Entry Title: "
Grow Range of Kitset Lights"
Company:
David Trubridge
,
New Zealand
Category: Professional, Product
Designer(s): David Trubridge
Entry Description:
Grow Range compromises of four impressive and high end kitset light shades that are constructed in an easy way allowing assembly by customer. The project brief was to redesign, manufacture and package a range of existing assembled lightshades as kitset for worldwide export. A Life Cycle Analysis had revealed that freighting was our worst environmental burden, as well as seriously inflating the final retail prices.
We completely redesigned the structure of these lights to reduce them to a single repeated component for easy assembly, without in any way changing their original and successful look. We developed the new design in a parametric programme which allows the lights to be scaled up to giant size as additional components are added. This broadens the retail niche of the smaller lights to exciting large commercial possibilities. They lights are made from sustainably grown bamboo which is made into plywood which is then cut by CNC.
There is no product like this available in the world. The original design did not evolve out of market research (i.e. from following the market) but from free creative design thinking that discovered a whole new market that previously did not exist (i.e. from leading the market). Then followed this very innovative development to turn it into a kitset. Kitset could have been a negative, but we gave it value and turned it around into a positive with story-telling, branding and packaging design, all created inhouse.
Under the old system, one assembled Koura light packed in a crate cost as much to freight to Australia as the light itself. Our distributor bought one or two at a time and many people were put off. Now 40 kitset boxes fit in the same crate and on top of that the unit wholesale price has come down considerably. Orders have become a minimum of ten. The promotion allows the light to be sold as a much greener and more environmentally responsible product. This is because of the reduced detrimental freight effects, but also because the purchaser has invested a part of themselves in the finished object making it less likely they will quickly throw it away, we hope. The influential design blog 'inhabitat' saw the display in New York and described them as green design masterpieces, saying It's hard to believe that each of his pieces were brought to the space within boxes measuring just a few inches high. |
