Making It as a Team

Imagine being fresh out of art school and selling your work to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, a firm of architects in Los Angeles, a pharmaceutical company in Milan, and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. It happened last year to Demakersvan, a design team comprised of three 29-year-olds: Jeroen Verhoeven, Joep Verhoeven and Judith de Graauw.

They met at the Design Academy in Eindhoven and lived together in a farmhouse, and when it came time to do graduation projects, they knew for certain that they wanted to make their name as a team. That name turned out to be Demakersvan (‘Themakersof’), and those three words convey the company’s philosophy well: they work together, focusing on the making of... "You can fill in the blank," says Jeroen Verhoeven. "We don’t want to pin ourselves down." He speaks continually in the first person plural. Each concept may originate with one Maker, but the ideas are developed collectively. "You can compare it to an orchestra: every player, even the little triangle, is essential to the whole."

Craftsman and machine

They’ve been at it a year. A designer friend helped them to get a studio on the Rotterdam harbour, and there they started to work on a collection from scratch ("We worked in a casino at first to pay the rent," Verhoeven says). But the Industrialized Wood table, which he made for his final exam (see photo), and a decorative steel fence, How to Plant a Fence, his twin brother Joep Verhoeven’s final exam project, got things rolling. Now Demakersvan are hot. "Yes, things are happening fast, but that just shows us we’re on the right track," says Verhoeven.

The track of socially conscious design, that is. Demakersvan hate throwaway products. "Buying new furniture every season – we don’t believe in that," Verhoeven says. "There are plenty of timeless pieces of furniture that last a generation, preferably more." Timelessness, according to Demakersvan, comes from attention to quality: "In our digital world, craftsmanship has been pushed too far into the background. People must dare to deliberately choose good materials again, and develop an eye for detail – to make sure every screw, every leg, every cut has a purpose. Not that I’m arguing that we should go back to making every product by hand. But we have to see to it that machines start working for us again, instead of allowing ourselves to be led by them, as so often happens these days."

What Verhoeven is saying is that it’s best to control the production process; one needn’t always make straightforward IKEA tables. Beautiful, labour-intensive tables, like his appropriately named Industrialized Wood, can be factory-made too. "I had a labour-intensive decorative table, modelled after seventeenth-century furniture, industrially manufactured. We had to push the machines to their limits to do it. But it’s worth it."

Going global without cookie-cutters

The initial response by Verhoeven’s instructors was, "You’ll never be able to sell that table." But four have sold so far – one to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Verhoeven gets at least ten new requests a week. But the 20,000-euro price tag is holding back sales somewhat at the moment. "I want to make sure my work doesn’t end up selling just to museums," he says. "What we want to do is sort of aesthetically educate the average man on the street. That’s why we’re looking into producing a number of our designs more cheaply in India. We aren’t against globalisation or mass production. But we are against the cheap cookie-cutter sameness that results from it."

The decorative fence, for which help was sought from the Dutch bobbin-lace association (craftsmanship again), is especially popular with large companies, and will soon be produced in India. It’s an enterprise that requires a considerable amount of business expertise. Jeroen Verhoeven and his teammates have been learning about the various aspects of starting a company. They will soon establish a general partnership, and Verhoeven will be spending more time on management. "You don’t learn how to run a business at the Design Academy," he says. "You have to figure it out as you go. That means we’re still making a lot of mistakes. Now that we’ve gone abroad to set up a production line in India, we can of course permit ourselves fewer and fewer. On the other hand, working on the edge like this suits us."