What is this "Klevr Furniture" you ask?
23 - Jan 23, 2015
There really is a connection between my software and this furniture, so here goes…
I learned to program BASIC on a TRS-80 Model 1 when it first came to market in the late 70s (I think I was eleven), so computer programming is something that grabbed my attention at an early age. As a result, I've learned to develop software through life and work experience rather than solely through formal computer science education. And because my experience has been in chronological sync with the birth and growth of the personal computer industry, I've been able to learn and mature at its pace rather than being dumped present-day into something massively overwhelming without knowing how we got here. Also, because this experience happened over a long time period, it has allowed me to learn and get rather proficient in a wealth of languages including BASIC, Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, Objective-C plus a number of common web development languages.
When I met my first Mac Plus in college, it really intrigued me. When I started working in 1988 on a Mac II with a 19" SuperMac 24-bit color display, I was hooked. It took me a couple more years to go from just using the Mac to beginning to develop things I needed for my own use, and the introduction of System 7 marked the formal beginning of my Mac development career as bergdesign. Since then, I've been writing tools for my own use and polishing them into finished apps for sale to others. And regardless of how you feel about software patents, a colleague and I have come up with a few really novel inventions that we've patented and released, including SuperCal and Maskerade.
So that's the software part. Now for the furniture part.
My formal college education was in mechanical engineering, but I veered off into industrial design shortly after graduating because I always loved architecture and design and the right-brained part of me needed an outlet. This steered me away from fluid and thermodynamics and into consumer product design where I could channel my creativity and apply my mechanical design and computer programming skills to the blossoming field of electronic consumer products.
Fast forward to 1999. I started a company called Stick Networks with four other friends to design and manufacture a very smart hand-held electronic device that would be very different from the Palm Pilots and Windows CE devices on the market at the time. This was no dumb terminal with a web browser, but rather a wickedly cool handheld device using Macromedia Flash for its entire user interface (remember that this is when Flash was still cool and not the current-day piece of crap that it is) that was wirelessly connected to a very smart back-end server via the CDPD network. This needs to be a post in itself for another day.
Because Stick Networks was a start-up with limited funds that needed to use them wisely, I used some after-work time and a friend's CNC router to prototype a wood desk that we could build cheaply. This desk was designed to use baltic birch plywood with tab and slot joinery that could be cut on the CNC router, eliminating the need for fasteners of any kind. We could make a dozen of the desks and store them compactly in a small closet until we hired a new employee and needed to set up a new workspace for him or her. The design was pretty cool in that it was modular so we could set up small workgroups, it provided some privacy with back panels that went from the desktop to the floor to hide clutter, yet it still gave us a nice open environment without cubicle walls isolating everyone.
We had a lot of traffic in our office over the two years that Stick Networks existed, so I put up a website and offered the desks for sale as an after-hours business which I called "Legare". Ultimately, Stick Networks didn't survive due to a really tough economic environment (this was 2001, so we experienced the unforeseen 9/11 disaster in addition to the dot-com fallout), but Legare kept me afloat. In 2003, I was approached by two individuals that would become my business partners for the next ten years and grow Legare Furniture to a successful international business.
Fast forward to late 2013. Legare Furniture was profitable, but ten years of doing the same thing was taking its toll on us. We were growing weary of constantly adding to our product selection and customizing things for increasingly demanding wholesale customers, and I was worn out by the everyday tasks that kept distracting me from focusing on product design. As a result, we had the opportunity to sell Legare to a synergistic company and we exited the company in January of 2014.
I spent most of 2014 focusing on my Mac apps, bringing them up to date and beginning some new apps that I had penciled into my sketchbook over time. It has been a good distraction from the furniture business and it has given me time to think about product design again with a clear head. Now I want to use what I've learned over the previous fourteen years in the furniture business to design and manufacture some new furniture concepts right here in the USA more cost effectively and with far less overhead than we could before.
So Klevr Furniture is a rekindling of my product design passion. The Klevr Lego Table is something I designed for my two little boys, Max and Charlie. Charlie has Duplo in one table, Max has Lego in another, and we rarely step on Lego anymore as a result (subliminal sales hint there, in case you missed it). The Storage-Top Desk is a variant of that Lego Table that I designed for my own use. Plus I have a number of other neat ideas to turn into finished Klevr products soon.
I hope you like the products as much as I do, and don't hesitate to share your opinions with me. I'd really like Klevr's designs to evolve much like software apps do, because the furniture manufacturing process can be responsive much like software bug fixes, so your feedback might mean you get version 1.1 of a product instead of 1.0.
