Locally made furniture for inspiring workplaces. We ship furniture as a digital file & make through independent craftspeople in cities around the world.
Hello all, So excited to be on Product Hunt! When we first started Opendesk my co-founder Joni and I were on a mission to rethink the way products are designed and made. As architects, we both had experience working on large physical building projects, but we were fascinated by the way digital technologies and the Internet were beginning to change our relationship with designing and making. In particular, we were excited by new digital fabrication technologies, and their capacity to lower the barriers to entry for makers, and the threshold for access to precision manufacturing tools.
After designing the first Opendesk design (the Lean Desk - https://www.opendesk.cc/lean/desk) for our first customer Mint Digital, Opendesk was founded on a mission to build the world's most equitable and distributed supply chain.
Our business model is targeted at benefiting a diverse community of designers, makers, and customers around the world, by hosting digital designs on behalf of designers and then connecting you to a skilled network of local makers to have your furniture made to order. Our fee structure ensures that you are supporting everyone in the supply chain with each order.
Unlike the traditional industry, which tends to squeeze designers and makers, takes advantage of manufacturing where land and labour is cheapest and relies on complex supply chains and international shipping, with Opendesk we want to ensure that local making can become viable again through a global platform, delivering a more sustainable model - environmentally, socially and economically.
I’m excited to hear your feedback and answer any questions you may have. Please ask away and tag @open_desk and/or @nick_diaconou so I can reply!
https://www.opendesk.cc/opendesk...
Many thanks for the support,
Nick
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@open_desk@nick_diaconou Big fan of OpenDesk - for the concept, designs, and the fact that it might have saved my marriage (that might be taking it a bit far, but it certainly removed some strife!)...
"Oh, BTW honey, I just dropped a boatload of cash on a new 4'x8' CNC machine that is going to take up the remaining free space in the garage. It'll be here in 3 weeks"
WTF!$!$#@#@!%
Fortunately, I found Opendesk, and the "Layout Table" the next day, and my wife fell in love with the design for her new desk. I suspect we'll be making some other pieces for her architecture office as well. Disaster averted, thanks to cool design :-)
Looking forward to building several of your pieces, and watching the selection grow. Keep up the amazing work!
Question - I've filled out the "join as a maker" form a few times, and the gear just keeps spinning. I've never seen a response, so I think the form might be broken? Would love to know the maker details and how it works- what's the best way to get the info?
UPDATE: Just filled the form out again, and it seems to have processed this time. However the link provided is a 404. https://www.opendesk.cc/our-model
@open_desk@edholloway Hi Ed, thanks so much for the awesome post - made our day! Please apologise to your wife on our behalf for the initial shock, but so glad she was happy with the Layout Table 😄
Re onboarding, sorry and thanks also for reporting this issue to us. We'll dig around to figure out what went wrong for you there, but in the meantime, to find out more about joining as a maker please drop us an email to makers@opendesk.cc. One of the team here will be more than happy to pick it up and explain!
UPDATE: Thanks for reporting that redirect issue @edholloway - should be all fixed now!
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I really like the idea behind this business, it's not super clear on the website, do people pay for the design which comes with the "how to build" or is it only building through your supplier network?
@jesse_ryles Hey Jesse, thanks and good question! We host designs on behalf of a community of international designers, and connect people to a network of makers who can make those designs locally, on-demand. We’re trying to build a business model that benefits everyone to build a more distributed and ethical supply chain 🙂
So we encourage people to ‘request a quote’ and have stuff made local to them through our vetted global network of makers - we’ve done the hard yards to ensure they’re all amazing at what they do and the furniture is top notch! When you go that route, as most do, you pay the manufacturing fee, a clip to the designer and a platform fee to Opendesk (just like your regular marketplace).
@jesse_ryles That said, if people want to make things themselves, for themselves (i.e. non commercially) - that’s great! Some of our designs are available for download (either directly on the website or via email after outreaching to us) and we love to hear of people taking on a weekend project in their local maker space 😊 They’re very much DIY files, so you’ll need to know your way around CAD and CAM software, and have access to a 3-axis CNC machine. Because we host designs from a range of international designers who pick the Creative Commons license associated with their design, you’ll also need to abide by those terms ☺️
@clement_juillard Fantastic! I had my dad in mind for loving this site but I know he doesn't know about CAD and CAM programs haha so might be a bit about the average handy man, but love the idea.
Hey @jacqvon! Thanks for asking a question 🙂 We wanted to create a better, more efficient and more sustainable way to make physical stuff - starting with furniture.
Rather than mass producing and shipping heavy designs around the world, we send a digital file (like a .dxf or .dwg) to a workshop in our network near you - meaning the design you want can be made on-demand, locally, sustainably and quicker than your average! It’s kinda like sending a PDF to your local print shop 🖨
It all started when our founders Nick and Joni (both architects), were asked to design a large team desk for Mint Digital a company based here in London. Their brief was to design a number of bespoke workbenches that were affordable but also could be made more quickly than ordering from a major supplier. Joni and Nick found that they could make desks from sustainably-grown forests, and build them locally in less than 3 weeks. Because the tables were designed to be made with digital fabrication tools they were able to make them less than 3 miles away from Mint Digital’s central London offices with a local maker.
