What Happened When European Designers Came to China? | Maybe Europe Has the Answer ⑧

In this “adventure” of mixed curiosity, economics and creativity, both sides end up discovering the same thing: working together is not easy.

When the Italian designer Luca Nichetto began working with the Chinese company Zaozuo two years ago, his European clients were skeptical. They did not really believe a Chinese company would pay for design. If it would, there would be no need to lose sleep over knockoffs.

They do lose sleep over them. At a recent Milan Fashion Week, the well-known British designer Tom Dixon, together with a group of European designers and home-furnishing executives, told the design website Dezeen in all seriousness that they feared Milan Design Week had become the place where Chinese manufacturers copy a design the moment it appears.

A knockoff of a piece of furniture Luca Nichetto designed is easy enough to buy, but he does not seem to take it much to heart. After two years of working with Chinese companies, he says of the copying: “We — the European brands — are the ones chiefly to blame. We pushed things in this direction… We just wanted to treat this place as a factory, because it is so cheap here.”

That is putting yourself in the other man’s shoes rather far.

But if you have met the European designers who have come to China to give it a try, the remark may sound less outlandish.

Even now, designing in China is nowhere near a trend among European designers. We do not mean the star designer flown in for a one-off to give some city a landmark, but broader, longer-lasting collaboration. For most designers Europe is a “comfort zone” most of the time, and few step out of it.

The ones who do share a few traits. Curiosity is essential: they have to be interested in cultural difference to begin with, and willing to make mistakes in a new market. Usually they have also been struck by the speed of China’s growth and the size of its middle class, and believe this place cannot stay a factory forever. Quick wits and a sense of proportion matter just as much, or the collaboration soon breeds discontent.

Luca Nichetto is a good example. Even as he claims he intends to “educate” this immature market — “China has big problems” — he reminds himself from time to time to try to understand his Chinese partners:

“You know, I don’t have to use a knife and fork. I can use chopsticks too,” Luca Nichetto says.

European designers rarely get a chance to learn what is happening in China’s design world. What they do know about the industry is mostly about the factories. European brands that had worked here before would occasionally invite designers to visit plants in these new markets and look over the supply chains and the raw materials with local character.

Where that kind of collaboration has some history behind it, things usually go smoothly. David Wahl is a Swedish designer who began working in Shanghai a few years ago, employed by the Product Development Center (PDC) that IKEA, the world’s largest furniture retailer, set up there. In 2013 IKEA decided that to get real benefit from its suppliers it had to be near them — which is what most people think. Twenty-five percent of IKEA’s products worldwide are made in China, so the company built its only product development center outside its headquarters in Älmhult, Sweden, in Shanghai. It drew more than 30 designers of 11 nationalities.

It paid off. In his three years at IKEA’s Shanghai PDC, David Wahl won an iF Design Award and a Red Dot Award. He credits this to designers being closer to the factories, which let them “turn trends and new ideas into products quickly.”

Thanks to the internet, fledgling designer brands can now try working with Chinese suppliers too. The results vary.

Prettypegs, based in Stockholm, found a factory in Guangdong on Alibaba, and its founders are pleased with it. They gave the factory the metal table legs, which are simpler to make, and in the end, even with long-distance shipping added on, these not especially large orders still saved a good deal of money.

A few blocks away, another startup, Superfront, says it sent a Chinese factory drawings of a perfect circle and got back an oval. “Maybe once we are bigger we will find someone to supervise on the ground in China. We will think about Chinese factories again then.”

Apart from the supply chain, what usually gives European designers their rough first picture of the new market is a landmark event — the 2008 Beijing Olympics, say, or the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. Quite a few European architecture firms worked on Expo pavilions, which for many of them was probably their first time in China. ARX was one; the Dutch government invited the firm to give a talk at the Netherlands Pavilion.

“I understood nothing at the time. I just saw the Expo and thought there was an opportunity here, because the Netherlands was in a financial crisis then,” says Alfonso Wolbert, director of ARX.

When ARX began asking around, he found Shanghai already crowded with architects from the United States, France, Italy and Japan, who had come in earlier with the boom in Chinese real estate.

Alfonso Wolbert is a careful man; he and his partners spent a year deciding whether to enter China. ARX had very few international clients then. Building client relationships in a new market, Alfonso Wolbert reckoned, would take four or five years. ARX thought policy might be a useful market signal in China. They found “sustainable development” in the five-year plan of the day, which was exactly what ARX had been doing with sustainable buildings in the Netherlands.

What Alfonso Wolbert did not learn that year was how large a part “guanxi” — personal connections — plays in winning projects.

In 2012 Alfonso Wolbert met his current partner, a real-estate management company called Shanghai Tongyi. A few rules now roll off his tongue: in China location matters a great deal, and you cannot keep doing small projects, because no one will take you seriously. That is his partner’s last word on which jobs to take. Alfonso Wolbert also found that where Dutch clients ask tirelessly for revisions, Chinese clients would rather hear the story and the thinking behind a design than study the drawings. He began working the number 8, which Chinese people like, into his presentations, and, to be safe, took feng shui into account in every building. He learned all this from his Chinese teacher.

