Schüco Product Development
Since 2019 Etcetera has been engaged with Schüco, through their innovation department to improve existing products and develop new ones. To date, the work has crossed the spectrum from brainstorming sessions and pre-concept studies to new material forecasts and on-going market driven developments. The myriad projects have involved all Business Units and most development teams with probable product launches in 2025.
Client: Schüco International KG
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More about the project…
For several years we were in conversation with Schüco regarding the development (and optimization) of their product catalogue. The quality and design of their products has always been undeniably good, but they felt a need to press on to bring in ‘design’ as part of the complete process: from early concepts and market analysis, through concept development and into production focused development. We have been lucky to be working with them on these topics since 2019.
The management, innovation, and engineering at Schüco maintain a high level of craftsman’s ethic, placing a great deal of care into their products. Because of this, they have been very receptive to our integrated design approach. With each new product that we are assigned, and with each new development team that we work with we are developing relationships and spreading ideas across their large complex organization. And gradually, their culture is adjusting from that of craftsmanship to that of design as way of thinking and developing a complete process. It is a privilege to work with them as they begin to understand the value of ‘design’ as a process to be integrated with market analysis and engineering and design of products as the best signifier of their brand.
The logical extension of the product development work was for Etcetera to design the Welcome Forum exhibits. With that we learned more about some of the standard, successful products that were not yet in need of our help. BAU2023 was an opportunity—with the UDC80, AOC50 timber, and Grid2Shell among others—to put on display our understanding through collaboration of their products. By all accounts the exhibits on the BAU stand were a success. And, in addition to the stand, two of our collaboratively developed products were on display in Schüco’s Innovation Lounge and several of our sliding door keys were being passed around.
Almost all of the work remains confidential. We’re looking forward to seeing some of the products hitting the market in 2025, and giving you more insight into this work in the coming months.