the community submitted ideas, a judging panel reviewed them, and the winners were valued, developed, pre-sold, produced and sold. Users could post product ideas on Quirky (US$10 per submission) and could vote on, rate and comment on other people's. Each week the community picked one idea from the previous week's submissions to bring to life, and whoever had submitted it became the product's inventor. The difference is that Quirky concentrated on electronics, and it did all its matchmaking online.

+86, a shared-design platform founded this past January that calls itself "Greenwich Village for designers," is doing something close to what Seventwo does. The difference is that the projects it wants to match are not limited to home products; they also include smart hardware, footwear and apparel, food and dining, and travel and leisure. In July the platform launched a project called Designer100, which aims to promote Chinese designers through touring exhibitions, salons and forums.

These models exist because in design, most designers are cut off from factories. Independent designers usually want small runs; factories would rather take large bulk orders. In Feng Jie's words, "no factory wants to open a mold for a small batch." That pushes designers to build factories of their own, but paying workers and renting floor space sends production costs up sharply — more than most designers can afford.

So it makes little sense for an independent designer to do the design, line up the factories, build the supply chain and then handle sales alone. Abroad, the more settled arrangement is for a furniture-design brand to sign independent designers: the two sides agree on what kind of product is needed, and only then move to design and production. The brand pays a design fee, and keeps the copyright and the sales revenue.

The well-known Danish home brand Normann Copenhagen, which has 54 designers under contract; the fashionable Dutch furniture brand Moooi, with 33; the classic Italian brand Alessi, known for its crossover work with architects; and the Swedish home brand HAY, which entered the Beijing market not long ago — all of them work this way. So does Zaozuo, which got its start online recently under the banner of "bringing together 82 master designers from 27 countries to offer world-class design to the new middle class."

Seventwo's model is in fact very close to these foreign home-design brands, though Normann Copenhagen, Moooi and Zaozuo take the "international route" and recruit top designers from around the world. At bottom, all of them turn design into goods. What sets Seventwo apart is that it answers the needs of designers rather than shoppers, and those designers, like Pruneddu, tend to treat their "design" work as dabbling. Feng also keeps insisting that Seventwo is a platform, not a brand.

"Our wish to help good young designers get better has never changed. If a publisher only works with the very top designers, does that mean young designers never get a chance?" Feng said. "We're a platform, so we touch more kinds of products." Seventwo signs designers for the marketing and pricing rights to a design, for a term of three to five years. During that term the right to sell the work and set its price belongs to Seventwo, and the designer takes only a cut of sales. According to Feng, Seventwo pays a slightly higher cut than the market average of 3% to 5%.

In other words, where established brands chase top designers, Seventwo would rather produce the work of young ones — a kind of "social responsibility" that Moooi, Normann Copenhagen and Alessi do not have to carry.

The reality is that in product design, unless the request comes from a brand, many designers cannot find a factory to turn their wilder ideas into objects. "They can't find a company that can make the product, so the designer has no way to push it forward. Some designers want to see something made, but there's no one to do it," Feng said.

Pruneddu's lamp never reached mass production or the market, but he does not question the value of what Feng and Wang did. "Seeing my own design become a product is very satisfying. I want to thank Seventwo — what they did means a lot to me," Pruneddu told QDaily.

Feng, for his part, does not deny how naive the project was at the start. Back when he and Wang had not yet worked out how Seventwo should operate, it went by a more idealistic name: the Dream-Fulfillment Project.

"At first we wanted to do something purely charitable — just help students get their work made. We had no idea about profit, no idea how to commercialize it. But I thought helping a designer get a piece made was just really cool, really good," Feng said. "Students would send in their work, and we'd use voting or some other way of choosing to get the pieces made, and then sell them."

At that stage, to find designers, Wang even went south to the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts to see the graduation design show. There he liked a color-changing mushroom lamp by Jin Yongping, and took the design back to Beijing for development.

But judging by the 13 products Seventwo has developed since, the early plan to fulfill students' dreams has shifted.

"Working on the mushroom lamp, we saw how green students are at design. But any designer who has never really dealt with a factory is the same as a student — they all think it's simpler than it is, and the work ends up with problems," Wang said, recalling those first months with Jin Yongping's design. "A designer who has never touched a supply chain — say they want to make a glass cup. If they have never dealt with a factory that makes glassware, they don't even know how a cup is made. If a designer wants a coaster shaped like a face, they have no idea how much one extra color on that face adds to the cost. They don't understand the commercial side."

That is why Feng and Wang later dropped the original idea of helping students and went back to Beijing to look for designers they could work with. On August 8 last year they held a salon called Designers as Entrepreneurs (《设计师创业》) at Guangyin Café in Nanluoguxiang. Of the 40 people who came, half were architects.

That "carpet-bombing" hunt for designers paid off. Feng and Wang "met 10 useful people," and also landed Lou Xiaoyu, now another Seventwo partner, who has "good judgment about both craft and market." She is the company's director of product publishing, and the bone-china cups, ball-pit balls, tangram sets, silicone coasters, stacking storage boxes and pillows she designed have already been produced by Seventwo. They also met the artist Jiu Mao, who designed the Flash beer opener.

