Last month’s NeoCon was a personal triumph for Nick Gillissie and Paul Krüger with the launch of their Res cupcake-like upholstered soft seating on a rolling pivoting storage space, for Allseating; and Collaborative Spaces, a collection of mobile tables, team and hospitality carts, for Global. Two more Global launches are in the pipeline. Krüger’s new wall systems, which he can’t discuss yet, will launch next year.
Gillissie and Krüger are founders and partners at modus ID, a five-person firm specializing in industrial design, product development and design consulting for the contract furniture industry. Remarkably, they’re the only player in that narrow market niche, Gillissie avers. “To the best of our knowledge, we’re the only design firm in North America with our mix of expertise.”
We caught up with the duo in their office deep in the bowels of a labyrinthine light-industry building in Toronto’s east end, where Gillissie mercifully offers to meet visitors at the street door. He explained that they need a brick-and-mortar facility in this time of remote work to maintain their sample library and to assemble parts and prototypes. Krüger’s test wall runs along one side of the main space, where he hangs and bolts materials as he explores new ways to handle them. (He does sawing, grinding, painting and other dirty work in the workshop at his home.) Near the windows at the far end is a meeting space with a table big enough for 10. “We have 200 square feet of whiteboard,” Gillissie boasts. Not to mention a substantial LP collection and a high-end audio system to play them on.
“I’m a systems furniture design expert; Paul is an architectural products design expert. I don’t think there’s anybody else consulting in his space. We’re four industrial designers and one design engineer. So we don’t create a bunch of renderings that you can’t make. We’re with you for the long haul. We work through prototyping, we work through troubleshooting the prototype and we’re with your in-house product-development team.”
The pair are Teknion alums: Gillissie was senior systems designer at the Toronto manufacturer before starting his own consultancy seven years ago. At Teknion, he was on the team designing and adding to the District panel system product line, led the design team on Interpret benching and helped set the direction for the upStage furniture system. Subsequently, he designed the Exchange soft-seating system for Allseating, another Toronto-area supplier.
In 2018, Krüger joined Gillissie to form modus ID. During his 19 years at Teknion, Krüger had risen to Design Director, Architectural Products, with expertise in height-adjustable tables, benching systems and soft seating. He was senior designer on the Altos and Optos architectural wall partitions products and was design director for many Teknion product launches, including Altos Landscape, Tek Pier, Focus Wall and Tek Vue wall systems. He was also design team lead on Teknion’s successful bid to provide the demountable wall solution for Apple’s new corporate headquarters.
“We have industrial designer friends who have consulted for a while. We’ve seen them struggle with being generalists. Every time they start a project, they have to learn that aspect of the industry,” Gillissie says. “We have seating experience. We’ve got a lot of systems experience and a lot of architectural product experience. So we just play in those three areas.”
Their business model differs from those of the familiar industrial designers who parachute in to design new product for contract-furniture manufacturers. “We saw the market move that way when we were working at Teknion,” Gillissie says. “The juicy, fun projects went to outside design firms because manufacturers were looking for fresh new ideas to come in the front door. They needed somebody to shake things up.”
However, he adds, “A lot of design firms will create imagery that they’re not sure how to make. Or they may know how to make it, but not with your supply chain. What are you, the manufacturer, good at? Are you good at extrusion? Are you good at cutting wood? Are you good at solid wood or laminate? What’s your sheet-steel capability? What folds do you do? Which welding jigs and fixtures do you use? We figure that out and work with your in-house team to create something suited to what you do. We ingrain ourselves with your product development team to figure out what Global or Allseating, say, do best.” Modus ID may work with a client for years before a product comes to market.
Despite its vast catalog, most of the lineup for Toronto-based Global comprised fixed-in-place desks and systems when they approached modus ID to create a mobile tackboard/whiteboard program. “Global didn’t have a cart program like Collaborative Spaces,” Gillissie recalls. Built on aluminum extrusions put together with laminate, the collection exemplifies the trend, given the unsettled state of the post-Covid hybrid workplace, for furniture that the end user can easily install, move and reconfigure.
“We call this table line workshop tables. They’re lighter in scale than a classic board room table, mobile yet stable and range from 18 to 48 inches deep and up to 96 inches wide.”
Collaborative Spaces signifies an evolutionary move. “For Global, space division was a panel,” says Gillissie, who had earlier helped create Teknion’s upStage freestanding workstation system. As the modus ID website explains, by this time, in 2013, the latest developments in panel systems had reduced them to little more than freestanding stub walls now that the workplace no longer needed to store reams of paper inside binders in panel-supported overheads. Instead of panels, Collaborative Spaces exploits a newer mode of space division: shelving. Spaces’ 48-inch-wide shelves can be configured to create traffic aisles.
Visually, the system looks like it evolved from the merchandising world because the infrastructure for all the carts is the coat rack. Furnishings are constructed in a similar way with posts at the outside corners, a laminate piece at the bottom and steel trim around the shelves giving color contrast. “It’s all the same componentry, just different drilling patterns,” Gillissie says.
