Move over IKEA: Customised furniture production from Poland
An interview with Polish design startup few. last week highlighted a several founder struggles encountered in the early stage company’s search for fundraising. Bartosz Bykowski, the founder, explains that his team are in need of smart money before big money, pointing out that his quest for the perfect investor is more complex than just finding investment.
When I asked the founder to tell me a bit about how he started and what inspired him to start the company, Bartosz began to explain a set of goals as a base to what he is aiming to change in the European furniture industry. What drove him the most to shift from product design to creating his own company, is the idea of creating his own brand. Having worked for a couple of years on big projects for large furniture brands in Poland, Bartosz discovered a unique gap in the market.
“I think it’s mainly the approach towards what we do, because every next project we start, we try to somehow invent and introduce new innovations. So for example, when talking about storage systems, we not only want to create really nice furniture in terms of design but also a whole new standard of construction and joining system that will allow us to mass-manufacture customized furniture.”
Moving the conversation towards the challenges that few. is encountering in its first year of being out there, Bartosz confirmed that the early stage design company is in the pre-seed stage of funding and struggles mostly with allocating funds towards R&D, necessary for the immediate growth of the company. Bartosz sees the importance in convincing investors that his brand is worth their time but also in finding someone who will fall in love with the brand, with the team, with the product, with the people, with the passion. He is aware of the competition and that there are several other projects around customisation of furniture that combine technology with online configurators but the problem is that hardware is usually the weak part of those projects.
So the challenge lies in finding funding from the right investor who understands the product and who can give access to the facilities and the technology that the team requires for growth.
The Polish furniture industry is quite large, ranking at fourth exporter in the world, but the price of the furniture or the cost for brands that are produced is really low as it’s a wide label production. few. focuses more on the design marketing, manufacturing, innovation, which is where the team have good knowledge.
few. was founded earlier this year, so the company is still in its first year in the market — I asked Bartosz how he thinks the team will overcome the “first year” hurdles and where he would you put the funding first.
“As long as we know that we were able to deliver the right product in let’s say pre-order in three or four months, we will start putting some funds into marketing and sales”.
The few. team have decided to group traction from other categories of products and create a generic product that can adapt to the setting in which it’s being used, he tells me their next product is a line of tables (adapted to kitchen, dining room and office usage), making it much easier to create and produce in the masses. He adds that there is no R&D financial barrier with this mode of production — a path he wishes to take so they can produce a customised product, but for mass furniture lines.
When asking Bartosz where he sees the company growing in the next three to five years in comparison to this new movement within the furniture industry and design industry, he replied that the plans didn’t stretch further than three years as the market could change at any time with trends that can not be foreseen. Bartosz tells me that the plan is intense for the speed at which few. needs to move, eventually looking to scale across the European market, especially the Western European market (Scandinavia, Germany, France and the U.K.).
“As far as we’re going to be able to make the next move, we would like to go beyond Europe and go to the United States and expand to other markets. I mean we want to make a global brand here.”
In terms of disrupting something on a European level and being able to incorporate the brand into the Scandinavian market, the few. team is definitely on the right path. When we look forward to incorporating innovation into the traditional industries, it is key to look at how the brand is thinking around disruption, putting importance and meaning into doing things a different way.
