Opendesk is a platform that enables customers to download furniture designs from around the world, and have them made at a local workshop.
Shipping furniture can be costly and result in long shipping times, but one London-based company is looking to disrupt the furniture market. Opendesk offers designer furniture that can be made locally around the world.
Inspired by the words of the economist John Maynard Keynes, who said, ‘It is easier to ship recipes than cakes and biscuits’, the company connects local workshops with online designs.
Rather than buying individual items of furniture and shipping them across the world, customers can pay for access to the design as a file, and have the furniture built for them in their own country by local makers. The designs work for flatpack products that can be easily assembled on site, using locally sourced materials.
This approach leads to substantial cost savings for the customer. One of the company’s trademark four-person desks sells for around £1,400, which is around 50 per cent cheaper than a high-end equivalent and only two or three times more than an Ikea equivalent. Equally, the designers stand to make more. There is typically a 200 per cent mark-up on such goods sold at retail, and a designer would receive around half of what they could get if they sold their design through Opendesk. Usually, of an Opendesk sale, 10 per cent goes to the designer, 60 per cent to the maker and the remainder to Opendesk.
Small-scale creatives and designers also benefit from the new opportunities that open up when the onus of production and shipping is taken off the table (no pun intended). They are able to host their designs on the global platform without having to worry about organizing shipping themselves.
Designers also have control over how they license their product designs. They can choose to publish them without any licence restrictions (under something like Creative Commons Attribution), or they can specify that they are free for non-commercial use only. They can also charge for downloads as a way to earn income. Elaborating on this ‘open making’ model, the company explains: ‘We embrace open source because we believe that it can produce attendant benefits and a more ethical model of production without the intellectual property incumbency typically associated with “business as usual”. This means that we’re able to host professional product designs which can be freely downloaded and made by people themselves, for example in makerspaces, Fablabs, techshops or other suitably equipped facilities.’
The company is also aiming to appeal to customers through Opendesk Express, which enables customers to buy on-demand desks that are shipped within 14 days. Customers of the service can check out instantly, rather than wait for a quote from a manufacturer. Opendesk is also working on new smart features for their office ware, continuing development on utilities for desks such as phone charging points and touch sensors.
The company, which is backed by Innovate UK and Telefonica’s Wayra accelerator, has raised around £640,000 through a combination of crowdfunding and investment. With a global network of over 1,000 designers and makers, and with over 30,000 downloads, the company has also attracted interest from a number of big brands. The likes of Nike, Greenpeace, Google and John Lewis are all using Opendesk designs, and the company has forecast profit for 2017.
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Website: www.opendesk.cc
Contact: sales@opendesk.cc
Innovation name: Opendesk
Country: United Kingdom
Industries: Design / Retail & e-commerce / Workspace