New possibilities
The launch of Nedre Foss was driven by the possibilities of direct online communication combined with a bigger structural change within the interior object business.
Designers & production
When we started out as professional designers around year 2000, we were expected to follow our projects to a certain point until in-house development teams of our industrial partners took over. Our job was pretty much done. We didn’t meddle with production, and designers starting their own line of products could be seen almost as reacting to not finding their place in the established industry.
Back then, most of the heavy functions of commercialization, like product development, sourcing, manufacturing, communication and logistics, were locked inside the big manufacturing brands.
Ongoing shift
The ongoing shift from brands focusing on manufacturing to brands focusing on development and communication, spurred on by some of the new Danish Brands emerging around 2000, has moved many of these heavy functions out into independent agencies.
At the same time the designers are often asked to follow their project further into product development and manufacturing as prototyping and the actual making of a product are also handed over to external suppliers.
On one side you have designers being more familiar with development and with the possibility to show their work simultaneously to almost everyone almost everywhere. On the other side you have independent suppliers supporting all the functions needed for bringing a product to market.
Nedre Foss is a child of these factors. Compared to the work we were doing within our existing collaborations, we found a sort of freedom to express a different set of attitude and language in objects.