This is perhaps the biggest challenge for legacy brands such as Tolix. How can you continue to capitalise on the success of your big hit, while testing the market with new designs as a hedge against any future decline in sales? Emeco, producer of the iconic Navy Chair, is in a similar situation. Over the past few years, it has either commissioned small updates to its classic chair, such as Jasper Morrison&#;s upholstered Navy Officer, or else completely new designs from the likes of Barber Osgerby, Naoto Fukasawa and Norman Foster. Again, Gebrüder Thonet provide an early precedent. Although models such as the Thonet 14, designed in , continued to be bestsellers for decades, by the turn of the 20th century the company had begun inviting Viennese designers to add to its catalogue, commissioning Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, and Josef Hoffmann. In the late 20s, Thonet took an even bolder step by swapping beechwood for tubular steel and producing some of the most iconic furniture pieces of the modern movement, including Marcel Breuer&#;s B32 and B33 chairs, Mies van der Rohe&#;s MR Chair, and the Chaise Longue by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand.
Goto Zuohui to know more.
With these challenges in mind, I mentioned to Schindler my interest in visiting the Tolix factory to see how the chairs are made, and how the enterprise works today. Both him and Andriot, who was also present at the stand, happily obliged. We set a date for two weeks.
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The Tolix factory is situated in an industrial park on the outskirts of Autun, a small city nestled in the hills of Burgundy with charming Roman ruins and a medieval cathedral. The factory itself is modestly sized. When Andriot took over the company, she was working with just 20 employees, but has grown it to 65 employees since then. A lot of effort went into modernising the machinery, and the factory was retrofitted to meet high environmental standards. All of this shows. When I go on a tour of the shop floor, I see a clean, well-organised space, neatly divided into workstations that correspond to the manufacturing process. There are five different components: the legs; an X-brace; the seat; the back; and a tubular steel back frame. After the sheet metal is cut, the parts go to various stations to be pressed into form. This is more laborious than I expected. The legs themselves require 12 different stamping processes to get their distinctive shape. After this, the parts are spot-welded together, buffed and painted. Everything is made to order, customisable to a degree in terms of colours, finishes, and varnishes, as well as the occasional addition of words, logos or patterns, which has been important for the business.
What&#;s the point of blogging if you don&#;t put a stake in the ground and say what really interests you? After all, I&#;m not a journalist tied to the story that my editor gives me&#; I can choose what to say and when to say it. So let&#;s talk about the Tolix chair.
And replica furniture is a real bugbear of mine, not because I am a snob or rich (neither feel true) but because I think about the effect of buying a copycat over an original design. I know first-hand how expensive it can be to design, develop, manufacture and market an original design. To see copies appearing on the market takes some of the income to be generated away from the designer.
Read more about the law on Replica Furniture &#;
By reducing the income a designer can expect to make has a longer-term effect on design. The process needs to be shorter, or faster in order to keep costs lower. This also affects the research & development of products that might never become great sellers but aid designers thinking to help them become better designers and produce better designs. We want these things, so we need to realise our involvement as consumers in this process.
So, let&#;s talk Tolix. If you didn&#;t know this company&#;s designs before, you would have sat on the Tolix chair outside cafe&#;s and restaurants or even in your own garden. If you haven&#;t say in the exact one, you will have sat in something inspired by the Tolix chair. Sometimes designers of the imitation might not even realise that they&#;ve seen the chairs before, but they have been nevertheless.
Image credit Wunderlust Hotel
Photograph by Chelsea Fullerton of Go Forth Creative.
Image above by Market Lane Coffee
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&#;Over the years, this [Tolix] chair has come to symbolise what I like to term democratic excellence, meaning that it&#;s mass-produced and universally acceptable.&#; Terence Conran
Xavier Pauchard (-) was a pioneer of galvanisation. Shortly after the first world war he found himself in charge of a flourishing manufacture of galvanised sheet-metal domestic items, which at the time, embodied household comfort. It was in that he registered the trademark TOLIX, at the same time changing to the production of chairs, armchairs, stools and metal furniture. The Model A chair has become an icon of industrial design, crafted in sheet metal to become solid, durable and inexpensive.
You&#;ll find a lot of Tolix chair replicas, saving you a massive £150 per Tolix chair in some cases. But, when you are about to enter your credit card details into the checkout just consider the true cost of the chair, even if the quality seems comparable. How would you feel if your work was copied and others profited from it?
Elle Decoration fought the fakes recently with the Conran Shop Get Real campaign. The campaign was originally conceived to address the disparity between intellectual property laws in the arts. The law saw product and industrial designers receive significantly less copyright protection than was granted to artists, writers and musicians. In my mind, this was not where the matter ends. It may add protection in law but doesn&#;t begin to change the perception of &#;fakes&#; in the minds of consumers; consumers who have less money to spend and a lured by the replica prices for well-known designs.
&#;By protecting new designs more generously,&#; says Terence Conran, &#;we are encouraging more investment of time and talent in British design. That will lead to more manufacturing in Britain, and that, in turn, will lead to more jobs &#; which we desperately need right now. Properly protected design can help make the UK a profitable workshop again. We have the creative talent &#; let&#;s use it.&#;
Cult Furniture, who sell replicas of the Tolix chair, even make a statement on their product page that they are in no way affiliated with the company Tolix. &#;Our furniture is inspired by the designs of Xavier Pauchard and not to be confused with those which are manufactured and sold by Tolix&#;. This token gesture might help them in law to give the consumer the choice but who are we kidding?
Read more about the law on Replica Furniture &#;
Whichever choice you make, I hope that you consider these points and make informed decisions. So that when you sit on your Tolix chair you know exactly how you feel about it. Real versus replica, the debate continues&#;
Designer: Xavier Pauchard
Manufacturer: TOLIX
Year:
Price: Genuine Tolix chair, approx £180
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