At a time when plenty of Gauteng-dwellers are semigrating south, Pedersen + Lennard is heading in the other direction. The Cape Town design company, which has been making furniture since 2008, has just opened a shiny new store on 6th Street in Parkhurst. It’s their first standalone Joburg shop.
If the name is new to you, think clean-lined wooden tables and cabinets, colourful steel chairs and stools, generous sofas and useful smaller pieces for the home. The Scandinavian influence is there, but so is a love of colour and playfulness. Everything is designed by Pedersen + Lennard and made at its factory in Maitland, Cape Town.
We spoke to co-founder Luke Pedersen, who was in the City of Gold for the opening, about furniture, manufacturing and the realities of running a design business in South Africa.
Joburg, though, isn’t new territory. “We’ve always had customers here,” says Pedersen, with around half the company’s online orders already heading to the city. He’s also a fan. “I love coming here. The energy, the hustle, the diversity. There’s something super nice about Joburg.”
But a shop reaches people who may never have come across Pedersen + Lennard online. Their first Jozi customer was one of them. She spotted the store while driving past, pulled over and came in. She’d never heard of the company.
Making their own jobs
Pedersen + Lennard started in 2008, but Luke Pedersen and James Lennard met a few years earlier while studying industrial design at Cape Tech. By the time they graduated, neither was having much luck finding work.
“We both needed jobs and I’d applied for every design job I could,” says Pedersen. “There were no jobs. The design sector now is a lot bigger than it was, but it’s still a small thing. So eventually we just decided we’ve got to make the job.”
The timing was hardly reassuring. The global financial crisis was unfolding and businesses around them were closing. But that also created opportunities. They picked up machinery from factories that were shutting down and, Pedersen says, learnt early on to grow carefully and slowly.
Working from a small workshop in Woodstock, the pair had their first real hit in 2009 with the Bucket Stool. It was pretty much what the name suggests: a galvanised steel bucket, powder-coated in bright colours, with curved birch legs and an upholstered cushion on top. The bucket was hand-hammered by a local artisan and even doubled as storage. More than 5,000 were sold, with the stools making their way to more than 20 countries and helping put Pedersen + Lennard on the international design map.
Do it yourself
At a time when so much of the furniture and homeware South Africans buy is imported from China, it’s refreshing to find a company still making its products here. For Pedersen + Lennard, bringing production in-house also made good business sense.
In the early years, much of the production was outsourced. “I spent my life on the phone basically begging suppliers to send us the goods and not be late,” says Pedersen. “It’s not a life you want to live.”
Today, around 50 people work in the Maitland factory, with another 20 in the office. Woodwork, metalwork and upholstery are all done in-house, giving the company greater control over quality, timing and costs.
Pedersen calls production the company’s biggest driver of growth, but it has also influenced the design. “When you see things being produced and you control that process, you see all the opportunity, you see all the waste.” Offcuts now become lamps, side tables, chopping boards and other smaller pieces. “It’s a precious resource; you’re paying a lot for it. If you can get more out of it, the business is going to grow.”
Don’t forget to design
Of course, a 70-person business comes with rather more than designing chairs. There are staff to manage, finances to watch and the everyday headaches of running a factory. Pedersen is particularly frustrated by government red tape and bargaining councils, which he says take up a huge amount of time and energy. Building a team and company culture has been another challenge. “If you told me this before, I wouldn’t have started the business because it’s crazy.”
An early mentor warned him: “The business is going to suck you in. You have to fight to stay creative. You have to fight to do the thing you love to do.”
Pedersen now makes a point of doing a small creative project every week, often alone in the workshop with his headphones on, no drawings and no particular purpose.
One of his favourite pieces is the Osaka Chair, which came after a trip to Japan and several years of thinking about an idea. One Friday afternoon, he went to an old manual Italian pipe-bending machine in the factory and simply started bending steel. No drawings. “I knew immediately; this is Osaka,” he says. “The simplicity of it, the playfulness, the colourfulness of it.”
What’s next?
The Joburg store may not be the last. Pedersen would like to open more, but not at any cost. “We don’t want to grow beyond ourselves. We want to stay who we are and keep doing the thing we love.”
They’ve had several offers to buy the business over the years, but for now they’re staying put. “It made me think, why are we still here? And the reason is we still love doing what we’re doing.”
For Pedersen, the next chapter is about giving the team more responsibility and freeing himself and Lennard to spend more time doing what started all this in the first place: designing.
