Memorandum by Vitsœ
A PHILOSOPHY FOR
PRODUCTION
Vitsœ was founded in 1959 to realise the
furniture designs of Dieter Rams. The proposition was to create
furniture that would last as long as possible. Accordingly, built-in
obsolescence would be avoided by making the furniture discreet
and adaptable while not pandering to fashion.
The intention was to encourage customers to
start by buying less; to add to, rearrange and repair when needed
so that a commitment would build between customer and company,
to their mutual benefit.
Importantly, the customer would take the furniture
with them when they moved and thereby ensure continual reuse.
In 1995 Vitsœ corporate seat transferred
to Britain. Today 97 per cent of its production is in the UK.
The company employs directly a staff of 42 but indirectly a larger
number via key suppliers. 30 per cent—and rising—of
turnover is exported. Vitsœ's entire sales comprise a shelving
system (for which it is best known) and a chair programme, which
were designed in 1960 and 1962 respectively. Vitsœ is profitable,
privately owned and Dieter Rams continues to work with the company
(celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2009).
Today, at any one time, up to 50 per cent of
Vitsœ customers are existing customers who are adding to,
rearranging or reinstalling their furniture which might have been
bought as far back as 1960. The inevitable impact of their furniture
on the world's environment has been minimised by being useful
for as long as possible.
END OF
LIFE?
It is almost unheard of for Vitsœ's furniture
to be thrown away. In January 2008 a customer related how the
20-year-old shelves they had recently inherited—after hard
commercial use—were reinstalled in their private home. Two
metal shelves were left over; they had been bent and damaged during
the removal process; disposal was reluctantly contemplated. Instead
they were posted on eBay. After competitive bidding from a number
of parties they sold for £70. Their original cost in June
1988 was £64. Reuse in favour of disposal at increased value.
This is not a unique anecdote for the company.
KEY INGREDIENT
Arguably the most important ingredient in Vitsœ's
long-term success is the creation and constant nurturing of trust
between customer and company. It is the antithesis of returning
to a shop in the almost certain knowledge that it will not have
that much-needed replacement cup and saucer because "we have
discontinued that line and now offer this new one".
LESSONS FROM
NATURE
Charles Darwin's succinct definition of evolution
was "descent with modification".
Nature does not hold annual trade exhibitions
where it displays rafts of new products, many of which will disappear
without trace almost immediately. Moreover, nature has no waste:
all cycles are closed. Whereas man used to operate within closed
cycles, during the 19th and 20th centuries the cycles became open
and created waste. Therefore the lessons are in nature: allow
a species to evolve continuously via small, apparently insignificant,
improvements and then reuse every last molecule at end of life.
Vitsœ tries to behave in this way.
Theory into reality: what does Vitscoe do differently?
— Vitsœ's purpose is to allow
more people to live better, with less, that lasts longer;
— Vitsœ tries not be distracted
by novelty or passing fashions (the customer is not always right);
— Vitsœ concentrates on reuse;
recycling is what you do when you fail to reuse;
— Vitsœ puts the entire emphasis
on being a business that provides a service rather than just a
product (the product is good but, it is hoped, the service is
better);
— Vitsœ ensures that customers
know it will exist for them in the long term; therefore the customer
can make a commitment for the future provision of both product
and service;
— Vitsœ does not take part
in trade exhibitions which increasingly seek to portray furniture
as fashion and thereby exacerbate the problem of waste creation
while seeking to satisfy short-term financial goals;
— Vitsœ is not run primarily
for profit; every offer letter to new employees states this on
page one; profit is the result of providing real and lasting satisfaction
to its customers;
— Vitsœ does not accept short-term
gain at the expense of long-term loss;
— previous evidence (15 January
2008, Q211) pointed at the problem of internal budgeting disguising
the true cost of actions. There is no internal budgeting at Vitsœ
but genuine individual responsibility for cost decisions. Vitsœ's
new financial controller is finding it strange that the entire
business is cost-conscious already: whole-life costing is understood
throughout the company;
— previous evidence (15 January
2008, Q169) has shown that the burden of suggestion schemes falls
on others to implement. There is no suggestion scheme at Vitsœ:
everyone is allowed to talk to their colleagues and to implement
evolutionary improvements;
— Vitsœ's approach is, at
first glance, not cheap; but when spread over only a few years
it rapidly becomes cheaper for the customer and the company, as
well as being of great benefit to society.