His Exchange soft seating, a line embracing couches, sectionals and single chairs, illustrates modus ID’s out-of-the-box thinking when a client such as Allseating enables it. “For the size of their company, they swing for the bleachers with regards to innovation,” Gillissie says. “They want to make sure they’re not getting knocked off too easily. They say, ‘If we invest in R&D and tooling in a unique way to make something, we’ve got a longer lead.’”
When Allseating pondered entering the soft-seating systems space, they tapped into modus ID’s systems experience. Allseating wanted to try a new method of construction. Generally, this type of product is made using plywood layups. To lower manufacturing costs, Gary Neil, Allseating’s president and founder, wanted to make the base piece with injection-molded plastic instead.
“It’s a great green story,” Gillissie says. “You see all these holes for attachment places? You need this for a soft-seating product. This base comes out of the tool, ready to go with all those holes already in there as opposed to taking a bunch of different pieces of plywood and nailing and screwing them together and putting a whole bunch of inserts in. That labor cost is removed.”
Traditionally with a soft-seating product, the upholsterer stretches the fabric over the base and staples it in place. Great skill is required to avoid unattractive alternating tight and loose sections.
Gillissie devised a method of clicking the upholstery into place on a small edge molded into the base. It looks even every time; anyone can rip it off and replace it, in the field, in under a minute. Even Gillissie himself, when he was put to the test at the pitch meeting at Alabama’s Auburn University.
“In higher ed, no matter what you do with upholstery, sooner or later it’s going to get vandalized, cut and worn out,” he says. “The wear rate is very, very high.
“What would you rather do? Buy a whole new couch because you’re not going to reupholster a traditionally upholstered soft-seating piece? Or send it to the garbage, or a frat house where it will be destroyed?”
The plastic base keeps everything in line; steel beams provide structural support. The result is a lighter seat or couch than the conventional plywood-based product. Another bonus is long unsupported spans; the couch in modus ID’s office stretches for 90 legless inches. “Interior designers love that!” Gillissie quips.
Teknion unintentionally nurtured the duo’s transition from designers to design entrepreneurs when Scott Deugo, now Executive Advisor, moved in 2011 from Senior VP Design, Marketing and Sustainable Development, to Chief Sales Officer, World Markets. He set the policy to bring product-development experts to sales meetings when the client asked for a large order with customization.
“When that happened, there was more face time for designers in front of clients,” Gillissie says. “Paul and I, as the senior designers in our respective fields, got pulled into conversations with clients. They wanted us to give the backstory to the product, the why behind the what, and what were we thinking when we came up with the design.
“Bringing the industrial designer into the conversation with the client can be magical. No client wants just to be talked to by a salesperson. They find it special to talk to an industrial designer who listens and understands.
“We also helped the client make good decisions. We explained that we could do what you asked for but it’s a very expensive way to fulfill that need or it’s very convoluted or might not look the way you hope it looks. What about this idea instead?”
Unlike salespersons, the pair’s earnings were not commission-based. “That might seem like a trivial point, but it allows me to be very calm in a sales engagement,” Gillissie says. “I’m not nervous about winning and subsequently, if I can remain calm, my ears stay open.”
Deugo’s approach, to include a designer at the first meeting, paid off spectacularly when Apple and their architect, Foster+Partners, announced a furnishings-supplier competition for their new cyclotron-like headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. Teknion triumphed over 40 vendors from around the world.
“This was an incredibly successful project for Teknion; they kept on using the street cred,” Gillissie says. “At the end of the pursuit, I remember Scott Deugo asking Apple why they chose us. They said, ‘We recognized that you were the best partners to co-develop a solution with us. You demonstrated that you weren’t trying to sell us a [standard] product.”
Apple wanted a sit-stand desk with the leg going through the raised floor; the standard solution in 2012 was a height-adjustable leg going into a T-foot. “Apple was looking at plunging a single column through the floor, which was problematic, so we suggested putting the actuator mechanism inside the wall, and they got excited.”
But by embedding the actuator inside the wall, the worksurface cantilever bracket would move through a tackboard. “You don’t want moving parts to pass through a fabric panel: It will fray,” Krüger explains. So he moved the attachment point for the desk cantilever very low so that when it came up to height, it stayed below the transition between the wood panel and the fabric.
From technologies developed for Apple’s “special,” Teknion launched a standard product, Tek Pier, a wall-integrated, height-adjustable work surface and monitor combination. Mounting to a Teknion Altos frame, hidden sit-stand actuators enable height adjustability, while an articulating monitor arm adjusts for individual group or collaboration.
Indeed, that six-point pivot arm, Origami, another standard Teknion product, evolved, in turn, from an earlier customization request from accounting giant KPMG. “This was one of the first engagements where I was asked to dialogue directly with the client to understand their needs,” Krüger says.
Gazing into the crystal ball, the pair want to remain designers and not become managers, so they have no plans to expand. Nor do they fear losing their livelihoods to AI. Gillissie considers it a useful tool for iteration to process concept ideas more quickly. “It’s a new pencil to noodle with,” he says. “It doesn’t create a solid model that’s fully detailed, just a flat two-dimensional image.”
“There’s a subtle art that industrial designers have in seeing problems hiding beneath the surface in plain sight,” Krüger adds. “We can design around them. AI will never get that right.”
David Lasker is President of David Lasker Communications in Toronto. He can be reached at david@davidlaskercommunications.com