Workplace furniture design: the Danish way

Ten years ago, Icons of Denmark established itself as one of the largest furniture distributors in the UK market. Since then they have worked hard to evolve from representatives of Danish design to seasoned designers. With their unique market-driven approach, they bring the Danish touch to the modern office.

How was your company born?

Icons of Denmark started as a traditional furniture agency, representing Danish furniture brands for the UK market. We have always had a hands-on approach to representing furniture and pride ourselves on being well informed about our products. We have a high level of technical know-how about how each piece of furniture can be used, its application and certain activities in the office where the furniture is relevant.

This approach has led us to the design and manufacture of products. We have used what we have learned in the market and now work with Danish designers to come up with new furniture for the modern office.

We engage with an international clientele that we regularly supply with the latest Danish design and furniture through the products we produce. Our projects are mainly large scale commercial projects.

How did you go from being a representative of Danish design to a designer?

When the furniture designers we represented decided to launch new products, we had to go to market and sell them. This work didn’t always reflect what we thought of the product and its usability in the marketplace… which was a little old for us.

In 2016, we created our first product. We were able to explain to a Danish designer and manufacturer how we wanted a sofa to be made, which became the first “mold” for how we create furniture today.

What is unique about your approach to creating new products?

The way we design furniture today is extremely market driven. When we started, there were a lot of residential products being brought into the work environment. In contrast, we look at the specific needs of the workplace and create designs based on those.

Our process starts with identifying gaps in the market: we notice a certain need or area of a project where we repeatedly don’t have the right products. We report this issue and work with designers and manufacturers to propose the new product. This is what sets us apart from many other companies. We are not driven by product designers in any way: we are driven by the needs of interior designers and clients.

For example, the most recent area we’ve worked on is banquets. Banquet seating is something that is often custom designed for each project. We identified this as an area for a new product: since we have become very experienced in sofa manufacturing and upholstery work, we decided to dive into this category.

To create this new type of sofa, we first started designing in 2D, agreeing on certain dimensions and concepts. This was then developed into a 3D model that was eventually built in our workshop in Denmark.

After creating a prototype, we go back to the drawing board to refine the 3D model and finalize the piece by defining the last details such as the stitching and leg position. This is the process we used for our new product, BANK, which we launched this year at Clerkenwell Design Week.

What was your first experience with SketchUp?

My first encounter with SketchUp was in 2007, when we were selling furniture for a Danish manufacturer. I came across the software through an architect and liked it immediately, so I started promoting it to furniture dealers as a potential tool for configuring our products.

When I moved to London in 2009, one of the first things I did was to send all of our models into 3D Warehouse and start using the platform as part of our sales process. SketchUp Pro allowed me to convert all of our DWG files to SKP files and make them publicly available.

We quickly saw a huge audience and a huge number of downloads on these products. Ten years later, we still use the platform to download and share our models.

SketchUp is a tool we use in three different categories of our business: product design, configuration and interior design.

Can you talk about your showroom and the products in it? Were any of them designed in SketchUp?

We work with many product designers. Right now we’re working with a designer who develops his designs in SketchUp, Peter Barreth. Trained as an upholsterer and sofa builder, he is a self-taught user of the product. SketchUp is a tool that he has found convenient and quick to use.

The private sofa was one of the first solutions created under the Icons of Denmark brand by Peter. This product was based on a few very basic principles regarding comfort, seat height and sizing flexibility. The process started with 2D drafting. 3D models were created in SketchUp from these initial ideas. Once the first prototype was built in Denmark, we sent it to our showroom in London.

We used this prototype to observe the reactions of people in the market and understand what needed to be done to refine the function and form before we could bring it to market. It was almost a year later that The Private Sofa was born as a complete product of our research and development with the commercial interior design community in London.

Where do you see the most value in SketchUp?

Most of our product designs are available in different sizes and finishes that can be configured to a customer’s specific project.

For example, when we first started selling meeting tables, we realized that it was an advantage to allow customers to choose their own size. We can visualize and configure the tables from our existing design to exactly match the customers’ needs. This is where we use SketchUp every day. Our sales team of ten people all use the product.

Since our products can be custom made, we communicate details such as leg positioning, tabletop division in a table and power integration. If the customer wants a specific edge detail, we can visualize it. This needs to be visualized quickly so that we get our customers’ commitment and we are all in sync. Our Forum table, for example, has a fairly simple geometry that lends itself to quick product customization. We can redesign these tops very easily based on the customer’s sizing.

We send these drawings back to our producers in Denmark when we place the orders. This allows us to synchronize very quickly with the producers and manufacturers before placing an order. This is actually where we find the greatest value of SketchUp for our company.

You mentioned that Icons of Denmark contributes to the interior design piece of a project. What does this workflow look like?

Since our products can be custom made, we communicate details such as leg positioning, division of tops in a table and integration of electricity. If the customer wants a specific edge detail, we can present it quickly. It has to be visualized quickly so we get our customers’ commitment and we are all in sync. Our Forum table, for example, has a fairly simple geometry that lends itself to quick product customization. We can redesign these tops very easily based on the customer’s sizing.

We then send these designs back to our producers in Denmark when we place the orders. This allows us to synchronize very quickly with the producers and manufacturers before placing an order. This is actually where we find the greatest value of SketchUp for our company.

You mentioned that Icons of Denmark contributes to the interior design piece of a project. What does this workflow look like?

We are very often asked to plant our products in collaboration with an architect. Similarly, we sometimes collaborate when the architect needs inspiration for a certain configuration and this often requires a quick turnaround.

Here, SketchUp allows us to play a role in the designer’s work not only by laying out a sofa, but also by actually laying out a complete configuration of our furniture and visualizing it with our collaborators’ proposals

In this case, we would take a brief from an interior designer or architect, suggesting some ideas for the space with our products, and preparing a proposal for the layout of the space. This not only shows our individual products, but shows how the products will work in situ on a larger scale.

In terms of interior design, I think that’s where some of our products really come into their own. For example, the EC1 sofa is a modular sofa. You can play with the different pieces of this product by changing them according to the space you are in.

And that is just as important to us as the two ways I mentioned that we use the product. You want the product in a certain size but you also want it in a certain shape and positioning. I think that’s why the EC1 has turned out to be one of our most popular products on 3D Warehouse.

How do you collaborate between the different design tools in your team?

In addition to our sofa line, our other product designers work on SolidWorks. Whatever the product designers’ workflow is, it all feeds into DWG files that allow us to work from a format we can read and understand quickly. Again, this is where SketchUp becomes the common ground: we always ask our product designers working in SolidWorks to give us a DWG model. We can then work to create SketchUp models to share via 3D Warehouse or use us when we configure or use the products in situ.

For export, it’s extremely convenient for us to instantly create DWG files as 2D or 3D files of the products we design from scratch. SketchUp gives us the advantage of compatibility with all the stakeholders we work with.