By their works shall ye know them. If the Toronto-based industrial design firm Fig40 doesn’t sound familiar, many of the products they’ve designed for American and Canadian manufacturers are. To mention only their 2017 introductions: Nienkamper’s CernOffice casegoods collection, that won a Silver award at NeoCon 2017; the F4 conference chair for Stylex, that won Gold; and Tayco’s Switch systems furniture.
This year will see the launch of Cache, a high-density stacking chair designed for Groupe Lacasse; desktop divider panels designed for Symmetry Office made of a felt lookalike – PET (polyethylene terephthalate recycled from soda bottles); and, at NeoCon, a table collection for Tuohy and two concrete lines for Nienkamper: Cern Accessories and the Perplex Bench.
To describe the bench with those much-abused and overused adjectives “amazing” and “remarkable” is, for once, not an indulgence in hyperbole. Perplex has already generated buzz as a memorable, iconic signature item, having won a European Product Design Gold and a Best of Canada award from Canadian Interiors, where I wrote:
“Perplex is an impossibly long and impossibly thin” cast-concrete bench for outdoor and indoor use in residential, hospitality and corporate spaces. At 14 feet long, two feet wide and 1½ feet high, and supported by skinny cast-aluminum legs at either end, Perspex is seating stretched like Turkish Taffy. So, what gives? The apparent suspension of the law of gravity is made possible by Grip Metal, a patented stamping process developed in Toronto that modifies sheet metal by applying an array of micro-formed hooks that adhere like Velcro to other materials. The new technology enables the bench to be hollow and weigh a mere 550 lbs. A bench of conventional concrete and similar size and configuration would weigh 2,200 lbs.—never mind that it would collapse instantly.”
We caught up with Fig40’s founding partners, Lee Fletcher and Terence Woodside at their studio in Toronto’s east-end Leslieville district, where century-old industrial lofts now host design, communications and TV and film production businesses.
Fletcher’s slight accent and proclivity for plural nouns (“Nienkamper are” instead of “Nienkamper is”) betray his British roots. He was born in Macclesfield, a market town in Cheshire near Manchester, moved to Canada when he was eight and obtained a diploma in industrial design at Fanshawe College in London, Ont. After getting his Masters back in Manchester, he returned to the Dominion, where, in Waterloo, Ont., he worked on the very first BlackBerry, the 1997-vintage Interactive Pager with the breakthrough thumb keyboard.
Woodside was born and bred in Oakville, an affluent Lake Ontario town that is to Toronto what Greenwich, CT is to New York. He studied mechanical engineering at Queens University in Kingston, Ont., and worked in the automobile industry.
Each partner has a wife and two kids. Away from work, Fletcher loves to mountain bike on the hundred or so kilometers of trails winding through the center of the city; Woodside can’t wait for winter, when he snowboards.
After hanging up my coat in the foyer on their one-of-a-kind wall-mounted custom coatrack—actually the prototype casting of the base for their Stylex F4 chair—I walk through their compact production shop to the studio area, where models and prototypes crowd the floor and shelves, and numerous industry awards festoon their trophy wall.
We gather round their Metronome table, one of five tables they designed for Nienkamper. This one earned NeoCon Silver and Good Design Awards in 2011, and Nienkamper’s first RedDot Award, in 2013. I’m sitting in the first chair they designed, Allseating’s Ray conference chair, which garnered NeoCon Silver and Good Design Awards in 2009.
Fletcher: We were known, for the longest time, as the chair guys, but we’ve since diversified.
OI: How did you two meet?
Fletcher: We met at Teknion. I had got fed up with working on electronic enclosures; it just wasn’t my bag. I called a friend who was working at Teknion, Steve Verbeek, now Teknion’s Director of Design and Innovation. Steve said, “Come work for us.” I was on staff from 2001 to 2006 as Senior Industrial Designer. I was Space Division Lead for District [systems furniture]; I designed the overhead universal cabinet and worked on a lot of storage.
Woodside: I started in Teknion’s design department in 2000. I enjoyed that environment, where designers and engineers often paired up so that we could throw ideas back and forth. I worked on the XM and Leverage systems, and Origami casegoods.
OI: So, when did you two join up?
Fletcher: Our partnership began while we were developing the Ray chair, which won Allseating’s first NeoCon award, in 2009. I did all the industrial design and the design development, but there was a lot of mechanics and the final engineering that needed to be developed and Terry did all that. We thought, you know, this could really work out.
OI: Meanwhile, you, Lee, founded Fig ID, the predecessor of Fig40, in 2005. Where did that name come from? Are you a Fig Newton fan?
Fletcher: My lawyer said, “You need to put a name to this.” After a few late-night drinks a friend of mine said, “How about naming it ‘Fig’?” I thought, that sounds like a name for a company, it’s short and ends with a consonant.
OI: How did you get the Allseating gig?
