15-10-2014
Over the years I’ve created designs for a large number of companies – designs that have met with differing levels of success on the market. In the first few years I regularly joked that anyone who worked with me stood a significant chance of going bankrupt. From a statistical point of view, this was certainly no idle remark. Since that time I can point to some successes. You could say that I’ve learnt from bitter experience.
One of those successes was the scrap-wood wallpaper, which had more to do with my reputation than with my qualities as a designer. Football field-sized pieces of that wallpaper were sold at one go. For Rick Vintages of NLXL, which sells the wallpaper, we’ve now thought up a plywood-print furniture collection. Rick was also the one who alerted Arno Ruijzenaars of LEFF Amsterdam to the fact that mentioning my name is in some cases like a Jehovah’s witness’s foot in the door: it gets you in anywhere.
Arno asked me to design a clock. Now, I only create a design if I personally have a good feeling about it, but especially if I have a good story for it. The clock therefore became a tube around which you could construct your own clock. Thanks to LEFF, the clock became a real little gem without even needing to be inside a housing. An extruded tube with a time display forms the basis of the ‘Tube series’. This ‘extrusion time display’ format was so obvious that after my first presentation, Arno spent ages searching on the Internet to see whether it didn’t already exist.
The same thing happened to Jaap Bloemer, son of Piet Hein Bloemer, who was one of our customers. Jaap still sits on and at the furniture that we made for his father nearly 20 years ago. The spectacles that I designed (he’s in that line of business), or rather the concept, was so obvious that he also spent quite some time on the Internet searching for ‘flat steel frame in two pieces which encircle the glass’. This was nowhere to be found either. So there are all sorts of new stools, clocks and spectacles, and now we must hope that they’re all a roaring success!
For NLXL LAB
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