From Small Everyday Objects to a First Piece of Furniture: How Does This Designer Plan His Own Course? | 100 People With Ideas

"I've never thought about how big this brand ought to get. The question I think about is a different one: how to take it from immature at the start to slowly mature, and grow it into a brand that lasts 50 or even 100 years."

Chen Furong takes his time. He founded the furniture and homeware brand WUU in 2014, and only this March, during Design Shanghai, did he show his first furniture series: the AXIS side table, years in the polishing.

For the past four years WUU has made small objects. It never reached commercial scale, but it built a reputation.

Britain's leading design magazine, Wallpaper*, covered WUU's work three years running, and in 2015 Chen won Best New Chinese Design Star from AD China. Gao Guqi, founder of the independent home brand Fnji, saw WUU's T-series lamps at Design Shanghai in 2016: "I felt a designer had finally started to improve the furniture and industrial goods that matter so much in a home. I was excited, and the design language was more spare, in line with what young people want today."

Apart from occasional appearances at design fairs in Shanghai, Beijing, London and Tokyo, Chen spends most of his time hidden away in his studio down an alley in Xiamen, studying materials, craft and design.

The quick rise in exposure and attention has not swept the studio onto a fast-growth track. WUU still develops new products slowly, and the team will even go backwards, refining the details and craft of older products.

"Huh, the WUU brand is somehow still alive." A friend once passed that remark along to him.

"Maybe it's because we look nothing like the way some Chinese commercial brands operate. But really, we just make products carefully. It may be slow, but if you put your heart into it, the work pays off — your brand still exists in the way you hoped it would. That's what comforts me."

He did not train in furniture design or industrial design. He studied integrated art in Shanghai, with the artist Ding Yi as one of his teachers, and tried his hand at all kinds of art and design projects while in school — but he had always kept a wish to design furniture to himself.

In 2013, chance took him to the hometown of his classmate Zhiming. He was drawn to the handmade playthings Zhiming's grandfather made, and, inspired by them, started an art project called "Hammer and Zhuangzi" with Zhiming and a second partner, Xinqiao.

The three drove a van for 52 days and 13,458 kilometers to visit seven creators living on the fringes in the countryside and record their lives and their inventions. These craftsmen built mechanical elephants and escape pods — work that fits no mainstream taste and follows no professional design logic, yet each man was inventing from his own particular point of view.

Chen thought they all lived like Zhuangzi: each in his own way, at ease, whole, full. And the "hammer" stood for what they were doing.

Afterwards the project — a wandering mix of video record and physical exhibits — was selected, through Ding Yi's introduction, for the 2014 Shanghai Art & Design Biennale, and later shown under the same name at Wei Art Space in Xiamen.

The village craftsmen he met along the way also hardened his intention to start a furniture brand: to go straight at what he wanted to do, as the "Zhuangzis" did, and with the focus and heat of a "hammer."

WUU studio was founded in 2014. Chen took charge of the brand's overall plan and led product design; Zhiming handled materials research. They put design and materials research side by side, looking for what more becomes possible when the use of a material and its design are worked out together.

WUU's Chinese name is simply wu — thing. "What we care about is what is genuine. We respect materials, and we want to explore their limits and their possibilities. Even in the design details we work on now, we want the moment a person meets an object to be as natural as it can be," Chen told us.

They studied concrete and terrazzo, working out how to bring this traditional building craft back into the present and apply it to portable everyday goods.

To keep concrete's raw texture while getting past the limits of cement's toughness and strength, the two ran more than a thousand experiments over two years, comparing mixes of cement and concrete again and again for strength, toughness and color. In the end they developed a new cement material fit for the fine manufacture of everyday goods.

The material shows its toughness in the Terra phone case, under a millimeter thick, and its strength in another product, the Aero meteorite ruler.

Brass went the same way. The team spent a full year on the material's properties, comparing brasses with different metal ratios and running tests on machining, polishing and natural oxidation, before settling on a process that suited WUU: one that resists scratches and yields a material with the elegance of copper's color but a slower oxidation.

Take the cement-and-brass container: a bright blue jar made by hand in cement, topped by a machine-cut brass lid. Simple and precise, it holds both a clash of materials and colors and a fusion of machine work with handmade texture.

