Exactly one year ago, on the occasion of the Salone
del Mobile 2012, Domus organised an exhibition
called "Open Design Archipelago/The Future in the
Making". Located in a beautiful but rather formal
palazzo in the centre of Milan, the exhibition
was an attempt to examine, through the work of
a dozen or so individuals, how network culture
combined with new manufacturing technologies
were triggering an epochal shift in how we
think about design. It was also a provocation —
we displayed furniture self-produced using
downloadable, open-source CAD files submitted to
our Autoprogettazione 2.0 open call to designers;
we invited Dirk Vander Kooij to bring an industrial
robot into the building and print out plastic chairs
on site; we displayed a selection of industrial
products produced not through the investment of a
design company, but through the crowdfunding of
resources on Kickstarter. The appeal to the design
community — and in particular the crisis-racked
companies displaying their wares out in Rho —
was: the network era is not just a threat but an
opportunity for those willing to innovate.
Needless to say, rethinking the economic structure
of an industry based on the industrial production
of large, expensive pieces of hardware is easier
said than done. Nevertheless, it seems the
message resonated with at least one visitor to the
exhibition, Massimiliano Messina, the CEO of Flou,
a legendary company known for having produced
some of the most successful bed designs of recent
decades. Having taken the reins of the company
upon the death of his father, Messina set about
considering how an internationally successful
company could not just survive the storm of
digitally driven innovation, but ride the wave.
The result is not evolutionary, but rather a
completely new start: a new company that runs
parallel to Flou called Natevo.
Natevo. Crowdsourcingdesign
What, in the 21st century, should companies do to tackle the current uncertainty successfully? Massimiliano Messina, CEO of Flou, has presented Natevo, a new entrepreneurial venture that aims to tap the power of crowdfunding.
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- 28 March 2013
- Milan
Natevo, Messina tells us, is an abbreviation of Natural Evolution, an indicator of another of his motivations in founding the company. Messina, who runs Flou together with his sisters Manuela and Cristiana, is convinced that the primary prerequisite of a successful business in the 21st century is a deep-seated commitment to social responsibility, particularly with regard to ecological awareness and stewardship of natural resources. Natevo addresses this challenge in several ways, some of which are obvious (for example, every component is recyclable).
Others are more unusual: every item Natevo
will produce is not only an item of furniture
(a chair, a bookshelf, a bed) but also a light source — using the versatile, less wasteful LED technology —,
potentially cutting down on the number of objects
one needs by giving each more than one function — and for this, the company has started research programs with Genoa's Università degli Studi and Napoli's Seconda Università degli Studi.
Others still are downright unprecedented for an
industrial manufacturer.
Messina believes the world is cluttered with
objects that companies produce but nobody
wants — tables, armchairs, lights nobody feels an
attachment to, sold at a discount and ultimately
destined to populate landfills. The obvious question
is how industry can prevent waste and optimise
production in the age of ubiquitous information
networks, and it was this question that inspired the
most innovative aspect of Natevo. Taking its cue
from the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, Natevo
will not commission designers to produce new
concepts and prototypes; it will solicit the design
community to submit furniture designs through
its website (the only constraint is the recyclability
of the materials and the incorporation of a light
source), and those which a jury considers possible
to produce will be prototyped and published on the
website. At that point, the public will be able to vote
each design into production by sponsoring it via
the website, and if the product receives a sufficient
number of pre-orders within a predefined amount
of time, it will go into production and be shipped to
the purchaser. Products will also be displayed in several Natevo retail locations in sizable Italian cities.
An internationally successful company could not just survive the storm of digitally driven innovation, but ride the wave
There are certainly a number of unknown quantities and potential challenges in a business model that is so audaciously innovative (at least within the furniture industry). Will customers — particularly in Italy, where Kickstarter is not yet available — be culturally prepared for such an unorthodox purchasing method? Will the submitted designs appeal to the market? There are, however, some distinct advantages to this approach. For one, Natevo is following in the footsteps of countless companies, until now primarily information-based, who have successfully tapped into the power of the crowd — unexpected sources of innovation from unconventional or "unqualified" sources (what Messina calls "embracing good ideas wherever they come from"). Secondly, by only manufacturing goods that are certain to sell, Natevo eliminates the cost of failures and should be able to offer high-quality products at a reasonable price.
Natevo launches onto the market this April at Milan's Salone del Mobile with a range of designs that somehow embody the diversity of the origins it imagines for its future products. There is a chair by young, less-known designers such as Thesia Progetti — who previously authored the Essentia bed for Flou in 2012, which integrated a light source —, alongside a bookshelf by a master such as Carlo Colombo. The website will begin collecting submissions in early April, and by the end of the year the line of Natevo products should be expanded to include new designs that have been "voted" into production by the visitors to www. natevo.com (the site will be active from 5 April 2013). Messina's is an audacious departure from the conventions of industrial production, and that is precisely what gives hope that innovation is still alive in Italian industrial design. Fortune favours the bold.