David Trubridge's furniture, lighting and jewellery design business is inspired by shapes he has seen in nature. PHOTO/WARREN BUCKLAND
David Trubridge's family wanted to see the world in the 1970s so they sold everything, leaving behind his "pretty good business" designing and hand-making wooden furniture in Great Britain.
In the steel cutter Hornpipe they sailed to nowhere in particular, making long stops in the the Caribbean and Tahiti, where he refinanced the decade-long expedition making furniture.
The young family arrived in New Zealand in 1985 and lived in the Bay of Islands, where he had a small furniture workshop and his Polynesian experience flowed through his designs.
The country's financial collapse in 1988 saw business suffer and they moved to Hawke's Bay where he was artist in residence at EIT and wife Linda taught at Ioana College.
Mr Trubridge told his story to The Biz event hosted by Yellow.
Yellow was once all about the paper Yellow Pages but has positioned itself as a digital conduit for small businesses.
Ironically Mr Trubridge's success is due to traditional methods.
At the 2001 Milan Furniture Fair his Polynesia-inspired Body Raft ashwood sofa was picked up by renowned up-market Italian design company Cappellini.
He said he didn't expect a great response in Italy because the design was "a bit local".
"I discovered they loved it because it was different," he said.
"The international design stuff was being done already - they had that already - so why take it half-way round the world from New Zealand? But they loved my stuff because it was different. To them it was exotic and telling a new story they hadn't heard before.
"That is out asset and we need to be proud to tell our story."
Since his first sale at Milan he has returned every year and is a regular at other trade shows, which can have up to 280,000 visitors, "doggedly going back every year after year after year to show them you're there, to show them you're still in business and you have new ideas."
"You can't do it by email and internet - everyone else does that and its saturated. Overseas people get bombarded by that sort of thing.
"You have to take it there yourself and show you are in it for the long haul year-after-year. Not with the same product but new products to show you are moving forward. Then they really start to notice you."
Cappellini asked him to make the first order so he employed more people and moved from his Havelock North home studio to a Whakatu studio shared with other designers.
More of his designs were picked up in Europe but he said he struggled to capitalise on the success.
Instead greater success came though creative play.
While teaching in Perth he made a modular light shade in his spare time "for more no reason other than I wanted to make something in my spare time".
"I liked making polyhedron's and things like that when I was a kid."
It sold, as have more than 80,000 more modular lights to 50 countries. The biggest design is 2.4 m high, the smallest is jewellery.
"The moral of that story is you don't scope the market and do the market research as in standard business practice. If you do that you come up with a product that you know has a reasonable chance of selling, but so does everybody else because they have done the same research."
"If you come up with something that people didn't even know they wanted, then you have the market to yourself.
"That's precisely what we did. I discovered a niche in the world market for these patterned decorative wooden lights, which no one else was making and people didn't even know they wanted."
Trubridge replica lampshades affected sales in Australia, an estimated sales loss of $200,000 plus legal fees for a "massive struggle".
"Australia is a maverick - it is on its own in the world in providing IP protection."
The legal strategy of saying the design was an artwork rather than an industrial product was a success in Australia but replicas "pop up all the time and are a serious problem". New designs are more complex and a lot harder to replicate.
He said design that did not have environmental responsibility was "irrelevant and irresponsible".
"I believe in nature - that's where we come from, that is what we are part of. I love it and it informs all my work.
"I believe in balance. When you grow things in balance they can last. When you go out of balance things go wrong."
People could see through spin marketing and the company made no claims, just laid out its story.
H
e originally exported containers with made-up lights, but up to 40 kitsets could fit in a box sized for the completed light.
Sea freight was a lot cheaper but a container full of kitsets represented $750,000 of stock.
Shifting to kitset for home assembly dramatically reduces the volume of shipped product, and is named the seed system.
"People have fun making it, and because they have fun making it they enjoy it and love it more and keep it to the longer."
Kitset instruction videos are made in house "because we know our story".
Products made in New Zealand and sent by sea freight had almost the same energy footprint as European-made product.
"One of the biggest impacts on the environment for the lights now is the customer driving from his home to the shop."
At the end of the day "integrity wins".
"You won't win everybody but you will win the ones that matter. We get a lot of people that come back again and again because they love what they've had in the past."
Business growth was paid for by cash flow until this year, when it bought the former meat works building housing its 22 staff and paying less in mortgage payments than it did in rent.
He said the company didn't need to grow and profit was not the main motivation of the business. Profit enabled him to do things he believed in and he hoped the designs was still be used in 50 years' time.
"If we don't grow that's fine - I'm happy with that. We are providing a good living for a bunch of people in Hawke's Bay, which has a good lifestyle."