Extraordinary products require courage - and lots of team work

Together with Haugaard Company Ocee & Four Design pursues a bold design philosophy to ensure that products never get lost in the crowd

An aha experience

“The functionality and design must of course be of the highest quality, but our products must also stand out from the crowd with an aha experience that gives the user a little something extra”
Christina BaagøeProduct Design Manager

‘We turn good spaces into great experiences’

With almost a century of history the furniture from Ocee & Four Design has already provided backs, seats, and tabletops for many great experiences and important decisions throughout Europe, and today that trend is boosted in close team work with Haugaard Company.

To ensure that products never get lost in the crowd, Ocee & Four Design pursues a bold design philosophy, which forms the backbone of the overall production.

“We have a very firm goal that all furniture must meet our ‘FDA’ requirements before they can be realized. F stands for Function, D stands for Design, and finally A stands for Aha. And that should remind us, that the functionality and design must of course be of the highest quality, but our products must also stand out from the crowd with an aha experience that gives the user a little something extra,” says Product Design Manager Christina Baagøe and demonstrates how, for example, you can sit comfortably on the company’s newly designed SHARE chair, regardless of which way the backrest faces.

In the same way, all Ocee & Four Design’s other products are imbued with a desire to bring original ideas in a way that in one way or another gives a little extra:

“Our design is comfortable, and you could say that it is more homely than that of many other manufacturers, and it also plays well into the fact that the trend after Corona has become much more ‘home away from home’. It also fits well with our roots, where we mix the eclectic with the minimalist, Scandinavian design. Our motto is ‘We turn good spaces into great experiences’, and Haugaard Company helps us to lift that part.”

Lots of tests and close teamwork

The requirement to deliver something special also means that the engineers at Ocee & Four Designs don’t just rely on calculators. Before tables, chairs, and other products end up in their final places, a process takes place that includes, among other things, numerous test designs, and in this context, the company has a close dialogue with Haugaard Company, which also produces more series from Ocee & Four Design.

“Our collaboration with Haugaard goes back many years, and therefore they also know our DNA. We have had a close dialogue through the development phase, and more than once they have come up with suggestions for improvement. It can be about specific things like the strength of a weld or the angle of the legs, but it can also be a prototype that allows us to test the durability in our own test laboratory, and that way, the partnership really gives us a big win,” says Palle Jørgensen, Quality & Product Testing Specialist at Ocee & Four Design.

“One of our latest joint projects has been a new steel construction for a table, where we previously glued the table top on, but because Haugaard has introduced a new tube laser, we can now produce the table in a way that means it can be taken apart if it needs to be repaired or if you want to replace the tabletop, and there is also an important environmental aspect to that,” Palle Jørgensen further states.

Overall knowledge and production are a plus

The partnership between Ocee & Four Designs and Haugaard Company has been going on for years and since 2021 collaboration has also included producing, assembly, and distribution of several products from Haugaard Company’s factory in Jelgava, Latvia.

According to Christina Baagøe, that change has also been significant for the design process, as knowledge about the products is now gathered in a few places.

“It is a huge gain for us that we see design from several perspectives. It could be how furniture is made to pass the requirements in our durability tests, but it can also be small adjustments to optimize the production or to make the products quicker to assemble,” says Christina Baagøe.

New design with lots of recycling

The latest addition to the joint productions is the chair with the very appropriate name SHARE, where Ocee & Four Design launched their first so-called split-back chair, where the back and seat are different parts, which gives a different expression compared to chairs, where the seat and back are combined in one shell.

And with the SHARE chair, the collaboration with the engineers at Haugaard has again been close from the first sketch to the final assembly of the first chair – not least because there are great wishes for sustainability.

“Our new chair uses technology from the previous models, but because we will use pure plastic without fiberglass, the frame must also be stronger. It has required a lot of testing along the way but now we can say that the four-legged version is 100% recyclable and, on its way, to being Eco-labelled,” says Christina Baagøe, who has no doubts that the partnership provides a bonus:

“We share a common professional pride that makes the collaboration itself more fun and rewarding, and at the same time we get better products.”