Somewhat to Alfonso Wolbert’s surprise, “in China, money is not that easy to make.” Just as unexpected, he got to do projects in China that would have been impossible in the Netherlands — projects that were not only different in style but genuinely bigger.

Over the past three years ARX has worked on the interiors of Ma Weidu’s Guanfu Museum in Shanghai Tower and of the Shekou Art Museum in Shenzhen, and on designs for the Shanghai Pilot Free Trade Zone. None of these had much to do with sustainability, but by June of this year Alfonso Wolbert felt they had finally finished “the slow start you cannot avoid.” ARX set up a new company in China, and that license lets him take on commercial building projects.

Once this year is over things will be fine, Alfonso Wolbert says. Because of the reach of these big projects, his business back in the Netherlands has picked up as well.

These China stories always manage to move people, whether out of curiosity or the persuasive force of economic growth.

The Stockholm design studio Form us with love got an email from Zaozuo in the autumn of 2014.

Zaozuo is a Chinese startup with more than 100 employees today. Its first model was a bit like made.com: it invited designers to work with it and offered them an easy way to “enter” China — Zaozuo would handle production and online sales. Founder Shu Wei believed this could answer young middle-class consumers’ new demand for furniture, with Nordic home style in fashion. But of the many invitations Zaozuo sent out at the start, only a small share drew a reply.

For Form us with love this was a first with a mainland Chinese company; before that it had only held brief talks with a firm in Hong Kong. The studio clearly saw it as a milestone worth recording, and gave the experience in China its own section in the book marking the studio’s tenth anniversary. The book would be handed out to other studios as promotional material.

There is indeed something in the experience worth their attention.

In the autumn of 2014 Zaozuo came to Stockholm in person to meet the studio’s founders and designers, and invited them to Beijing. The designer Christian Fiebig visited a number of homes in the city, along with local mahogany-furniture markets. But Christian Fiebig recalls in the book that Zaozuo’s business model was not yet mature at that point, and the company did not know much about how furniture is made. The designers there, barely in their twenties, could not quite read the sketches, which had to be broken down detail by detail.

In an interview this June, Christian Fiebig complained politely that in the end they found their pebble-shaped sofa had been altered without notice: the legs, originally metal, had become wood, and the sofa, originally meant to come apart and go back together, had become one fixed piece.

Christian Fiebig was a little curious whether this is a common way of working in China.

Luca Nichetto has been Zaozuo’s creative director since January, but before that he was, like Form us with love, one of the designers and studios Zaozuo worked with. He can probably answer Christian Fiebig’s question. He is not the only one asking it, of course. At Beijing Design Week, Luca Nichetto found that people kept asking him what the difference is between the European and Chinese markets, and between their designers.

“In design especially, in Europe we are all spoiled, because most designers’ clients, the brand companies, help the designer solve problems. In China it is not like that,” Luca Nichetto says. “You need to understand the limits, and then find a solution.”

Those limits include a supply chain unfamiliar with certain techniques. After becoming creative director, Luca Nichetto spent several months working out in full “what Zaozuo’s supply chain can do, how Zaozuo should do it the right way, and how to do things it has never done.”

“Design is not just drawing sketches. It also means understanding the company, the organization, the scale,” Luca Nichetto says, and that standard applies all the more in China.

New Chinese companies and young European designers probably both need to understand this: what, exactly, they stand to get out of the collaboration.

The cost of living in London is high, and the number of design graduates has risen sharply over the past few years, so designers there are finding it hard to get a suitable design job and are considering moving to other European cities. Gabriel Boicel, who studies graphic design at a London university, is a young man with unusual ideas: he plans to move to Beijing.

His friends in London are afraid to look for work in China, but this Swedish-born designer-to-be believes the creative industries are doing well there. His mother works at Nokia, so the family has a network already in place. He has also read in newspapers and on blogs that Nordic design is very much in demand.

Henrik Jeppesen thought “this business could work” 16 years ago; today he might see it differently. In 2000 he came to China for the first time, planning to open an office in Beijing. The year before he had opened one in Ho Chi Minh City. Five years ago he sold the Beijing company to a local partner. Now he flies to China when a new project needs a meeting in person. Copenhagen has flights enough to cover frequent business travel.

Henrik Jeppesen lives in Copenhagen, likes to travel, and likes talking about what he has seen in North America and southern Europe. He is proud of Denmark’s trading history, and finds it a little hard to understand why his peers have turned so cautious — they will not even go and look at southern Europe, at how long the days are there in winter!

You can tell at a glance he is the sort who decided on a whim, in 2000, to try his luck in the East.

He looked as ambitious then as Luca Nichetto does now, set on persuading Chinese clients to “see the importance of design, use technology properly, and become market leaders,” rather than stay a “factory.”

He ran into the same bind as Alfonso Wolbert: Europe had stopped being comfortable. His Danish design firm had just come through the slump of 1998, and clients had tightened their design budgets. “The West was struggling,” Henrik Jeppesen says.

But when Henrik Jeppesen talks about those hard early years from his office on Nyhavn in Copenhagen, he plainly understands that in this “adventure” of mixed curiosity, economics and creativity, both sides end up discovering the same thing: working together is not easy.

Cover image: Zaozuo