The same company then opened their New York office and wanted to kit it out with the same furniture. Because Nick and Joni had the digital file already, they realised they didn’t have to make the pieces here then ship it across to NY, they could simply find a local maker near the New York office, send them the file, and cut out the need for heavy shipping and time lags. By turning hardware into software it was possible to ship only the digital file across the Atlantic – and the core idea behind Opendesk was born.
We now make this possible for not just Mint Digital, but customers all over the world through our online marketplace. We offer a collection of designs, designed by a global design community and connect customers who want those designs to a network of makers to have their furniture made for them on demand. For us this is just the beginning. Although we currently have a marketplace that allows you to buy digitally fabricated plywood furniture underneath the hood we are building the infrastructure and platform that allows you take any product and any fabrication method and marry the two together alongside materials and processes for manufacture. Eventually the idea will be to separate what we see as the underlying platform that powers the current online marketplace and allow anyone to plug into it. Whether that be our existing maker network who want to set up their own channels to generate further sales or a company who already has their own channel and idea but needs the platform and infrastructure to power it.
Essentially we’re trying to build a global platform for local making and while that current making is plywood desks we imagine in the future it could be anything. Our mission is to build the world’s most equitable & distributed supply chain.
Such a huge fan of Opendesk, I had the pleasure of using their first desks at Mint Digital and have been following their story since. So exciting to see new approaches to manufacturing and businesses thinking about the ways they make and the impact it has. 👍
@kayesymington thanks so much for your positive feedback!
We owe everyone at Mint Digital a huge debt of gratitude for helping to get Opendesk off the ground and for the ongoing support ever since ❤️
@nick_diaconou This is a great idea. Bringing more business to local artisans who don't have the marketing scale that the big furniture companies do.
- How do you source new makers? Do you actively find them, or wait for them to apply on your website?
- How do you vet the local makers for quality before adding them to the platform, especially internationally?
@nneuman Thanks for the great questions, and so glad you like Opendesk!
- We allow makers to sign up to our service themselves, either via www.opendesk.cc directly, or via our sister directory for digital fabricators at www.fabhub.io. We are always on the lookout for great makers around the world and the hope is obviously that we can provide them with a meaningful source of extra income as we scale the business.
- We have an onboarding process which we ask all makers to go through should they wish to produce and sell Opendesk products. This involves providing information about the way they work, the tools and materials they have access to, etc. We also request that they produce a prototype piece and send detailed photography through to us and we ask various questions to assess it. At the same time, we gather information from makers on the way they produce the furniture and their prices against materials and processes, so that we can give them feedback on ways to improve their efficiency as they start receiving quote-requests from local customers. In the fullness of time, we will be looking at more reputation-based feedback for makers to help them improve their offerings and quality over time too.
Hope that answers your questions and thanks so much again for posting!
Nice idea, but the world went the way of mass production for a reason. I could pay $500+ and wait two to four weeks for a nice desk, or go to IKEA/Walmart and have plenty of sub $100 desks I could take home today. And yes this way benefits the local economy IF you have local woodworkers, but a $400 premium might be too steep for the average consumer.
@alteredorange Thanks for your thoughts, and you’re completely right of course: we certainly can’t compete with the IKEA model (nor are we aiming to right now!). If you want something cheap today that’s definitely your best bet - and to be clear, what they’ve built is amazing and they are a huge inspiration to us, having revolutionised an industry throughout the 20th Century. We simply want to be an alternative for those who want to consume more consciously via a new model, and we are excited about where distributed production could go through the 21st Century.
Regarding pricing, we are excited that as our maker network matures and expands and our tech gets better, we’ll become more competitive - our makers will become faster and more skilled with our designs, and as the platform scales our costs can decrease too. That's not to say we will ever compete with the cheapest and most vertically-integrated in the market, but we do believe this alternative model works and can provide new / alternative value-adds as a consequence of a different supply-chain model.
For example, one differentiator is in the value-added services we can offer on the top of the standard ('default') products you see listed online. This is possible due to digital, micro-batch, local production enabling more customisation. So yes you may have to wait an extra couple of weeks, but your furniture can be crafted to the perfect dimensions to suit your space, or you can personalise it with a logo or design etched into the surface - and in time, more bespoke customisations can be offered by designers working on custom-builds. That's the beauty of on-demand design and manufacturing! It's what we’re working towards and you can actually request tailoring on quite a few of our products already.
Thanks again for the question, it’s a really good one and something we think about often at Opendesk. But hopefully what we’re offering, and the way we’re offering it excites people enough to help us build a viable model that benefits each and every contributor along the way!
@nick_diaconou Thank you for the response! It's almost taking the Tesla approach to customize-able furniture (high-end experience for a select few, and then branching out to a broader market). I rooting for you guys, I would love more customize-able furniture options!
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Disclaimer: I am a board member and small investor.
Pros:
It's a more efficient manufacturing model. The products are beautiful.
Thanks for the feedback Yannick - we will definitely be working on increasing the rate of new products in the weeks and months ahead - part of our mission to empower more independent designers the world over!
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Disclaimer: I am a board member and small investor.
Pros:It's a more efficient manufacturing model. The products are beautiful.
Cons:More designers / product selection is needed.
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