Better design and use of materials;
— Vitsœ's products are designed
as true systems (the principle behind the long-lived Routemaster
bus, also a product of post-war thinking) with high-quality specification
and finishes to ensure flexibility, variability, adaptability,
durability and therefore longevity;
— all of Vitsœ's products
are simple to construct, repair and dismantle; the use of plastic
is minimised; most products comprise recyclable aluminium and
steel, and compostable wood that is assembled with mechanical
joints (ie not bonded or welded) to permit repair and end-of-life
dismantling;
— the appearance of Vitsœ's
products is self-effacing and the range of finishes is deliberately
small; Vitsœ intentionally restricts the amount of choice
offered (The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz points
out the debilitating effects of too much choice for society);
— Vitsœ produces next to
no waste (even waste from the office kitchen is composted); aluminium-extrusion
offcuts go to recyclers as does waste cardboard at the end of
its multiple-use life;
— wooden stillages are used to
transport all of its high-value aluminium parts between suppliers;
some of these stillages have been in continuous use for 15 years;
— when suppliers deliver components,
reused cardboard packaging and stillages are returned on otherwise
empty vehicles for reuse; waste and costs are reduced;
— Vitsœ's demands for innovative
packaging solutions are often ahead of developments in the market;
for example compostable starch packaging (in use at Vitsœ
for 10 years) is still greatly undervalued in the UK;
— where possible, Vitsœ delivers
its high-value cabinets in reusable, repairable, heavy-duty "tautliner"
bags (designed by Vitsœ with a specialist supplier); the
investment was off-puttingly great but the rewards were rapidly
even greater than anticipated;
— Vitsœ's behaviour has increasingly
been able to infect its suppliers: some have improved their processes
to reduce waste while almost all have improved the quality of
their products;
— incoming packaging from suppliers
is reused as outgoing packaging for customers;
— no waste whatsoever is left
on customers' sites when Vitsœ has installed a shelving system;
all packaging is returned for reuse;
— over the last 18 months Vitsœ's
internal processes have been migrated to the web and have become
almost paperless; customers can order complicated shelving systems
without having to use or receive any paper;
Consumer behaviour via product attachment
Ruth Mugge at the Faculty of Industrial Design
and Engineering, Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands
published a paper in 2007 on the topic of product attachment—the
strength of the emotional bond a consumer experiences to a specific
product. She wrote:
"This definition implies that a strong relationship
or tie exists between the individual on the one hand and the object
on the other. If people feel strongly attached to a product, they
are also more likely to handle the product with care, to repair
it when it breaks down, and to postpone its replacement as long
as possible. Product attachment may thus increase a product's
lifetime.
"From the viewpoint of sustainability, it
can be valuable for designers to influence the degree of attachment
people experience to their products. Nowadays, people dispose
of products although they still function properly, for example,
because these products look old-fashioned. Extending the psychological
life span of durables could be instrumental to reduce the demand
for scarce resources and the rate of solid waste disposal. Up
to now, the role of the product and its design in stimulating
the degree of attachment experienced toward this object remains
quite obscure.
"As the product is under the designer's
direct control, understanding these issues is valuable for designers.
Accordingly, this research contributes by establishing the role
of the product for bringing about product attachment, and by proposing
several design strategies to strengthen the emotional bond between
a person and his/her product."
She describes what Vitsœ has been doing
for almost 50 years. For example:
— Vitsœ recruits the highest
quality staff in all areas of the business; almost all members
of staff have one or two degrees. High quality staff can communicate
the ethos of the business with conviction to customers, suppliers
and new colleagues alike;
— Vitsœ's staff always point
out to customers that they can buy less today because they can
return later to add more; accordingly Vitsœ's staff do not
earn commission because that rewards short-term thinking; rather
they build a trusting relationship with the customer for the future;
— Vitsœ's customers can return
for spare parts, ask for their furniture to be repaired or even
reupholster an entire chair in their own home after decades of
use;
— a high proportion of Vitsœ's
customers return to ask for planning advice when moving home or
office; the charges for dismantling and reinstalling aim to cover
costs only because of the importance of ensuring long-term customer
loyalty;
— ever more customers say that
they will buy Vitsœ's furniture because they can reuse it,
rearrange it and take it with them; they understand that they
are making a genuine life-long investment. Often they say: "Why
didn't I know about you 10 years ago? You would have saved me
time, stress and money";
— a sense of well-being pervades
Vitsœ's staff because the ethos of the company chimes increasingly
with its employees (aged 23 to beyond retirement);
— as reported by Imperial College's
Tanaka Business School in June 2007, Vitsœ is a highly innovative
company: the innovation is all in the area of how to use technology
and the web to bring Vitsœ to the attention of a much wider
audience; how to allow that audience to understand, plan, buy
and install its shelving system; and how to form long-term relationships
with those customers so that they may infect each other with the
passion of understanding Vitsœ.
