Benchmark Furniture: Product development

I have been involved in some of the product development at Benchmark over the years, in particular the Gleda Collection by Space Copenhagen and the OVO Collection by Foster + Partners.

For the Gleda range, my primary role was turning the designer’s drawings for the Lounge Chairs into 3D CAD and workshop drawings for production of the initial porotypes. I then worked with the designers and makers to refine and make improvement on these before finally producing full parametric CAD models (in Autodesk Inventor) for all the chair iterations. From these models, I produced 2D shop drawings in AutoCAD. I also worked with our metal fabricators for getting the brass elements supplied to the required standard.

The OVO range, in terms of my remit, has been a little different. Here my role has been to re-model the entire range in Solidworks but with a view that this becomes the groundwork for a broader improvement of business processes. This has begun with rationalising the products offered and developing a new SKU numbering system; modelling all items in Solidworks down to the smallest component so that these may be called up in PDM and possibly an ERP systems and that this can then link to the downstream workshop information.