Page 89 - Overthrow_Black&WhiteVersion

The building we are sitting in here, which has taken us about 30 years to design, is also about allowing more people to live better with less,
that lasts longer. When you boil it down, that’s the satisfaction that we give customers. That’s where the smile comes from. It doesn’t necessarily just come from a well-designed or functional shelf;
it comes from giving them something broader, wider, deeper in their life. That word ‘fulfilment’ is not far away.
Our customers have that sense of fulfilment,
and that’s something quite difficult to achieve.
Dr Nancy Bocken published a paper in 2014 in which we were included as a major case study, and in the summary of that paper, she wrote, ‘Vitsœ exemplifies sufficiency by actively striving to eliminate built-in obsolescence through its design and production systems, and consciously eschewing short-lived fashions or cycles.’ That’s an academic paper and we’ve had a lot of academics come and really pull us apart to see whether this was just clever marketing speak, in their words,
or something more profound.
Is that short-lived fashion cycle what Vitsœ actively stands against then?
Yuval Noah Harari writes in Homo Deus – and in Sapiens as well – that to attain real happiness, humans need to slow down the pursuit of pleasure, not accelerate it.
88 Enlightened Zagger