Besides meeting new designers, Feng brought in an old friend, Lian Zhiming. Lian founded Beijing Yidizhuzuo Decoration Design Co., Ltd. and specializes in interiors; in 2015 he remodeled a cramped 35-square-meter hutong home on Dragon TV's renovation show Dream Home Makeover (《梦想改造家》).

So far Seventwo has helped Lian get two of his designs made: a ceramic speaker and a frog stool.

Lian had in fact designed that ceramic speaker six years earlier, and over that time tried three or four factories, but "too many pieces came out defective, and the glaze wasn't good," so he could never settle on a final version. Only in November 2015 did he find Beijing Chengsi Intellectual Property Agency Co., Ltd. to file a patent for it. After teaming up with Seventwo, Lian and Feng worked out an adjustment to the speaker's length and added a small support at the back. The other thing they did together was refine its packaging.

Oddly, while Lian was still looking for a factory to mold the speaker, he also started a home-products brand called Daran Design, which put out furniture, lighting and tableware. That brand, founded three years ago and short-lived, never pushed the ceramic speaker into mass production either.

"Designing the ceramic speaker back then was pure play. Day-to-day space projects come with a lot of commercial constraints, but product design is still fairly free. We made this little product to let out some of our passion," Lian told QDaily. "Later I found that running your own brand eats you alive — in the end all that's left is the work, not the love of design."

"Lian's main business is interior design. He can't put all his attention on product development the way we can, really talking problems through with the workers. He worked on this speaker for a long time without nailing it down; once he handed it to us, it was finalized in two months. He was quite happy with the result," Feng said.

Making Lian's speaker is also how Seventwo built its ceramics supply chain. At first Feng and Wang looked for factories on general marketplaces like 1688, touring workshops and showrooms. Even when they found factories with good craftsmanship, they were turned down.

The speaker was finally made by Yazhou Shidai, a factory in Tangshan that a friend introduced. Wang calls some factories "factories with ideals," because "designers make demands on their craft, and in the end that craft educates them."

After Yazhou Shidai, anything ceramic became much easier: a coffee cup or a mug that needed ceramic could simply go to Yazhou Shidai. "Wood, ceramic, silicone — once we've worked with a factory, anything in that category can just go back to it," Wang said.

For Seventwo at this stage, though, producing the most perfect design is not the point. Building the supply chain, and finding the right factory to make the work, is the hard part.

"You don't need to manage designers. Build a supply chain this good and they'll come to you on their own," Wang said. "The biggest problem is still getting the whole chain moving. Right now only a small part of it is turning."

That is also why only five of Pruneddu's lamps were made. The shape is not complicated, but the retro look called for a bulb and a socket built to British standards, and few factories in China make that kind of bulb; the socket's clip design is not a common standard here either.

"Almost no one in China makes it. Starting a production run is a hassle, and buying the bulbs is a hassle too. Bayonet bulbs don't come cheap — they sell for around 1,000 yuan," Wang said.

The two also wondered whether they could find a substitute bulb, but "they were all too big, and they completely wrecked the industrial feel of the designer's original." In the end Pruneddu's lamp never went on sale as planned. It now stands by the door of Seventwo's office, a souvenir of the company's first production run.

"Normally, once you find the right factory, making the product isn't that hard, and the craft problems get solved along the way. The hardest thing is a supply chain you can rely on, your own set of partners," Wang said. Earlier, Seventwo had taken the same Pantone color number for a coaster to two factories, and got back two different versions.

Having found these designers and built part of a supply chain, Seventwo has gradually slowed down; for now it wants to stay with this handful of designers. "Designers still come to us on their own, but once we've worked with them a while we also think about their products commercially, and give them suggestions based on the market," Feng said.

In early September, Feng and Wang took Seventwo to the 22nd China International Furniture Expo. Feng thinks "exhibitions are a good channel for promoting new products," and for this first appearance he trimmed the lineup to 10 items. Where those products would eventually be sold, and whether they would sell well, the two had not entirely worked out.

Just as Feng and Wang set off south to Shanghai to set up their booth, Cheng Si, a children's-product designer based in Beijing, was also heading to Shanghai to see the furniture expo. Cheng had just left her design firm to work full time as an independent designer.

Cheng had studied children's cultural design at HDK – School of Design and Craft in Sweden, and already had several designs ready to produce. Her reason for visiting the expo was simple: she needed a production chain that could make them. Seventwo looked like a company that could meet her needs and help her. Unfortunately, the two may not end up working together, because Cheng wants more than mass production of her own designs. Her goal is a brand of her own.

"On some Seventwo products it makes sense to put the designer's name, on others not necessarily. But all the packaging and promotional material carries the designer's name," Feng said.

Cover and in-text images: courtesy of Seventwo, normann-copenhagen.com and designcurial.com.