FUNC: The Confluence of Fun & Function

I recently got a teaser email from Shawn Green telling me a bit about a new brand he was involved with by the name of FUNC. Mr. Green is well known in the industry from his stints at KI and Knoll. He brings to the table vast experience in market intelligence and product design and development. Currently, he’s Vice President of Design for Baresque, the parent of the fledgling brand FUNC, which is supported by their distribution partners MDC Interior Solutions in the U.S. and Crown Surface Solutions in Canada.

Being a huge fan of The Godfather of Soul and the progenitor of Funk, Mr. James Brown, I was intrigued; so, I rang-up Mr. Green to learn more. In the best tradition of the great pandemic, we arranged a Zoom meeting for a “Zoomerview” (the confluence of Zoom and interview). For the rest of the story I invite you to my recap of our Zoom interview.

Bob Beck (BB): What is FUNC, and where did that most unusual name come from?

Shawn Green (SG): FUNC was originally a brand idea of our Managing Director, Angus Blaiklock. He had been thinking about FUNC for a couple of years, but his ideas hadn’t fully gelled into specific products. He wanted it to be a cutting-edge brand of finished goods that were simple, fun and functional – produced as much as possible using materials made by Baresque. As I understand it, the name FUNC derived from the words ‘fun’ and ‘functional.’

BB: What were your marching orders at the outset?

SG: They were pretty open-ended, which was great because it gave me the opportunity to get to know Baresque products and materials and think about market opportunities. I’m not an industrial designer, so I started working with my good friend, Paul James, an industrial designer whose firm, James Design Company, is located in Minneapolis.

BB: As you looked at the possibilities what were some of your design objectives?

SG: We wanted the products to be simple, and by that I mean easy to plan and specify, easy to ship, easy to assemble, require minimal packaging so after installation there wouldn’t be tons of corrugated heading for the landfill. As for the easy to install idea, we thought it would be great if we could design the products so that users could assemble them without the need for tools – that easy to install!

We also wanted them to respond to the idea of a higher level of user control. That meant the products would need to be light enough in both scale and weight so that users could manage and manipulate them in real time without tools, without any downtime or disruption.

We wanted the products to convey the idea of the FUNC brand with a fresh, fun visual language. We wanted to make them cutting edge, but not polarizing in the sense of ‘you either love it or hate it.’ We recognized that our products would be used in conjunction and in support of other products, so it was important that we design products that could achieve all these things and at the same time wouldn’t compete with the architectural elements or the products they’re supporting. But at the same time they needed to be attractive enough to draw your eye. That’s a really difficult design balance to achieve and I think we’ve accomplished it pretty well.

BB: So how did you hit on space division as the functional area you’d attack first?

SG: We saw the trend in the workplace toward higher levels of interaction, lower panel heights, lower sight lines, higher people density, and so on. And those trends did produce higher levels of interaction, but not without creating other problems. So we were already starting to see designers asking, ‘How do we divide people? How do we provide a better sense of privacy? And what can we do about acoustics, even before Covid-19 gave a whole new meaning to those needs. From the outset we were about finding a way to facilitate a higher level of social interactions while providing a platform for what we now call social distancing. We thought finding that balance would set us apart and I think we’ve found it in these products.

BB: Tell us about the materials you chose.

SG: I think there’s an honesty to the materials. There’s a high-performance acoustic material (PET) and wood – simple as that. We chose a Baltic Birch plywood construction which has been used in furniture historically. It’s beautiful, it doesn’t require a lot of manipulation in terms of sanding and finishing and so forth. You bring those two materials together – the high-density PET and the wood and at the end of the life-cycle you can quickly knock it down and send it off for recycling. And once again you can do that without needing tools.

BB: What about options in color and finishes?

SG: We have 20 colors for the PET material ranging from the subdued to the vibrant. For the wood we settled on two finish colors that complement the color range of the acoustic panels. We have a low gloss natural finish and more of a medium-tone darker finish in the walnut range.

BB: Looking at the photos I think I can see how you did on the goal of simple assembly. It appears to be easy to put together.

SG: That is one of the things I’m really pleased with. When I think about our ease-of-assembly goals, we literally killed it! We didn’t engineer it to the point of its assembling itself, but from a simplicity standpoint, we got close! When a customer receives it on site, they can literally put it together in a few seconds with no tools.

We were inspired by the packaging of IKEA and how they manage to get so much into so little packaging. And on the other side we thought about all the waste of packaging materials on the typical jobsite during installation. So we didn’t design the product and then figure out how to package and ship it. We considered simplicity of packaging, shipping and installation as part of the design tenet.

BB: So you’re going to market with FUNC through a distribution partner, MDC Interior Solutions. Tell me about that.

SG: Yes, Baresque has a long history of international partnerships – importing partners’ products into Australia and exporting our product for distribution by partners in other international markets. MDC Interior Products is a Chicago-based distribution company that markets a wide range of products from commercial wallcoverings to textiles to some glass and acoustic desk screens. It is a trusted partner of Baresque with a national sales force and geographic reach. In launching a new brand, working with MDC gives us very broad and quick access to the market. We know and appreciate their sales and marketing capabilities.

BB: So where does FUNC go from here?

SG: Well, I’m very proud of the amount of work we’ve done in just the past 12 months and we have no intention of slowing down. We’ve just released what we’re internally calling FUNC 2.0 which introduces desktop dividers and screens that combine acrylic and PET acoustic material in a fun and visually interesting way while maintaining our focus on users and applications in a fun, functional, funky way. We want to show that we’re thinking about these things in a different way and we’re already working on another group of floor standing screens that are really beautiful, mobile and have windows in them. They’re made out of our high-performance PET and they’re going to be elegant and just wonderful. After that, who knows, but for sure the products will be fun and functional!