In our Participate series and in so much of our point of view, we look into the culture at large to understand how to design thoughtful products and continually improve outcomes for our customers. We believe a fundamental way to move that needle is to invite the active participation of the design community, which results in a more customized — and ultimately more meaningful — product for you.
We’ve developed capabilities with both digital tools and personal concierge services that allow you to work with us earlier in the design process, so that you can personalize your products. Then we deliver them with expertise, convenience and efficiency to save you time, and we shoulder complicated logistics so that you don’t have to. In the process, we get to know you and anticipate what works as you create the next great spaces that inspire great work.
This is our part of participation — to be as responsive as possible. And this responsiveness has two important dimensions that we focus on: the present and the future. We partner with you to provide a seamless and unmatched experience during your project. And we envision where our customers’ evolving needs are headed so that we can help define how new generations of work will shape modern culture.
We’re driven to look forward in both of these areas because we believe that’s the place where the best work is generated.
Responsiveness in any discipline is first and foremost about providing the most thoughtful and tailored reply to any request. This is oftentimes about not just the product but the delivery, in both real and reaction time.
A web-based retailer might earn loyalty by sharing free or fast-track shipping, or by always having friendly human beings available on a customer service phone line. Hotels, airlines and restaurants all respond well by documenting client preferences, so that we are treated as a familiar visitor and prompted to a more custom experience with less onboarding time. Your neighborhood barista, for example, is likely to know you and start your drink when she sees you in line, which saves you time and genuinely enhances your purchase. These are all things we learn from consumer culture that can have strong echoes in the commercial design world.
Customer care is paramount. It’s valuable, it’s measurable and it’s intended to be enjoyable.
For us, responsiveness means we always look for the highest order solution — to not only react quickly to the specifics of any request, but more so, to proactively build customized knowledge of your needs and tastes into all the ways we can deliver on our products. That forms tighter bonds, which in turn enhances our participation together on your project.
The most valuable commodity on earth today is time. The busier we are and the more encompassing our work lives have become, the greater the demands on our time; and this perpetual time crunch can lead to stress, mistakes and even loss of competitive advantage. Therefore, we do a lot of our work to help people save time — with substance. We try to bring speed, accuracy, convenience and enjoyment to all the steps in the relationship with us, from presentation to inquiry to sample to ordering to production — so that your experience with Coalesse is as complete and responsive as the products we design.
At the Coalesse Studio in San Francisco, we get to shape our thinking by participating in one of the most vital cultural, natural and technological hubs in the world. We use those experiences, with a pioneering spirit, as inspiration for what’s next and new in the mix of crafted and high-tech ideas that go into our furniture.
This type of responsiveness goes beyond the metrics of real-time service. It involves cultivating an empathy for and about the future that requires a different lens and time signature. We don’t only design for now, or for here. We design for five years out and think about the many years after, for the global marketplace, for longevity, but also for innovations and habits that we can merely predict today.
We connect the dots and see emerging patterns. We listen and we translate subtle signals that could influence future events. These outliers can be indicators of what’s to come and we spend our time finding them.
Then we design, experiment, prototype, take risks and bring new things to market, with a combination of leadership and a leap of faith.
Our point of view is to look forward and invent. We stay ahead of the curve so that what we design and how we engage in producing it, will define the next need and be ready for the one after that.
As the world grows continually more nimble, connected and creative, so must our products. That’s the future of our work, and of the workplaces we want to help you make possible.
