RDD Italia helps upholstered furniture companies adopt a design-to-cost approach with DesignConcept
Design office RDD Italia intervenes in the critical product development and prototyping phase providing hard-to-find, highly specialized technical talent in computer-aided drafting and virtual prototyping.
Upholstered furniture companies aim to manufacture profitably
To manufacture profitably, upholstered furniture companies must aggregate exacting production planning specifications. Essential to the process, product prototypes allow flaws to be corrected before production even begins. Although virtual prototyping offers the most cost-effective way to fine-tune designs, a labor shortage in Italy prevents companies from hiring these specialized talents.
Costing estimates to enable accurate, efficient production planning
Drawing on the advanced CAD/CAM capabilities of DesignConcept, RDD Italia provides digital product design and virtual prototyping services to upholstered furniture companies in the Murgian business cluster. The solution’s integrated costing capability enables RDD Italia to carry out costing estimates enabling accurate, efficient production planning.
Accurately calculating manufacturing costs to save time and resources
DesignConcept shortens production cycles for RDD Italia’s clients by accurately calculating manufacturing costs during the manufacturing industrialization phase, before negotiations with upholstery suppliers. This saves time and resources otherwise allocated to trial manufacturing runs.
RDD Italia
The Italian upholstered furniture industry is currently undergoing a critical shortage of virtual prototypists. RDD Italia was founded in 2020 to satisfy this need and help upholstered furniture companies benefit from digital design in the product development and prototyping phase.
RDD Italia serves the Murgian upholstered furniture cluster in the Bari-Matera region of southern Italy. In the 1950s, the local furniture industry was characterized by the production of traditional sofas and armchairs by skilled artisans. Manufacturing took on a different course altogether starting in the 1960s, when a local entrepreneur set out to produce leather-upholstered furniture on an industrial scale.
By the 1980s, rapid growth gave rise to a concentration of small and medium-sized companies that were to form the Murgian cluster. Today, as one of the world’s most prominent furniture-manufacturing clusters, Murge serves North America, Europe and Asia, with high demand in China.