Strength in Numbers – Bisley’s Brand Partnerships and Designer Collaborations
Written by Robin Bayliss, Group Sales Director at British heritage office furniture manufacturer, Bisley.
Over the years Bisley has worked with a number of other brands and designers in order to access fresh and innovative ideas so brilliantly demonstrated by firms that we admire, thereby adding product lines to our portfolio that we would have otherwise been unable to deliver on our own.
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Our brand partnerships and designer collaborations are often some of the most exciting projects that we work on as a company. So not only are we achieving the ultimate goal of delivering a diverse and innovative range of products to our customers, but we are also learning a lot and having a lot of fun in the process.
Ultimately, it’s about maintaining our freshness and allure to consumers, but from a practical perspective, collaborations are also an efficient way to upscale and diversify product lines, without investing millions in new machinery and factories.
In terms of our brand partnerships, in recent years we have partnered with Moving Walls, a family-run company based in Lucerne, Switzerland whose vision of creating spaces for collaboration and problem-solving led to the development of the Moving Walls writeable office tools system, which interconnects to build upon the workspace, enabling a more efficient use of space in innovation, workshop, focus or teaming spaces.
British furniture brand Deadgood are constantly pursuing their mission to challenge the preconceived conceptions of what a commercial furniture brand should look like. I have long admired their work and so Bisley and Deadgood started working together. Bisley now has the exclusive distribution rights to Deadgood products in North America, Ireland and The Netherlands.
In 2019 a short while before the onset of the pandemic, Bisley also partnered with Finnish firm Vetrospace, who manufacture unique soundproof meeting pods and phone booths that incorporate critical health technology, including anti-microbial lighting, anti-viral nano-coating and clean-air ventilation, designed to create peaceful and healthy working environments.
And most recently, Bisley has also collaborated with iconic British lighting brand, Anglepoise, to develop a new office furniture collection, known as Quarters, designed to meet the evolving needs of the post-Covid workplace.
All of these brand partnerships brought something to Bisley that we didn’t already possess and couldn’t easily create ourselves. Nor would we wish to when there are companies out there already doing such incredible work in their own space.
And beyond brand partnerships Bisley has also worked with some fantastic designers on some special collaborations as well, the results of which are exclusive to Bisley – our BOB and Bridge collections.
BOB by Bisley is a beautifully hand-crafted magnetic, modular storage and display system that lets you click, twist and rethink your space. The vision of award-winning designer, Paul Kelley, who worked in collaboration with Bisley’s designers, each BOB unit is secured together with a simple magnetic system, resulting in an effortlessly changeable system.
Bridge by Bisley is a modern credenza that brings together storage, stowage and room division in one system. Inspired by the traditional meeting room credenza, but re-imagined for the contemporary office, the concept of Bridge was kept deliberately simple, and was the work of Craig Jones from Jones & Partners, who when collaborating with Bisley’s in-house design team, followed a ‘less is more’ brief, ensuring the design was modest yet still injected with style and charm.
By working with designers like Paul Kelley and Craig Jones on the BOB and Bridge collections, we brought talent and a fresh eye to our team from industry recognised designers. And while it could be argued that our own very talented in-house design team have a proven track record of delivering collections that we are immensely proud of, I firmly believe that maintaining an outwards facing gaze on the wider industry can only be beneficial to creativity and innovation in the long run.
For more information: www.bisley.com
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