Danish design for Far East manufacturers

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN: Increasing numbers of manufacturers in China and Vietnam are realising that success requires its own original design. The Danish design company CBD has opened offices in both Beijing and Hanoi and welcomed many major customers

When the new tiger economies in the Far East become members of WTO, it will lead to increasing respect for original production. It will put an end to buying a product in the West and then copying it millimeter by millimeter. If a manufacturer from the Far East wants to ensure success, it must be with an original product, produced for the domestic market. A product with its own design and its own expression, not just a copy of one that already exists.

“If you want to gain success in the Far East you have to go with the flow.” Karaoke has become such an essential part of Far Eastern culture, that one of CBD’s first successes was the design of a karaoke system.

“Copy production in the whole of southeast Asia is increasingly being cracked down on,” says Nils Toft and Henrik Jeppesen, partners and owners of the design company CBD in Copenhagen. “If say Chinese companies want to make progress and not end up as mere subsuppliers to Western manufacturers, then their independent product development needs to be brought up to speed. Increasing numbers of companies have realised this, not just in China and Vietnam, but in the entire southeast Asian region. To create an independent identity with their own superbrands they have also found out that the use of design helps to pave the way for success.”

Potential
In addition to heading one of Scandinavia’s largest and most dynamic industrial design companies, Nils Toft and Henrik Jeppesen are in charge of the first western design companies in Vietnam and China. Three years ago, CBD opened an office in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, where the company today employs 17 people. CBD in Beijing employs 20 people, and this year the company has opened a new office in Hangzhou.

     “In both Vietnam and China there is enormous potential in capable production companies,” says Nils Toft. “And an even larger potential in the rapidly growing middle class, which wants a share of the same material wealth which exists in the West. Applying our know-how as industrial designers and sparring partners to ’read’ the opportunities in the local market has brought us some of China’s and Vietnam’s largest companies as customers.” “It is our ability to interpret the active trends on different markets, and then convert them into useable design, which makes us necessary,” say the two designers. “Not necessarily because the Vietnamese manufacturers want to export. Most of them are still not mature enough for that. But just to cover domestic needs with products which have the functionalities and attributes required by the home market.”

Local modes of expression
Both Toft and Jeppesen emphasise that their task in southeast Asia is not to make Chinese and Vietnamese design into a derivative of Danish minimalism and aesthetics.

     “Naturally we are loyal to our roots, but that is more reflected in the Danish view that aesthetics must be subordinated to functionality. We are very conscious that it is not us as designers who must be branded, but the company and the product. Through good and independent design and on the conditions set by market forces.” China’s TV City, one of the world’s largest TV manufacturers employing more than 100,000 people, is among CBD’s customers in China. With the population’s increasing wealth and purchasing power, attractively designed TVs are products which are selling well. CBD also carries out tasks for the electronics manufacturer (including mobile phones, computers and TV) Amoi and the white goods giant Haier.