I love working with smart ambitious creative young people. They give me good energy. Well, most of them.
Working with students or graduates to create new designs/products is not a new idea. In some areas, this has become really lucrative business. Say, in arts - you take works of a young artist for pretty much nothing, do a bit of marketing, and two years later you sell his paintings for several thousand pounds, and also get commission for all his new works as his agent. All you invest in is marketing. There are no expensive materials or prototypes, there are no costly manufacturers... Furniture is a different matter - before you get your product, you need to spend a lot of cash. So at the moment, I just do not understand how the maths works, and how smaller furniture companies survive.
Apparently, when made.com started their business, they wanted to do the same, but quickly figured out that students are a bit difficult to work with - when you are young, you have a lot of ambition and self-belief, but you lack commercial or business sense. I do not want to generalise, but really, can a design student make a realistic costing model and make recommendations for the efficiency of the manufacturing process, or assess what would be the most optimal wholesale and retail price?
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