Extraordinary school chairs and amazing hockey equipment are winners in 2005 Lexus Design in Business Awards
October 14, 2005.

Furnware, the Hastings based manufacturers of school chairs and OBO, the Palmerston North based company which dominates the world of field hockey goalie equipment, are the major winners of the 2005 Lexus Design in Business Awards, organised by the Designers’ Institute of New Zealand in association with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise.

The Diba awards, which were presented at a function last night (Thursday, October 13) at the Auckland City Art Gallery, were established to identify and recognise New Zealand companies that have achieved commercial success through investment in good design and who have a high “innovation quotient.”

This year, with the backing of a major new sponsor, Lexus, two awards were made for the first time: one for Design Innovation, won by Furnware, and one for Design Strategy, won by OBO.

Furnware, the winner of the Design Innovation Award, has been the leading supplier of education furniture in New Zealand schools for 70 years. However, as global competition increased, the company had to make a decision, either to rest on its heritage, or to boldly invest in new product development.

Furnware CEO, Hamish Whyte, worked with Murray Pilcher and Paul Freestone, of Burroughs Pilcher Design, to design a radically new style of school furniture.  Traditionally, New Zealand school furniture had been designed to European or North American prototypes. However, New Zealand school children have changed shape over the decades and now range from tiny Vietnamese children to sturdy Samoan boys.

Over four years the company measured 20,000 school children, before it developed its Bodyfurn chair which fits children by size, not by age. The design has two key elements: a six tiered height banding system that matches students with appropriate desk and chair size; and a simple pivot device that allows students to do what they do naturally: to lean back, lean forward and shift their posture in the chair regularly.

Says Murray Pilcher: “I think we took an extraordinary approach to this project and we built research into the brand values. It is a good use of strategic design and resources.”

Hamish Whyte says the results and response from schools to the new school chair system have “been bigger than we ever believed in.”

“Schools report better hand writing, quieter pupils and not as much fidgeting.”

Nor is there as much vandalism of school furniture. While the system has produced tangible results in the classroom the Bodyfurn system has performed well at a business level. Company turnover is 26% higher this year, which has resulted in a staff increase of 12% to 65 people.

Hamish Whyte says Furnware’s next projects will involve better furniture for teachers and easier to carry backpacks for pupils. The company is also looking to expand into export markets.

The judges said what they liked about Furnware was “the simplicity, yet game breaking strength of the idea, that not all kids grow at the same rate, so why design school furniture by age?”

The Design Strategy Award, which recognises a company’s strategic investment in design, was given to Palmerston North based OBO, who are world leaders in making field hockey goal keeping equipment.

OBO is a small company of 16 people, and 80 per cent of its equipment, which is now sold in 61 countries, is made in New Zealand.  Managing director, Simon Barnett, says OBO has become market leaders in its niche market by producing products that really work, last well, and they have a manufacturing process that produces products other manufacturers are not capable of making.

The foam OBO uses in its hockey equipment has a tight cell structure which means that OBO foam wears more slowly than most other foams.  Also, OBO uses a thermo-bonding process in manufacture which enables them to make three dimensional products. This means, for example, that leg guards are pre-moulded to fit the leg, and are shaped to reflect the way the body moves and means goalies can move more quickly.

OBO also works with goal-keepers in several countries to provide new ideas and to test equipment during development.  They then use professional product designers to put the finishing touches on their products, so they not only work well, but look good.

Simon Barnett said that he entered OBO in the Diba Award “because I think the sort of business we are in is a difficult business.”

”We have to think about products that haven’t been thought about in relation to people’s needs, needs that other people haven’t identified. Then we have to convert these needs into products. It is genuinely hard to do and this award acknowledged that.”

The judges said that OBO relentlessly led by example and “by developing cutting edge researched and designed products, the company has maintained its dominance in the sport at all levels of the game. This has been done in a very humanistic way with the development of excellent relationships within the worldwide community. OBO has truly become a ‘lovemark’ in this arena.”

A new company, OBO Cricket, has now been established and continues with the same investment in “creativity and innovation”.

The awards judges were Derek Lockwood, worldwide director of design, Saatchi & Saatchi Ltd; Richard Mander, Chief Technical Officer, Navman; Nevil Gibson, Editor in Chief, National Business Review; Marie Wilson, research fellow at the Graduate School of Business, University of Auckland; and leading Auckland businessman, Brian Corban.

At the award ceremony judge Derek Lockwood said the Lexus Design in Business Awards were distinctive “in that they are not yet another example of an industry’s self congratulatory approach to awarding its peers, but are a celebration of the instinct, intuition and inspiration of the business entrepreneurs who have engaged design.”

“They are for the business people who get it, go after it and get results from it.”

Dame Cheryll Sotheran, Sector Director, Creative Industries, NZTE, said that more New Zealand export businesses were recognising robust design-led processes as the key to selling products and services for a premium to global markets.

She said that having design at the heart of our business thinking meant extracting maximum value from something New Zealand had historically undervalued –“our intellectual property.”

Said Dame Cheryll: “.By using design to create a tangible competitive advantage in niche world markets, design-led businesses are creating assets built on intellectual property which cannot be easily taken up by a competitor, unpicked and replicated.  The challenge, now, is to bring these components together to design products the world will covet and pay a premium for.”

Gary McIver, National Manager for Lexus, said that his company supported the awards to “celebrate New Zealand companies using design innovation to make their products and services leading edge.”

Mr McIver said that the core of the Lexus design philosophy was to be “technologically advanced yet humanised, to create striking design but still be artistic yet unpretentious.” He said over the past four years there had been a shift in emphasis on who were the “heroes” of the Lexus’ development team: from engineers taking the centre stage to the designers sitting equally in the limelight.

Other finalists in this years awards were Orca Performance Speedsuits Limited, for their design of the Orca Apex Speedsuit; Fisher & Paykel’s Finance arm, Wingate + Farquhar, for the design of a customer call centre which has increased staff morale, productivity and satisfaction and decreased staff turnover; and Michael Draper Design, whose design attitude pervades everything the company does, whether it is dealing with customers, specifiers or with the numerous interns who have learned design skills in the company.