Oliver from fuzl lives in South London and noticed that when people moved from their apartments they threw away their flat pack furniture instead of taking it with them. This waste led him to thinking about redesigning flat furniture for small spaces, working to figure out products that people would want to take with them from place to place. His company is now running a Kickstarter campaign to fund a first round of production furniture.
fuzl is branded as clip together furniture, using steel clips that hold components together instead of fasteners or adhesives and requiring no tools. The structural components are built from birch plywood from Scandanavian trees. Five different pieces are currently in the group's portfolio - a stool, chair, rotable, bench, and table. A special piece designed with six hooks is also available exclusively from this Kickstarter campaign.
Beyond the radical redesign of common components, the group also has a strong commitment to sustainability. This first production run is committed to eliminating plastic packaging in the supply chain that is under the group's control, and making as many city deliveries as possible using bicycles instead of automobiles. A special bag can be purchased that's intended to house the furniture during shipping and easily hold the items if the user needs to pack up or move. Additionally, the engineers from fuzl are offering Kickstarter patrons the opportunity to join them on a journey of sustainability discovery to follow the wood from Scandanavian forests to its customers' homes, and create a sustainability benchmark for their product. An odd offshoot of this sustainability focus is the fact that these products don't ship outside of the European Union, and some items only ship inside the United Kingdom.
As a complete redesign of IKEA style pack furniture, fuzl looks like a great entry into the market and their sustainability ideas feel somewhere between radical and realistic. It will be interesting to see how wide the group stretches its portfolio and whether they expand worldwide in the coming years. As an engineering professor it of course gives me some apprehension that there aren't drawings with dimensions on the campaign page, and no mention of life cycle testing or finite element analysis, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt here. The campaign has already met its funding goals and ends on June 23. fuzl items are currently scheduled to ship in September 2018.