Note Design Studio Launches Their Latest Product and a Disruptive Direct Sales Platform.

Note Editions premiers with the launch of Mallow Lounge Chair by Note Design Studio for Labofa.

Stockholm-based Note Design Studio is one of the most loved, prolific design studios working today, with a significant international following and an enviable history of collaboration with Europe’s leading design brands. Their furniture graces hotels, workspaces, restaurants and cafés around the world. But for those who fell in love with a Note design and wanted it in their own home, the purchasing process that ensured through a manufacturer or brand sales agent was complicated, protracted and not user friendly. However, things are changing.

Today Note introduces Note Editions – an online platform built to establish a connection between the design studio and users, providing direct access to limited-edition, early releases of their latest designs. Note Editions will allow people to order special signature editions of selected products at the moment they launch – and, for the first time, give Note a channel through which to speak and sell directly to their audience.

Note Editions has been conceived in response to the widespread cancellation of international design festivals caused by the Coronavirus pandemic. With Milan off the calendar, Note and the Danish furniture brand Labofa had nowhere to introduce their bold and cheeky new chair family, Mallow.

Note elected to take things in their own hand by launching their online platform, as a single-product digital design fair and online shop. The portal gives the public opportunity to buy a new design from the moment it’s released, rather than wait form months before the product makes its way through the producer’s manufacture and distribution network.

“Is this the right move? Who knows?,” says Cristiano Pigazzini, co-founder of Note Design Studio. “It’s something very different for us as a studio, and that sense of risk and discovery is important in everything we do. After the strangeness of the pandemic, we felt the need to move, rethink, and explore new possibilities. Everything started with a question of how other approaches might be necessary. We had long wanted our new collaborations to be more readily available. By launching Note Editions, we can now speak to everyone at the same time.”

Inspired by the approach taken by sport and fashion brands, where exclusive designs with special features, finishes or branding are launched to market for a limited time, every product showcased on Note Editions will include a unique element, such as a special-edition fabric or colour, and be supplied with a distinctive Note Editions tag. Orders can be placed at note-editions.se, and the product will be dispatched directly from the manufacturer, with the Note team handling all aspects of the sale, the delivery and the customer relationship. Those ordering within Sweden can expect their Note Edition to arrive within a week; international shipping will be available subject to the customs legislation of individual countries.

The inaugural Edition is a lounge chair from the Mallow family that Note designed in its first collaboration with Danish furniture brand Labofa. Plush, playful and inviting, the chair is formed from an arrangement of rounded forms that resemble a plush pile of marshmallows – and are every bit as enticing. Alongside its fun and floaty aesthetic, Mallow prioritises comfort and indulgence.

“Like a piece of couture, the proportions, angles and geometry of the chair are balanced in a way that just makes it look – and you feel – good! It’s as though you and the chair are in a beautiful symbiosis”, says Note’s Kristoffer Fagerström.

The online platform will be complemented by a new bricks-and-mortar showroom and event space that Note is set to open in late summer 2020. Located a few doors down from its studio in central Stockholm, the 50sqm space will allow people to discover Note Editions products in person, as well as giving Note a multifunctional venue to host special events, exhibitions and collaborations with global design brands.

What does this mean for Note and the industry?

The launch of Note Editions creates a plethora of new possibilities for the studio, closing the gap between designer and audience and making the pathway to purchase easier and more efficient. It can serve as both a sales channel and a campaign showcase, potentially as effective as a stand at a design fair, but with – arguably – even greater international reach.

The studio envisages that Note Editions could become the principal launch platform for as many as six products a year, as more of its collaborators come to see the advantages of working with a designer that can offer them use of its own consumer promotion and sales channel. For Note, it represents the first step in an exciting new direction – from leading design studio to global design brand.

[Images courtesy of Note Design Studio.]