To understand how the furniture manufacturing sector decline has all happened in Victoria we need to look at our particular history to put things into perspective. I believe that the recent collapse of the furniture manufacturing industry in Australia has been ultimately a result of the endemic practise of plagiarism throughout the manufacturing industry, rather than globalisation and the availability of cheap labour elsewhere. Knowledge of the crafting process is an essential part of good design. The combination of innovation with craft skills creates amazing possibilities.
Furniture manufacturers in Victoria are capable of producing extremely high standards of furniture production, consistently and at a sensible price that the market will pay well for. Throughout our history, Australians have constructed timber furniture in the style of at first Europeans and then also Americans. For many reasons this practice from early settlement has continued until the present times. These reasons include our ‘homesickness’ for civilised luxuries, the expense of freight, the availability of native timbers and the relatively slow evolution of fashion in interiors and the trade protection policies of governments in the past. Foreign designs were replicated here at a fraction of the cost of importing the original items due to trade protection and the expense of transportation. Eventually these replicas were produced to excellent standards. Still today in Victoria you will find as a legacy of this way of operating, with lack of specialisation. Many companies manage the total range of production, from upholstery to computer based equipment to hand-carving to spray finishes. The market leaders in Italy have long since given up on this and become specialists because they understand the commercial market advantages of being design innovators. If companies produce very similar products then the only real difference is how the items are manufactured and this then becomes some huge commercial secret.
Australians consumers have demanded to keep up with international fashion trends in furniture and homewares in the present era and have been increasingly educated about the benefits of good design. This is perhaps due to increasing discretionary spending, increasing exposure to foreign lifestyles, information flow due to media and technology and the Australian preoccupation with domestic real estate. This has all happened within a relatively short period of time. The plethora of magazines and television programs dedicated to interiors and designs of recent times is a good indication of how deep and passionate interiors have become in Australia.
Of course the first innovators to succeed in supplying demand for design have been the contemporary international discounters such as Ikea. These companies competing on price as a primary selling feature rely on vast sales volume for profitability. The vast volume required for economies of scale advantage has meant that these retailers were the first by necessity to have a great push into the Australian economy. Part of the profile of these companies is inexpensive prices, but what the local industry has been in denial about for far too long was that the other essential feature of them is design innovation. The Australian manufacturers concentrating at the middle market somehow managed to convince themselves that only consumers shopping for budget or luxury, wanted contemporary design.
More recently fashion cycles have speeded up in interiors, like never before. The lead essentially has come from Europe and in particularly Italy. Since my furniture beginnings in 1991, I have seen the fashions for furniture revolve from exotic lush veneers and quirky individualism in the post-Memphis era, to the blonde, then chocolate timber phases, to white with brushed metal of more recent minimalist times and presently, solid bright colours of paint finished and plastics. This is over a period of only twelve years. The furniture industry in Australia, with little experience of original innovation is in no position to keep up with this speed.
Concurrent with this fashion revolution, we have also seen the steady demise of the department store as the prime retail location for furniture sales. As furniture suppliers have been less and less able to supply them with goods that customers wanted to buy, the basic response of these monolithic retailers is to increasingly squeeze manufacturers on price, on the false assumption that this was the issue. As manufacturers were squeezed on price, they have been in a less and less able position to afford the up-front costs of innovation. And because of the history of vast majority sales through department stores, manufacturers have been slow to investigate other options for retailing. The price squeeze hasn’t worked because increasingly customers are disinterested in the dead and derivative design aesthetic on offer. Currently the market is in an increasingly fluid state. The rise of price point discounters has been tremendous with Freedom and Harvey Norman etc joining Ikea. Concurrently we have seen an expansion at the top of the market with an increasing amount of small to medium niche players and a demise of department stores (Grace Brothers in their flagship store in Sydney CBD do not even have a dedicated furniture department).
The economies of scale in Australia are certainly against us and this is why trade barriers protected the industry in the past. With a relatively tiny population, the proportion of Australians who are willing to pay any sizeable premium for quality and innovation is even smaller. However, the manufacturers producing here I believe have tried to convince themselves that innovation is not the answer, and that international economic forces are to blame for their demise. With innovative design culture being so foreign to them, it all seems too abstract and alien for them to comprehend such a large leap as to actually become real innovators. However high or low that you aim at the market, I believe that there is always room for innovation.
I believe that the real issue for manufacturers in Australia is that they have consistently underestimated the sophistication of the current local market. Increasingly consumers are capable of spending more on furniture, however at the same time consumers are faced with an increasing list of categories of spending that until relatively recently did not exist, such as overseas travel, computers, restaurants and gym memberships. I would guess that as a proportion of income, Australians spend less and in a very different way on furniture and homewares than ever before. Just imagine if local furniture marketeers worked as hard at selling prestige as local car retailers.
So what does all this manufacturing history mean for the craft component of a design led rejuvenation of the industry? As we know the fine craft area of making can seem expensive, obtuse and removed from the mainstream to many, however this is the reality of trying to live in an alternate way. Nevertheless fine craftspeople have crossover success in the more commercial spheres of mainstream manufacturing and retail worlds. Despite this, craftspeople are delusional if they are hoping that suddenly something is going to snap and a mainstream public is going to wake up and turn them into popstars on million dollar budgets. Fine craft is about concepts and excellence and reinventing the whole way that people think about the world. This innovation is idealistic and expensive and economic rationalists have no appreciation of the ultimate standards of excellence that fine craft is about.