Fletcher: I made a pragmatic pitch. I thought I could marry the intelligence of systems furniture to seating. Systems allow interchangeability of parts to make the right configuration, if bits wear out you can inventory parts and you can repair on site. And I packaged our pitch to respond to the trend for chairs with very expressive exoskeletons, such as [Herman Miller’s] Aeron and [Teknion’s] Contessa. Ray has more of an endoskeleton, it looks more tailored and finished.
Gary Neil, Allseating’s owner, had just been approached with a new mechanism and liked our proposal. He said if we could make the mechanism and our chair design work together, we’d have a deal. We spent a frantic weekend on it.
OI: Didn’t you want to create the mechanism?
Fletcher: No, I’d never designed a chair before. I knew that creating it from the ground up would be difficult. Once it was finished Allseating put an awful lot of marketing into the Ray chair. They had us write a CEU [continuing education units] course for interior designers. We went all over North America, spending a couple of days with the local rep, doing lunch-and-learns.
OI: You designed the A&D Cantilevered Student Desk for Paragon, and the Omada conference chair for Nienkamper, which won a 2010 IIDEX/NeoCon Bronze Award. Speaking of Nienkamper, what’s the story behind your design of their MetronomeTM table collection?
Fletcher: Nienkamper were looking to create a new standard. For many years, they owned the boardroom with Vox. But, by then Vox had a couple of challenges. They asked: “Can you design this table to cost 40 percent less than Vox?”
Woodside: The market had shifted.
Fletcher: A key to Metronome’s success was the power access we designed for it, which has a flip door. Under the door, you can paint it in bright colors, like a paisley or flowery lining inside a conservative navy-blue suit. You can have a sedate table and when you open the doors up it suddenly hums.
OI: Evidently, customers see this as a way to individualize their table because so many trendy companies are buying it.
Fletcher: Metronome has taken off. TD [Toronto-Dominion Bank] in Canada and the U.S. have standardized on our table in their TD green. Tesla, LinkedIn and Red Bull have standardized on it. You can get all these colours because we walked through Nienkamper’s factory to see how they make things. They have a great paint line. We asked, “Well, if you can paint it light grey, can you paint it bright red?” In the factory now, you can see these tables lined up, upside down; blue ones and red ones and shiny ones and white ones. It’s wonderful to see so many different colors that customers want to standardize in, and Metronome allows that.
OI: That bright color-hit gives it a playful quality. It’s always nice to humanize the office.
Fletcher: That was part of the deal. Variability of finishes is another big feature. Nienkamper are known for their wood and it’s beautiful in wood. But they’ve done tops in Corian. Red Bull’s are carbon fiber.
Woodside: As for creating the structure, we went back to what we learned at Teknion about making long benches with a small kit of parts.
Fletcher: They’ve done 20- and 30-foot-long Metronome tables that are five feet wide.
OI: My own first impression of your table is another selling point: It looks high-tech, yet friendly and even residential.
Fletcher: Absolutely. And because Nienkamper have the foresight to invest in tooling and die-cast parts, the cost of all of this is relatively low, so they can offer the beauty, tactility and finish options of these tops at a great price.
Woodside: And winning the Red Dot Award certainly helped many companies feel comfortable in buying Metronome as their standard table.
Fletcher: They put a 10 by four-foot table in a big crate. They had never won a Red Dot before, so it was worth it.
OI: How did you get the Metronome gig?
Fletcher: We were pitching our chair idea [to Nienkamper founder Klaus Nienkamper] and Klaus said, “I’ve been thinking about a conference table. If you have any thoughts, just let me know.” A nod’s as good as a wink, so off we went and came back with the Metronome concept. It started a great relationship. To date we’ve done five tables for Nienkamper.
OI: Last year also saw the introduction of your Switch system, what was your design mission?
Woodside: Switch replaced two legacy systems that had an outdated look and feel. The details – the radiuses and corners – were all over the map. The finish palette was drab. They needed to refresh and launch something new to compete at the entry level for a system.
OI: So what was your secret sauce?
Fletcher: The slotted channel that Terry designed.
Woodside: We went to an aluminum-zinc casting with a lot of inherent intelligence, as opposed to just a dumb steel part. Its shape allows the wires to go around it. These are taps so that you can mount panels to panels and get a nice mechanical connection. This part holds the baseboard covers. That part holds the leveler. When panels go against panels they line up. This casting saves much of the handwork of lining up parts and screwing them together.
OI: You designed a universal fastener?
Fletcher: Yes. We wanted to reduce the burden on the installer. They don’t need to have different-length screws. When Tayco set up the Switch line and started building it, I spent several weeks asking installers to critique the whole assembly. “Oh I don’t like that,” “We can’t do it that way.” “I don’t want to put this cabling on,” they said.
OI: Is your intelligent fastener unusual in the industry?