BUSINESS FRAMEWORK
It is difficult to know whether or not the chicken
preceded the egg: did society—and the media's -obsession
with novelty come before its inexorable shortening of financial
horizons? Has society's demand for short-term financial gain turned
its consumers into increasingly dissatisfied neophiliacs where
the next purchase promises the gratification that the previous
one did not give?
Currently Vitsœ's business can only function
in a private arena. As Anita Roddick of The Body Shop discovered,
exposure of values that will be of a wider good to society—of
which waste reduction is key—are incompatible with the goals
of existing financial markets that are driven solely for short-term
financial gain. Until there are ways of measuring corporate success
in non-financial terms, businesses such as Vitsœ will continue
to be off-radar. The Dow Jones Sustainability index and the FTSE4Good
index underperform the market. Goldman Sachs has made a recent
attempt to capture the complex interaction between social responsibility
and financial performance with the creation of a model called
GS SUSTAIN. However, businesses that are paying the true cost
of their existence will always "underperform" businesses
that are able to offload their true costs on others.
It must be noted that employees in financial
markets are motivated almost entirely by bonuses related to short-term
financial performance and thereby rewarded for short-term thinking.
For those who are not rewarded by bonuses, there is credit available
in the next post. Meanwhile the real cost of most consumer products
has, in real terms, plummeted thereby ensuring that no value is
attached to most products allowing them to become disposable (repair
being unavailable or uneconomic). Vitsœ's furniture has value
in the eye of the consumer, even when damaged.
Every new customer for Vitsœ is another
customer who might consume and dispose of less during their lifetime.
Many observers are perplexed by Vitsœ's desire to sell less
to more customers and to encourage them to live with their products
for longer, but The Stern Review of 2006 says: "The world
does not need to choose between averting climate change and promoting
growth and development."
GOVERNMENT POLICY
Obsolescence must be penalised. Repair must
be rewarded. Reuse must become the norm (children learned to be
thrifty by collecting and returning their Corona bottles). What
happened to the battery-powered milk float delivering milk in
reusable glass bottles—with recyclable aluminium caps—and
collecting the empties? Thrift and saving have come to be frowned
upon—they must be rewarded.
Vitsœ has not received any incentives,
tax breaks, grants, loans or otherwise for its desire to cover
its true costs and to make and support products for the long term.
Approaches to Business Links, the London Development Authority
and Envirowise have all been met with more bureaucracy than would
be worth tolerating. The latter failed to respond to Vitsœ's
requests for packaging assistance.
New materials that are better from an environmental
point of view can be very expensive initially and could be supported
by government via tax on materials with negative environmental
impacts and/or subsidies for those with positive impact.
Labelling schemes based upon the full lifecycle
and environmental impacts of products and services, though complex,
would allow customers to make more informed choices and minimise
companies talking about sustainability—often, tellingly,
via their PR departments—but actually doing very little.
In addition, information about the predicted lifespan of a product
would allow customers to make a decision based upon cost per year
rather than directly comparing initial costs.
Vitsœ is not being groomed for a trade
sale or stock-market flotation, the yardstick against which the
success of almost all entrepreneurs is measured. The company is
currently investigating how to change its ownership structure
to include its employees and thereby aid succession and its adherence
to long-term values. The relative complexity and increased bureaucracy
of employee benefit trusts is a deterrent for Vitsœ; government
support for models nearer to that of the John Lewis Partnership
would be preferred.
Vitsœ urges government to reward longevity
and not to be distracted by, for example, rewarding more recycling.
In the USA the increasingly important LEED (Leadership in Energy
and Environmental Design) standard does not, seemingly, recognise
longevity. In essence a superficially green and recyclable product
can be thrown away tomorrow and still achieve LEED qualification
today.
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