2008: Pli’s year in review

This has definitely been Pli’s busiest year so far. 2008 has challenged and stretched us in lots of different ways. Perseverance and determination have brought their rewards. We are in a much better position than a year ago to fulfil our ambition of bringing good, environmentally-connected design to the mainstream market.

Speaking for myself, it’s been a tiring year, occasionally frustrating but ultimately pretty satisfying. My overriding feeling, looking back over the last 12 months, is gratitude to the many people who have gone out of their way to help us.

We started the year with a complete overhaul of Pli’s branding and marketing, resulting in an incredibly useful ‘brand guidelines’ document, put together by Alex, which we have hardly needed to alter since we finalised the details. In true small-business style, we began by taping marker-penned keywords to a brick wall and arranging our ideas into internal and customer-facing priorities. We ended with a new logo, colour guides and a detailed marketing strategy.

In January we went to the Interiors Birmingham exhibition: a week commuting past Birmingham Airport between our B&B in Solihull and the National Exhibition Centre in our rented van, in the rain. Our stand brought a lot of visitors and we made some lasting connections with other exhibitors and visitors, though direct sales were disappointing.

Our prototype display of the Reee chair won the Best Innovation award at the Interiors Birmingham Collection and Alex had his face on every screen in the NEC after the exhibition TV crew interviewed him about environmental design.

It was really valuable to get exposure to a massive commercial exhibition: the experience asked a lot of questions of our commercial offering, our marketing material and our product range. In many ways we have spent the rest of the year putting into action the things we learned and the ideas we developed in Birmingham.

Customers want an idea of your general product range and the direction you’re going with your collections, as well as details of just one product to sell. Your presentation needs to be very short, sharp and to the point. If you have a point of difference, or a unique selling point, you need to make it really easy to understand and down-to-earth. Customers are tired of bullshit but far from cynical about environmental issues.

We launched our new website in April, after six weeks’ concentrated development work. This project was about much more than just a brochure site. We wanted to find a way to make the website central to our communication with our customers, suppliers and partners. We wanted to share our ideas and inspirations as well as our product information, so we could present a professional face and encourage collaboration at the same time.

Steve Taylor developed the site for us, mainly using WordPress, and we remain amazed by the ease of adding new content all the time. We’re still working with Steve: our site will have a new front page and shopping cart next month.

In the spring, we focused on making links with online and high-street retailers. We lugged the Grass table all over London and developed some very useful relationships with internet sellers. The people who responded positively tended to be setting up or running eco-friendly product websites and it didn’t take too long to agree to sell our tables by that route. High-street and boutique retailers were harder to reach and were already starting to complain about a slow-down in furniture retail owing to a quiet housing market. That was an early warning of gathering clouds in the economy.

The middle part of the year had its highs and lows. The injection-mould tooling for the Reee chair seemed to take an impossibly long time to be finished and installed; meanwhile, pre-orders for the chair were building up and we found ourselves under a lot of pressure to speed the product development to its conclusion. Two hoped-for launch dates were bumped but we knew the absolute deadline was the London Design Festival and we made it, just. Our first customer received the first batch order on time in August and we breathed easy in September.

Meanwhile, Pli started a formal internship scheme, following an incredibly useful intern placement last year. We decided to run the internships on a semi-academic basis so that people who spent time with us would gain specific project experience and have responsibility for individual projects we would support in the workshop. I put the word out to design schools expecting very little interest and we were overwhelmed by the quantity and quality of candidates. Eray, Tim, Ed and Charlotte added so much value, enthusiasm and positive attitude to the company during the year and we are looking forward to running another intern programme in 2009.

Eray’s work on Utility Furniture has given Pli a new focus on developing a well-founded academic understanding of local, resource-efficient and affordable design in Britain. We are spending some of our free time as a team in re-interpreting aspects of the British design tradition from the perspective of environmentally-conscious design and resilient material selection. We aim to bring out a short educational film about Utility Furniture and ecological design next year, with the help of the many organisations that have helped us develop our thinking on this topic already.

Tim and Ed, both graduates from Nottingham University, helped us to develop designs for efficient packaging and broaden our understanding of available recycled plastics. They were also great at rolling their sleeves up and getting stuck into the physical side of product development, packaging, product launching and anything else where they felt they could help.

That kind of positive attitude, demonstrated by all our interns, went a long way with us and earned an enormous amount of respect.

Charlotte came to us with plenty of practical design experience but spent four weeks developing a wiki-based software system for us to manage our internal communications data on materials and processes. It’s an excellent system that has transformed the way we share information and it’s growing fast.

We launched the Reee chair on 10 September: our only new product of the year and already our best-seller. Sony Computer Entertainment lent us their atrium for the launch and we had a good time, marking the end of nearly two years’ hard development work for us and for the designers, Sprout. Of course, the work really begins when the product meets the market. The simple idea behind the Reee chair — using 100% recycled post consumer electronics plastic — seems to be taking hold. So we are now hard at work producing batches of chairs with our supply partners.

Following the launch, September was consumed by a frantic schedule of PR opportunities and industry presentations about the chair. Alex and I were stretched between west and east London as we presented the chair to different London Design Festival events and tried to make time to see all the other exhibits for ourselves.

Things settled down in October and November; we were able to focus on sales, production and new product development with only the occasional presentation or meeting to attend. We learned about Search Engine Optimisation and other dark arts of internet marketing from Jane Lucken. I managed to make time to attend the ‘Better World By Design’ conference in Rhode Island during November: that gave me at least a year’s worth of inspiration and some great contacts in the States.

So, what are we looking ahead to, in 2009? A couple of new product launches, starting with the Wrap Table, a new shared web information resource on materials in design, a new website for customers and more design management work. That’s January to March taken care of. After that, we’ll see: stay tuned.