High quality, bespoke furniture design in SolidWorks
Tuesday, November 01, 2011Villiers Brothers have been designing and manufacturing some of the highest quality furniture in the UK since 1989. Proud to fly the Made in Britain flag, their designs are beautifully striking pieces, constructed from some of the best quality materials around – bronze, brass, copper, stainless steel, mild steel, limestone, granite, glass... They create unique pieces based on existing designs, tailoring the sizes, materials and finishes in response to customer requests as well as one off designs. Once complete, their 100% bespoke products make it into super yachts, high-end interior designs, and hotel specifiers’ buy lists.
Villiers Brothers have been SolidWorks users for the past four
years and haven’t looked back. They say that a partnership with Innova Systems
has improved their design process “tenfold.”
Before SolidWorks, Villiers Brothers used a 2D CAD package. The need to produce a lot of drawings and accessibility issues when dealing with clients and shop floor workers meant that they simply couldn’t work with it any longer – this led them to look into 3D CAD.
They chose SolidWorks because of how easy it is to create designs tailored towards customer specifications and how impressive and accessible the resulting visuals are. When selling a design to a customer, the easier it is to understand and visualise a concept, the better.
“SolidWorks really has enabled us to be diverse in terms of what we can offer in a short timeframe. It sets concrete expectations for the designer and manufacturer as well as the customer – there are no surprises and no grey areas. It’s revolutionised our sales process, allowing us to react immediately to design requests within the day.”
For Villiers Brothers, who admit that their SolidWorks models are not the most complex, it is the ease and speed of use that has revolutionised their business – sales situations are escalated more quickly by quicker design processes and stunning visuals. They say that this sells the company’s flexibility – one of the brothers, Tim Villiers says, “When we can meet with a customer and get back to them with their completed design overnight, they are stunned.”
“Innova Systems provided us with a window of opportunity that would empower us to be fully in control of our designs and drawings. On a daily basis SolidWorks allows us to easily customise an existing concept to tailor a design, model it, render it and sell it as a bespoke product.”
“Innova Systems’s after sales service is second to none. I can’t sing their praises enough.”
SolidWorks facilitates design reuse. It rationalises the processes behind furniture companies’ bespoke services by allowing variations of designs to be made quickly with outstanding results. The visuals outputted by SolidWorks allow customers to see exactly what they will receive upon creation – the days of rough sketches are gone, now replaced by 3D photorealistic models.