New OhTwo™ Chair and Table range ready to conquer the world!
The difficult second chair.
Chairs are notoriously difficult to design. Especially after the success of our first chair, the second one seems to will one to fail, but after two years in concept form and three months of prototyping and development, Raw Studios is proud to announce that the first production run on our newest chair and table range is well underway. Clients can look forward to a whole lot of fun, and yes, some serious work from these quirky newcomers.
Says Peet regarding the look and feel of the range “I tried to create something that triggers an emotional response with people when they see it for the first time. You know that pleasant feeling that this is a shape or form you recognize from your childhood, from a varsity cafeteria or some such place where hardworking furniture does its thing without a big fuss.”
The low fuss factor is only skin deep though as this range includes a bunch of innovations and improvements, on our previous range of chairs. These include a laser cut and precision CNC bent steel component and although we are not completely new to using steel to solve some of the more industrially strong requirements of workplace and retail environments, we feel that the way in which it was utilized, to solve several of the usual construction and rigidity issues associated with chairs all in one clever little component has, for us at least, opened up a whole lot of options for future design solutions.
Consequent to the use of a steel component we have been able to bring the amount of plywood used down to a ridiculous minimum, so much so that we now cut enough parts for 12 chairs from a standard sheet of birch plywood. This did come with a slight payoff in the form of two of the parts having to have to be cut on at least a five axis machine into a 3 dimensional part. Enter the latest young lady to grace our workshop floor, and no, our tea-lady doesn’t cut our parts with a jigsaw in between tea breaks. Her name is KUKA and she is a little easier to talk to than our previous, slightly ancient, robot arm and the perfect compliment to our new “can do anything” prototyping environment.
So, combine some simple plywood parts, precision steel bits in several colour options, locally manufactured bent plywood seat and back also available in many different materials, put a lot of design soul and a little bit of nostalgia into the mix and you get something really special judging from the overwhelmingly positive responses we have had during preview sessions with our most valued project clients. Best of all the product can ship completely flat packed. For the first time we have been able to achieve this so completely. Once the range has won local hearts and minds, the next step will be global domination.
First we take Gauteng, then the world! (Insert evil laugh here).
