‘We stand against the consumption of resources’: Mark Adams, Managing Director, Vitsœ
Vitsœ projects its point of view through its window display on Duke Street. Photograph: Vitsœ
Vitsœ is a furniture company built upon the idea of sufficiency, not consumption. It is, in some ways, challenging the concepts of capitalism and consumerism, and that makes it one of the most interesting challengers we’ve studied. Vitsœ does not zag against fast fashion to be different or for competitive advantage, but because of deeply held views about the world and what is wrong with it. It is a world-leading brand on sustainability, and has been since it was founded in 1959 – before the idea was popular, and certainly before the issue was as important and urgent as it is today. Mark Adams is Vitsœ’s thoughtful and tenacious Managing Director.
Why does Vitsœ exist?
Vitsœ’s purpose, as a company, is to allow more people to live better with less, that lasts longer. This doesn’t mention shelves, chairs or tables. It doesn’t even mention furniture. And that’s why I say, only slightly provocatively, I don’t regard Vitsœ as a furniture company. We happen to make furniture but there’s so much more that we do within that purpose. The building we are sitting in here, which has taken us about 30 years to design, is also about allowing more people to live better with less, that lasts longer. When you boil it down, that’s the satisfaction that we give customers. That’s where the smile comes from. It doesn’t necessarily just come from a well-designed or functional shelf; it comes from giving them something broader, wider, deeper in their life. That word ‘fulfilment’ is not far away. Our customers have that sense of fulfilment, and that’s something quite difficult to achieve. Dr Nancy Bocken published a paper in 2014 in which we were included as a major case study, and in the summary of that paper, she wrote, ‘Vitsœ exemplifies sufficiency by actively striving to eliminate built- in obsolescence through its design and production systems, and consciously eschewing short-lived fashions or cycles.’ That’s an academic paper and we’ve had a lot of academics come and really pull us apart to see whether this was just clever marketing speak, in their words, or something more profound.
Is that short-lived fashion cycle what Vitsœ actively stands against then?
Yuval Harari writes in Homo Deus – and in Sapiens as well – that to attain real happiness, humans need to slow down the pursuit of pleasure, not accelerate it. I agree. I absolutely agree. The short-term, thoughtless disposability of our world is clearly completely unsustainable, and we stand fundamentally and passionately against that. The human race is subject to the laws of nature. That is an irrefutable fact, and we have been behaving now, probably since the Industrial Revolution, but in particular in the last half a century, as though we are somehow a higher being and above the laws of nature. We are not. Those laws are biting back right now, I was only discussing at lunch with one of my colleagues today about the three metres of snow in Austria at the moment, where roofs have collapsed and whatever. That’s global warming. People say ‘Oh no, that can’t be global warming, it’s snow.’ That’s global warming, because we’ve been warned that it’s all about extremes of weather. That’s what global warming is causing. It has taken David Attenborough to remind us again and again of the perils of what we are doing, and we continue to ignore the advice. The United Nations has told us we’ve now got only 12 years to change our ways. I see next to no evidence that within 12 years we’re going to get anywhere near to the fundamental changes that we need to make. So that’s what we stand passionately against. Obviously, the laws of nature dictate balance, and we are upsetting that balance. It’s that simple. We’re taking billions of years of carbon stored beneath us and chucking it up there.
What does that stance mean for the business and how you operate?
We act with as much integrity as we possibly can and, dare I say it, with as much altruism as we possibly can. The whole edifice of capitalism is built upon a selfishness. As EF Schumacher said in 1973 in Small is Beautiful, an absolutely seminal work which demands reading and re-reading, he boiled it down to greed and envy.
“We’ve got to be brave enough to take a position and stand by it. Not everybody likes it. Vitsœ is not to everybody’s taste.”
That’s the root of our problems. Where possible, we stand against the consumption of resources. We use resources, make furniture that lasts as long as possible, then repair them and encourage people to value them. We know who we are, we know what we stand for. We’ve got to be brave enough to take a position and stand by it. Not everybody likes it. Vitsœ is not to everybody’s taste. We are, dare I say it, somewhat of a Marmite. Those who love us, once they understand us, wouldn’t change it for the rest of their lives. We are making furniture to a very high quality in the UK and selling it to customers around the world at a price they can afford because we are going directly to them. We have nobody in between us and the end user, and that’s fundamental to us. We don’t discount. Because the person who didn’t ask for a discount is subsidising the person who did ask for a discount. That’s not truthful; that’s not honest; that’s not respectful. We stand against that. Initially, people can be quite aggravated by that. But then customers come to respect that. We might lose some people at that point because we stand up for who we are – believers in honesty, respect and integrity – and many a time customers have said, ‘I really respect what you do there, even if it riled me initially when I couldn’t get a discount.’
What single piece of communication best exemplifies Vitsœ’s stance?
We have a campaign running at the moment with a quote from industrial designer Dieter Rams in 1976, from a speech he gave in New York, explaining that Vitsœ doesn’t make furniture for consumers, but for users. That ad is titled ‘Not For Consumers’, below a picture of the shelving system. Again, it’s meant to be challenging. Normally somewhere in our ads is a little bit of a challenge to the audience. Because you have to think to come into this world. Sometimes I’m asked who our customers are. I will say ‘they’re people who think beyond the end of their nose’. That’s a very important aspect for us, bringing in those people who just say ‘A-ha’; they want to engage. For the entire month of January every year we run our ‘No Sale’ campaign that fills the windows of our stores. It says ‘Sorry, no sale’. And that stops people in the street and they turn and look, and there’s an explanation of why we don’t have sales and why we don’t ever discount. We have previously closed our shops on Black Friday, to point out our opposition to a world that is constantly trying to stimulate short-term sales. We also send handwritten notes and cards to our customers to impress upon them that we are human beings who genuinely value a long-term relationship with our customers.
“I am absolutely passionate about having a belief and sticking to that belief. ”
What has been the biggest lesson from your experience of managing and leading Vitsœ?
The word that popped pretty quickly into my head is tenacity. I’m not particularly intellectually capable or gifted or anything like that, but I am tenacious. I am absolutely passionate about having a belief and sticking to that belief. Things are constantly thrown at you to throw you off course, and there have been any number of opportunities where I could have, probably should have, walked away from the difficulties. Running a business in a way that benefits wider society is difficult – rather than running a business in a totally selfish way, or for the benefit of a few at the expense of the planet. That’s a relatively easy way to run a business. What we are doing is difficult, and with that difficulty comes the need for great tenacity. When I asked Dieter Rams only a few months ago, as we were coming into Vitsœ’s 60th anniversary year, for his impressions, he said that what Vitsœ does is very challenging, and that’s been the absolute constant of the last 60 years. We are not ploughing an easy furrow.