Besides materials research, the other subject WUU cares about is handcraft.

The village creators he visited during "Hammer and Zhuangzi" left a strong mark on Chen. He later joined "Craft Reborn," a project run by the magazine HOMELAND, working with a metalworking workshop in Fuzhou on an experiment that broke away from the traditional scissors prototype, trying to make something entirely new out of new technology and old craft.

"Materials and craft have always fascinated me. Every time I learn a new technique it is as if a whole new channel opens in my head — it feels amazing," he said in an interview with HOMELAND. "Fu scissors are a traditional, tightly made kind of metalwork. It made me eager to build a deft join between the new way of producing and the old way of making by hand, so the two merge naturally."

In designing them he reset the structure of the scissors and parameterized it, adjusting it until it suited casting in a mold, then brought in the old craft for the finishing work — so the piece met contemporary taste and could be half-industrially produced while still carrying traces of traditional handwork.

The three months he spent working with the craftsmen made him familiar with the techniques and made it easier to conceive a design and handle its details. He began to think about the relationship between time and taste: "I hope I can go on to make work that comes closer to what I think of as a classic — something I can still be proud of many years later."

When the studio was new, the team spent most of its time and energy on materials research and made only a few small everyday items: the HEXA honeycomb desktop system, the cement-and-brass container and the solid-geometry stationery mentioned above.

But Chen slowly realized that making objects that small was "too uncommercial to run as a business." The team began looking for a point where the brand could grow, and in the end still wanted to make WUU a furniture brand.

In 2015 the brand, just becoming known in the trade, took its first investment. A division of labor gradually formed inside the studio. It stayed small, a little over a dozen people, but the roles — design, materials research, quality control, operations — were clearly separated, and they hired an outside technical team to build a new website and an e-commerce platform.

Even after the move to a more commercial and more professional operation, WUU's rate of new releases did not speed up.

The T-series lamps, the most recognizable set of work since the brand began, took two years and came out in 2017. One of them, the T work lamp, took two and a half years, because of the complicated craft of its three rotating joints from base to shade, and went into mass production only a few months ago.

At first glance this is a set of strongly industrial work: the aluminum, finely cut and designed, gives it a futuristic look. But Chen told us the design focus of the T-series is touch, the most direct interaction between a person and an object. "I'm actually quite against some of today's smart products. There ought to be a natural way for people and things to interact, but a lot of smart products now just make you feel things are more trouble."

Take the several control modes in the T-series switch: a light turn or press adjusts the brightness and the color temperature, moving from cool light to warm, from a bright working atmosphere to an easy moment before sleep.

Chen says that studying the load and pivot points of the T work lamp alone — finding a balance between the ball at the base of the arm and the shade at the front, and making it both well designed and structurally exact — took more than six months.

After the T-series came out last year it quickly drew partners. WUU's products entered Fnji, Lane Crawford and a good number of design boutiques in Beijing and Shanghai, and can also be found at Fangsuo Commune and Eslite Bookstore.

"When I was making the T-series, the thought was also that once it was done it could be a product that sells for decades. Some products are the smart-alecky kind — they catch the eye at once, but after a few months you lose interest in them," Chen said.

The exploration of aluminum carries into this year's new products as well: the Quark pendant lamp and the AXIS side table.

The team had meant to make a small pendant lamp of around 1,000 yuan. After all, the cheapest thing in the T-series, the reading lamp, sells for 1,500 yuan, and the floor lamp in the same series comes close to 7,000.

But while developing the Quark, aimed at the mass market, their strict standards for material, craft and detail kept pushing costs up. Looking at the prototype, the team judged it better in texture and detail than comparable products at 2,000 yuan — and then found themselves stuck over how to price it.

Chen comes back again and again to his wish that his products last. "In 2015 we exhibited at 100% Design in London, and the booth across from ours belonged to a London brand. Talking with them, we found their whole team was six people, but their products were on sale in many countries... In Germany there are brands that have been going for decades with only a very small number of designs, and each one has sold for decades."

He envies that state, though he has only just begun.

Image credit: WUU