Woodside: It’s significantly different from the competitors’. There’s not much you can do with the panel itself, it’s got a hollow core and Masonite on the outside. But figuring out an intelligent way to join panels made this a really rewarding project. It’s not “high design,” just a panel system, but it’s smart.
OI: So Switch’s selling point isn’t just cost, it’s ease of assembly and reconfiguration?
Fletcher: And aesthetics. This looks better than the systems it competes against. Gensler specified this low-end product for Canadian Tire [a retail company with 500 stores across Canada selling automotive, hardware, sports, leisure and home products]. So it’s not just price, it’s not just looks. Dealers like it because they get burdened with the cost of installation
OI: You also designed a power unit for Arconas, to go underneath their ganged airport seating.
Fletcher: They want to own the airport seating category globally, so this is an international product. That’s why the outlets are round; they accept any socket currently in use worldwide,
Arconas hired us not so much because we could design the electronic packaging, but because we know how to integrate “something” into furniture. This design is an extrusion, so you can also put it into a floor-standing tower.
This in turn led to another Arconas product that will launch soon: a standing-height power access point that mounts to a screen or a wall and attaches to a laptop-sized shelf. In airport waiting areas where people sit on the floor and plug in, they’ll be able to stand. So, here’s a piece of furniture designed around our power box.
OI: In 2005, Arconas launched your Datum, where ottomans dock with a frame that supports a tabletop with corner hooks to hang a bag or jacket. There are AC and USB charging ports in the middle.
Fletcher: They had made these upholstered cubes and were looking for a piece of furniture to go along with them to help sell them and give them meaning. You can tether Datum tables together or pull them apart to use on the edges of a space. They sell a lot of them to universities and libraries.
OI: You also make something for the homeless, the Community medium-density stacking chair?
Fletcher: The Salvation Army Gateway Shelter [for homeless men] on Jarvis Street started a social enterprise for doing the laundry for their 120 beds. They opened Gateway Linens on Broadview Avenue to do the linens from their other shelters and hotels and restaurants as well. It’s an apprenticeship program for guys from the shelter who are trying to get back on their feet. It’s a job, so they get paid, and then get placed with nearby commercial enterprises.
Well, they had a chair problem. They were buying these crappy chairs that just get beaten about. Our chair manufacturers don’t do the wood bending or steel bending for such chairs, they just assemble parts. So, I thought, we know the wood guys, Woodply in Montreal….
Woodside: And the frame guys and the hardware people.
Fletcher: They were paying about $90 per chair and we thought, why not hire Gateway guys to make these chairs? We knew, based on our experience that we could work for less than that. Our first order, a few weeks ago, was for 150 chairs for Salvation Army’s Leslieville shelter. We hired three guys to do the work. We’re the manufacturer.
OI: It’s a beautiful chair. You could sell it at yuppie furniture boutiques, or as kid’s furniture. It has a simple, Scandinavian look.
Fletcher: We did research, visiting shelters, and found that the chair shouldn’t look institutional. It also had to be bedbug and tamper-resistant. And stackable, strong, quick and easy to assemble with an Allan key and a hammer, and serviceable on site.
The shell is suspended above the frame, so there are no tight corners. No dirt traps. It’s easy to clean.
OI: I’ll wrap by asking you about your concrete products for Nienkamper, the Perplex bench and Cern desk accessories.
Fletcher: Klaus told us that one day he took the afternoon off and walked through all the big buildings downtown and despaired at the benches he saw. He thought, here are great offices and great buildings, but they tend not to succeed in designing great benches; here is an opportunity.
OI: And the concrete bench led in turn to the desk accessories that are made of reject concrete?
Fletcher: A company that makes concrete fireplaces and fire-pits, casts the bench for Nienkamper. We noticed that every time they cast something, there’s concrete left over So we asked if they could cast some small parts with the excess concrete and that’s when the idea was born.
OI: You’re using a “found” material that would otherwise have to be shipped out for landfill.
Woodside: The colors come in whatever batches they’re running; this one’s a latte color. And the colors have streaks.
Fletcher: We get these inclusions because the concrete has already started to set because they’ve already poured it, so it’s thick. We worked with the concrete experts, who’d say, “This is a little narrow, and that needs to be wider, and you need to put a chamfer around this edge or you’re going to get some flash [that will crack and break off].” We can get a relatively consistent product, though it’s still very craft-like. We showed the accessories at Craft Ontario’s shop and gallery last fall.
OI: These irregularities, and the tiny bubbles, give the accessories a delightful artisanal, handmade, “high-touch” look.
Fletcher: Klaus loves the unique feel of each piece.
OI: People will actually pay more for that. And they’re heavy enough that my cats won’t be able to knock them off the edge of my desk when I’m writing.
David Lasker is President of David Lasker Communications in Toronto and Associate Editor of Canadian Interiors. He can be reached at david@davidlaskercommunications.com.