In February Mark Adams, managing director of furniture company Vitsoe, addressed delegates at the inaugural Munich Creative Business Week event. What he said was both contentious and compelling:
‘Recycling’, Adams argued, ‘is defeat’.
For years, recycling has been seen as the key to ‘sustainable’ design. The argument runs that the more recycled material a product contains and the more of that product can be recycled at the end of its lifespan, the less harmful it is to the environment. Adams agrees up to a point, but he believes it is vital we begin to value longevity over recyclability. It’s an inconvenient truth, perhaps, for a world in thrall to consumerism.
‘At Vitsoe we are concerned with reuse,’ Adams told the audience in Munich. ‘Recycling is what you do when you fail to reuse.’
Showing me round the company’s workshop and headquarters in Camden, north London, Adams elaborates on this: ‘Recycling is better than nothing, but we have lost our ability to reuse things. Things are made for an ever-shorter duration. You just chuck them away… we have to get back to making things of a better quality.’
The company Adams runs is known almost exclusively for one product: the 606 Universal Shelving System designed by Dieter Rams in 1960. Called ‘the best shelving system in the world’ by design and architecture critic Hugh Pearman, the 606 is designed to last a lifetime (or even longer).
It can be used for one shelf or an entire library, is adjustable and extendable without the need for tools, and is fabricated in metal with simple, clean lines.
Customers can add to their system incrementally – a shelf at a time if they wish – as their needs change. In more than 50 years, it has never become obsolete, and it has never fallen out of fashion.
Vitsoe began in 1959 as Vitsoe+Zapf, a company founded by Danish furniture entrepreneur Niels Vitsoe and designer Otto Zapf to manufacture Rams’s designs. Adams’s involvement began in in mid- Eighties when, at the age of 24, he turned his back on a promising career in recruitment to work on the shop floor of a new furniture shop in London that sold the 606 system. ‘I’d just got the company car, the bonus, the luncheon vouchers – all of that’, says Adams, ‘but being a headhunter just wasn’t me.’
When the shop went bust a year later, Adams got in touch with Niels Vitsoe and asked if he could set up a company in the UK to import the 606 system. Vitsoe agreed, and he later began manufacturing the system in the UK.
In the Nineties, Adams received word from Vitsoe’s German bankers that the business was in financial trouble. He flew to Frankfurt to see what he could do to help and was shocked to discover that despite a large product portfolio, the 606 system alone generated half of the Vitsoe’s turnover, so after taking control of the company, Adams moved production to the UK and stopped making everything but the 606 system.
Since then, he has made the production and distribution of the 606 close to an obsession. As we walk around the workshop, he explains how a minute alteration in a single part reduces damage during storage, and the many ways in which he has managed to reduce waste, including using biodegradable packaging. ‘I get criticised because I’ve essentially been doing the same thing since 1986,’ says Adams. ‘People ask, "Couldn’t you find anything better to do?" And I say, well no, I can’t. We’re not even a fraction of the way through this journey.’
The company recently had a life-cycle analysis completed by the Institute for Manufacturing at Cambridge University. ‘They looked at all the bits we’re making, all the suppliers and the materials, and they were amazed how good our result was because virtually all of our suppliers are within 150 miles of where we’re sitting now. They said that it was amazing how short we’d managed to get our supply chain,’ he tells me.
The 606 system has been one of the most enduring products of the past 50 years; but Adams recognises that digital media is taking over from items such as books and CDs, meaning people won’t require as much storage furniture in future. ‘The world is changing and it is changing fast,’ he says. ‘We certainly have to look to a world where the shelving system will be a minority of what we do, rather than the majority, as it is now.’
A little more than a year ago, Adams signed a licensing agreement with Dieter Rams, giving Vitsoe access to Rams’s entire back catalogue of furniture designs. ‘So there will be pieces that are almost forgotten that are utterly deserving of a new life,’ he says. ‘They were absolutely ahead of their times – 30 or 40 years ahead – and the market wasn’t ready for them.’
The plan, Adams says, is to begin producing some of these pieces in the UK. To begin with, the new products will all be Rams’ designs, but for the future Adams is keen to look further afield.
Vitsoe’s mantra is ‘Living better with less that lasts longer’. Is Adams concerned that Vitsoe will lose some of its USP if it diversifies its output? ‘No. That mantra doesn’t actually mention shelves or even furniture at all,’ he points out. Wherever Adams decides to take Vitsoe next, I get the impression he’ll do it with level of integrity that is difficult to find in any industry.
