In a Former Life…

In what seems like a distant former life now… I was in furniture manufacturing. For those who do not know, my family used to own one of the biggest furniture manufacturing plants in Canada. Pumping out 600 pieces of furniture a day. 

Yup, that was us working with the yellow and blue retailer from Sweden. The name I shall not mention. However, if you are interested in the details, there is a book titled John Doe Vs Evil, check on Amazon, please. This blog is not about that, it is about how involved I was and how we were a family in furniture. 

Since The Age of 10?

Yes, this is hard to believe for most. Child labour they scream, screw you, we did it to survive. What I am getting at is that yes, from a very early age were learning, gaining business, working skills, and business practices without knowing we were. We were involved from the ground up and yes, we were in school, business school 101. 

Learn by doing.

I think this is extremely important and while this is out on a limb, sometimes when I have ideas, I will work them out in my head and when that idea is fully baked, that is when I look it up online, to see if my idea is original. 

So this was us and I was… Learning by doing and always, always trying to get things done as fast as possible. It was like my brain never stopped. I was doing one thing while working on a design for example. Parts of my brain were working behind the scenes to make improvements to the processes that I was already doing efficiently. 

This constant need for quicker, faster, better, equalled genius little improvements and creating a lower-cost product. So yes from the age of 10, I was racking my brain. I assume at that point, it was trying to get things done faster so I would not need to be working. Later on, it was about lower prices and efficiency. 

Faster, Better, Cheaper.

Everyone knows that time is money. At least our concept of time is money. However, making improvements is hard. I believe that good design will also be in tune with the ease of manufacturing. To me, these go hand in hand and while we are designing, manufacturing should always be a concern. 

This was evident when we received designs and designs from our clients. Why is this so expensive? Because your design sucks, was the answer most of the time. That’s what we want they would say. This is then the price, we would say. If you let us add our magic touch to it we would make it less expensive. Usually, this worked.