Brock Brandenberg
I learned to program BASIC on a TRS-80 Model 1 when it first came to market in the late 70s (I think I was eleven), so computer programming is something that grabbed my attention at an early age. As a result, I've learned to develop software through life and work experience rather than solely through formal computer science education. And because my experience has been in chronological sync with the birth and growth of the personal computer industry, I've been able to learn and mature at its pace rather than being dumped present-day into something massively overwhelming without knowing how we got here. Also, because this experience happened over a long time period, it has allowed me to learn and get rather proficient in a wealth of languages including BASIC, Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, Objective-C plus a number of common web development languages.
When I met my first Mac Plus in college, it really intrigued me. When I started working in 1988 on a Mac II with a 19" SuperMac 24-bit color display, I was hooked. It took me a couple more years to go from just using the Mac to beginning to develop things I needed for my own use, and the introduction of System 7 marked the formal beginning of my Mac development career as bergdesign. Since then, I've been writing tools for my own use and polishing them into finished apps for sale to others. And regardless of how you feel about software patents, a colleague and I have come up with a few really novel inventions that we've patented and released, including SuperCal and Maskerade.
So that's the software part. Now for the furniture part.
My formal college education was in mechanical engineering, but I veered off into industrial design shortly after graduating because I always loved architecture and design and the right-brained part of me needed an outlet. This steered me away from fluid and thermodynamics and into consumer product design where I could channel my creativity and apply my mechanical design and computer programming skills to the blossoming field of electronic consumer products.
Fast forward to 1999. I started a company called Stick Networks with four other friends to design and manufacture a very smart hand-held electronic device that would be very different from the Palm Pilots and Windows CE devices on the market at the time. This was no dumb terminal with a web browser, but rather a wickedly cool handheld device using Macromedia Flash for its entire user interface (remember that this is when Flash was still cool and not the current-day piece of crap that it is) that was wirelessly connected to a very smart back-end server via the CDPD network. This needs to be a post in itself for another day.
Because Stick Networks was a start-up with limited funds that needed to use them wisely, I used some after-work time and a friend's CNC router to prototype a wood desk that we could build cheaply. This desk was designed to use baltic birch plywood with tab and slot joinery that could be cut on the CNC router, eliminating the need for fasteners of any kind. We could make a dozen of the desks and store them compactly in a small closet until we hired a new employee and needed to set up a new workspace for him or her. The design was pretty cool in that it was modular so we could set up small workgroups, it provided some privacy with back panels that went from the desktop to the floor to hide clutter, yet it still gave us a nice open environment without cubicle walls isolating everyone.
We had a lot of traffic in our office over the two years that Stick Networks existed, so I put up a website and offered the desks for sale as an after-hours business which I called "Legare". Ultimately, Stick Networks didn't survive due to a really tough economic environment (this was 2001, so we experienced the unforeseen 9/11 disaster in addition to the dot-com fallout), but Legare kept me afloat. In 2003, I was approached by two individuals that would become my business partners for the next ten years and grow Legare Furniture to a successful international business.
Fast forward to late 2013. Legare Furniture was profitable, but ten years of doing the same thing was taking its toll on us. We were growing weary of constantly adding to our product selection and customizing things for increasingly demanding wholesale customers, and I was worn out by the everyday tasks that kept distracting me from focusing on product design. As a result, we had the opportunity to sell Legare to a synergistic company and we exited the company in January of 2014.
I spent most of 2014 focusing on my Mac apps, bringing them up to date and beginning some new apps that I had penciled into my sketchbook over time. It has been a good distraction from the furniture business and it has given me time to think about product design again with a clear head. Now I want to use what I've learned over the previous fourteen years in the furniture business to design and manufacture some new furniture concepts right here in the USA more cost effectively and with far less overhead than we could before.
So Klevr Furniture is a rekindling of my product design passion. The Klevr Lego Table is something I designed for my two little boys, Max and Charlie. Charlie has Duplo in one table, Max has Lego in another, and we rarely step on Lego anymore as a result (subliminal sales hint there, in case you missed it). The Storage-Top Desk is a variant of that Lego Table that I designed for my own use. Plus I have a number of other neat ideas to turn into finished Klevr products soon.
I hope you like the products as much as I do, and don't hesitate to share your opinions with me. I'd really like Klevr's designs to evolve much like software apps do, because the furniture manufacturing process can be responsive much like software bug fixes, so your feedback might mean you get version 1.1 of a product instead of 1.0.
Brock Brandenberg