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.

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.

Top: The Nuvola
di luce slipper chair,
designed by Thesia Progetti,
started life as a piece of
hybrid furniture. Its steel
structure is covered with an
elastic mesh that comes in
three colours (white, black
and natural). Photo by Beppe Brancato. Above: Cristiana,
Massimiliano and Manuela
Messina, who inherited
from their father Rosario
the management of Flou, a
historic bed production firm
founded in 1978 in Meda.
They decided to create
a new, parallel company
called Natevo, which would
be capable of exploiting
the opportunities offered
by the Web. The name is
an abbreviation of Natural
Evolution. Photo by Delfino Sisto Legnani — Top: The Nuvola di luce slipper chair, designed by Thesia Progetti, started life as a piece of hybrid furniture. Its steel structure is covered with an elastic mesh that comes in three colours (white, black and natural). Photo by Beppe Brancato. Above: Cristiana, Massimiliano and Manuela Messina, who inherited from their father Rosario the management of Flou, a historic bed production firm founded in 1978 in Meda. They decided to create a new, parallel company called Natevo, which would be capable of exploiting the opportunities offered by the Web. The name is an abbreviation of Natural Evolution. Photo by Delfino Sisto Legnani

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).

The
Super8 display case by
Pinuccio Borgonovo has a
glass structure, with only
one side lit by LEDs. Natevo
furnishings are all available
with two shades of light, one
warmer, one cooler. Photo by Beppe Brancato — The Super8 display case by Pinuccio Borgonovo has a glass structure, with only one side lit by LEDs. Natevo furnishings are all available with two shades of light, one warmer, one cooler. Photo by Beppe Brancato

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

The Plettro table, also by
Thesia Progetti, includes
LED light sources positioned
at floor level and under the
glass top. Photo by Beppe Brancato — The Plettro table, also by Thesia Progetti, includes LED light sources positioned at floor level and under the glass top. Photo by Beppe Brancato

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.

In the CCLight bookshelf,
designed by Carlo Colombo
for Natevo, the light is emitted
by internal LED sources.
With a structure in aluminium
profiles, CCLight is produced
in two different heights and
three colours (white, graphite
and black). Photo by Beppe Brancato — In the CCLight bookshelf, designed by Carlo Colombo for Natevo, the light is emitted by internal LED sources. With a structure in aluminium profiles, CCLight is produced in two different heights and three colours (white, graphite and black). Photo by Beppe Brancato

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.

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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