Voxpop

Furniture designers Matthew Hilton, Terence Woodgate and Nazanin Kamali have each been given a 5 per cent stake in Case – the new joint venture between SCP’s Sheridan Coakley and Paul Newman. What benefits do you think this shared risk approach brings to the various parties?

A 5 per cent ownership doesn’t involve any risk worth mentioning – nobody is going to be losing any sleep (or indeed a house) over that. It’s really an incentive and, if the business takes off the way it seemed to be doing last week at SCP’s Milan tea party, there will be some quite happy furniture designers wandering around, which will make a change. They normally remind me of Morrissey.

Tim Pyne, Architect and creative director, 100% Design and The Boat Show

As an extension to the product specific confines of royalty agreements, this structure recognises the strategic contribution that design can make to brand development. A truly collaborative partnership benefits from the intelligence of all parties being brought to bear across the board, and, in this ‘case’, it seems wholly appropriate that the potential commercial success should be shared as well.

Tom Lloyd, Director, Pearson Lloyd

I think it’s a good idea for designers to share directly in the success or otherwise of the companies their creative ideas help to shape. The traditional design business model of charging for time plus costs is feeling its age. Relating risk and reward is one of the new ways to go. Even part-ownership makes designers think more responsibly about what they are proposing.

Jeremy Myerson, Director of innovation, Royal College of Art

I am very enthusiastic about this type of new thinking. Its high time that manufacturers, distributors and designers find original ways of collaborating and, in my own design life, I have come to the same conclusion that the only way to go forward is through an embedded partnership with a sharing of the risk and then, if you are lucky, talented or work hard you will get a proper share of the profit. So my hat is off to Sheridan and Paul for being innovative in business and, given the strength of the collection that we saw in Milan, it seems to have inspired the designers too. Good Luck.

Tom Dixon, Creative director, Artek, Habitat and Tom Dixon