Mainstream manufacturers need to understand that fine craftspeople have no interest in becoming the mainstream. The mainstream is fundamentally in opposition to the alternate and progressive ways that fine craftspeople are motivated. Many of us would hope that our work has a great positive impact on the world and that we can make enough income to develop our practise (and who wouldn’t like to earn a substantial income from what we love doing?). Some craftspeople even manage to produce on a relatively large scale, however we are not prepared to compromise what we do to achieve a financial short-term benefit. If fine craftspeople are to be integrated into a design led resurgence of the manufacturing industry in Victoria, then they must be involved on their own terms. Consider the Droog Design movement. These designers are constantly referring to broader manufactured items and responding in an alternate interpretation of forms, materials and contexts. The designers involved must interact with mainstream manufacturers but they do not need to hold the same values and motivations to succeed.
Similarly craftspeople in Australia should consider that they will always work alongside mainstream producers, occasionally they will work together, often the mainstream will lift ideas from craftspeople, and often craftspeople will rely on the resources of mainstream producers and retailers to make some of their work succeed. Fine craft works alongside the mainstream as it has always done, from Jimmy Possum with his bush furniture, to Robert Prenzel with his Australian botanically inspired Art Nouveau of and Schulum Krimper’s bespoke modernist work of post WWII. Ask anyone in the street what these names mean to him or her and they would have no idea who these makers were; yet the influence of this constant subculture has always led the way and shown the mainstream direction.
The fringes of the mainstream are the historic place in the world of design where mainstream plagiarists with their economic imperatives look to find a fashion advantage over their competitors. Designers operate on the fringes. The false promises of rampant capitalism, which requires larger volume and cheaper production do not add up for people with experience in fine craft motivations. Regularly mainstream producers steal concepts from the fringes and make them their own, picking up what they can use within their perceived economic limitations of their own market. We all had a ‘bean bag’ growing up in suburban Melbourne in the 1970’s but who remembers the name of the designers of the original product (the Sacco chair of 1968 designed by the Europeans Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini and Franco Teodoro and produced by Zanotta in Italy). It was a revolutionary concept, all this rolling around on the floor, but even our parents got into it and it was constructed of vinyl and polystyrene which were quite alien materials too. I wonder how many of us rolled around on an original Sacco? I remember seeing a 'CD tower' at a store called Designs Australia, probably around 1991. This slotted and (laser-cut?) folded metal thing sold for approximately $400. Now you can probably buy a cheap copy of these in any shopping district in Australia for $10 or so and as a designer myself, I can't even remember the name of the designer-maker responsible. Of course the mainstream producers are stealing the original concepts. They respond to the originality and vitality of a design, which may have taken years of financial investment to develop (often with many other less successful ideas thrown away in the meantime). Manufacturers steal these concepts without conscience in Australia and then in ignorance of the struggle and sacrifices of the original creators, never invest in the process themselves. Thus real creativity is never matched with the kind of production potential that could possibly make both design and production overheads viable. As a result manufacturers stay as market followers and are constantly on the back-foot, with ever reducing margins to enable great innovation and sizeable profit. Unfortunately craft makers are still shocked regularly by the blatant stealth of their creative language, as their ‘babies’ are bastardised into cheap imitations. It then comes back to wound them more as mainstream consumers become familiar with the copies, before stumbling across the originals and thinking that the inspiration occurred the other way around.
This process happens around the world to varying degrees, it is not endemic to Australia, however because of the unique background of our industry as outlined earlier, it seems the real stumbling block of any real development of manufacturing advances. If manufacturers want to operate as market followers then they will be ever forced to strive for more mediocre gains.
Craftspeople work best when they bring out the best of materials and processes. In Australia we have a tradition and a history of working with our local materials, timber and metals and wool etc. We have an amazing amount of sizeable resources and our sizeable hardwood forests in particular are the envy of much of the world. From my experience designing, wholesaling and retailing, furniture made of our timbers is extremely well received by foreign visitors and foreign nationals living in Australia. We have a vast and unique resource. These people find solid hardwoods rare and valuable because of their knowledge of how rare this resource is elsewhere in the world. For this reason alone it makes sense to me for craftsmen here working in furniture to focus on timber and particularly solid Australian hardwoods. It is what makes us unique and is therefore what other cultures will value.
The historic structure of total in-house construction of manufacturers means that they are largely inaccessible to designers who want to understand manufacturing realities, and this makes a working relationship difficult. As a result, most of our design talent ends up working as designer/makers, spending a lot of their energies in other areas than their specific design talents. The small scale that local designers operate on to maintain excellence, usually requires them to also have some involvement in the manufacturing process, whether this is project managing production, assembling components from more commercial manufacturers, or actually crafting everything themselves. The scale that I have operated on has seen me through every evolution of these processes as well as projects where I have only completed the design aspect of a product for another large company. I guess that this is why most of us are in the category designer/makers, not one or the other.
It is in the interests of the mainstream to support craft practice as a resource that they regularly draw from and I think that this should be the angle that is pushed for crafts-people to be involved in a design led re-energising of the whole sector. Developing a lively subculture brings the opportunity of working together. As designers increasingly understand how industry works, and industry understands how designers work, it is more likely that they will work together in an inspiring way. When each group understands and appreciates their differences from the other and relates to them with respect we have a real chance of achieving great results together.
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For further discussion of the relationship between craft and design, please refer to the Craftbase discussion paper.
