Design Students Draw a National Business Following

When you’ve wrung every possible penny from vendors, trimmed time from the production process, pumped up employee productivity to its highest pitch and stretched brand extension to the max, what’s next in the business world of increasingly competitive consumer cycles?

Well, for Michigan’s Bold Furniture – a furniture manufacturer founded in 1999 and now with 13 year-round employees and more than $2 million in sales – the answer was quickly found in the student-design studios at the University of Cincinnati.

Bold’s co-owner (who is also co-Chief Executive Officer) Todd Folkert explained, “What began as a straight business deal for us – fabricating furniture for classroom use in UC’s design college – has quickly become something more, a working collaboration where architecture students are actually creating a new line of furniture we plan to market by early fall 2005.”

Bold’s partnership with UC’s top-ranked architecture program, part of the university’s

College of Design Architecture, Art, and Planning

, began last year.  That’s when faculty and staff at UC approached Bold (of Spring Lake, Mich.) to manufacture elevated design desks complete with shelves rising at the back of each unit and with large, u-shaped “saddle-bag” storage units to hold large drawings and plans.  The new furniture – actually designed to be as compact as possible – was needed to accommodate the expanding student population in the college.

Bold accepted the designs, made the furniture as specified, and it was, seemingly, the end of the relationship.

“Then, we were sitting at lunch in Cincinnati.  The furniture was installed, and all had gone well.  Pam Porter of the UC Architect’s Office made a suggestion about furthering the process, wondering if the process the university had gone through in designing this furniture might not be a benefit for other design, architecture, art and planning programs and for working architects, planners and designers… to have better tools to meet their needs,” recalls Folkert.

That’s when Folkert realized there was a ready-made pool of talent available to design a new line of furniture for him, allowing him to open up a new market specifically targeting design programs at schools as well as professionals.  “I’d made design-studio furniture for UC and Ohio State, but now I had the chance to market a new line across the country, and who better to design that furniture than the end users, the students?”

So, in exchange for 20 of the design stations – tables, shelving, storage units and more – as well as a share of future royalties, Folkert now has a team of 16 architecture students designing his next line of furniture under the leadership of Anton Harfmann, associate dean.

In back of this collaboration is a recent spate of similar partnerships between businesses and UC’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning.  Students and faculty in the college have worked for clients like Procter & Gamble (baby products and a new form of heating pad), Western Southern Life Insurance Company and Delta Air Lines Inc.   

And more are planned for the future.  In fact, the recently founded Center for Design, Research and Innovation at UC just received a grant of nearly $2 million to help stimulate a new brand of success between the university and small businesses in Ohio.   “This is R&D around innovation, and many forces are driving it,” explained Craig Vogel, director of the DRI Center at UC and author of “Creating Breakthrough Products" and of “The Design of Things to Come.”

The new entrepreneurship emphasis at many business schools nationally is one engine powering these new links to the design profession, albeit on an ad-hoc basis.  Better design is viewed as a means to boost entrepreneurs up the growth ladder, explained Vogel.    Significantly, other universities – especially those that house engineering, business and design colleges – are also structuring partnerships between both large- and small businesses and design students.  These schools include:

• Arizona State University
• Georgia Institute of Technology
• North Carolina State University
• Southern Illinois University – Carbondale 
     

With this particular project now going on at UC, Bold Furniture will receive the final plans and full-size models for their new line in early June.  Very quickly thereafter, they’ll offer better design-studio furniture to schools and professionals across the country.  The

ideas

the UC students are now synthesizing include elevated design tables, laptop tables, shelving, lockers, file cabinets and organizers as well as “saddle bag” units – all of which fit together, each piece working seamlessly with others to provide the most practical use (and security) in tight spaces.