Thoughts #1

L: I’ll just launch into question number one. The company is called Frontal Lobe. What was the reasoning behind the name? 

B: When I initially left my design engineering job, the thought was that we’d be a little bit of a design house for developing other people’s ideas, and I was kind of playing around with ideas like ’think tank’ but they all felt a little bit cliche. One night I was looking at a schematic of the human brain for inspiration and I saw ‘frontal lobe’, I was like, that’s kind of rad. I did a little bit more digging and it’s this space in your brain where the creative process happens – we thought, actually that’s a great fit! I threw it around friends and family and everyone loved it. We have a lot of people that comment on it now – our actual workspace has now become affectionately known as ‘The Lobe’.

L: It’s quite hard for SEO because when I Google ‘frontal lobe’, there are lots of medical websites pop up. 

B: All our competitors are brain surgeons!

L: Tell me a little bit more about how Frontal Lobe does business and how you try to show integrity in your business.

B: I guess you need to understand a little bit the back story of where I was working. It was a cool little company – a neat community of people working together. Then it was bought out by a big international company, and became this thing that was entirely profit driven. I’d been on a journey parallel to that of questioning business and what it existed for. To see the stark contrast of how I was more and more thinking and this money driven model was the last straw in me going, no, I think I have to create my own thing. So yeah, I looked at how, I guess, traditional business is done and it’s very much profit driven and decided that actually at the bottom of it all people matter more than profit, That is our driving ethos. If we broke our values down we’d say our number one value at Frontal Lobe is relationships. That’s with our workers and the others that share the facilities at The Lobe, with the community that we’re located in, with our clients, our suppliers, our families – businesses have a lot of connections and they are the most important thing to us. 

L: That’s definitely mirrored in the types of people in the Lobe and the types of clients that you have, and I know now that I have, working in this building. I think that positivity and goodwill and that way of doing business really does attract the same in turn. And it’s cool that you have those values and then they’re now being reflected so strongly in the environment. In terms of suppliers, obviously those relationships are so important. What are your relationships like with the local manufacturers in the area and how strongly does local sourcing play into your supply chain? 

B: Yeah, we always try to stay local and the closer the better! So even within Christchurch we try to stay within Sydenham, and for the most part we can. This is a cool little neighbourhood and it’s amazing who lurks in the side streets. So one of our engineers is a block away, our powder coated is walking distance, and so is our upholsterer. Our suppliers are pretty much all within a 10 minutes drive. I think it’s important for lots of reasons. I mean, it’s great for just pure convenience if we need anything, but I think it’s actually just really neat to all be growing each other’s little businesses. It creates far more of a community vibe to what everyone’s doing.

We’re invested in seeing each other succeed.

L: The modern consumer, especially in the designer end of the market, demands a lot of transparency around the sourcing of the products that they’re buying. How do you ensure that you’re honouring ethical supply chains for your products?

B: It is very important to us that our materials are ethically sourced and of super high quality. At a real fundamental level we’re furniture makers, so our products generally have timber in them – that would be our core product, and there are some pretty good international certification networks now to ensure that the products we use have been sourced ethically right through their supply chain. Where we can, we still use local materials. We’ve just connected with a great local leather supplier – so we know right from the source where that leather’s come from, and who we’re dealing with. I guess the shorter the supply chain too, the easier it is for us to be sure where it’s coming from, and that it is being ethically sourced. By trying to keep it local as much as possible, that supply chain is as short as possible, which is great. 

L: We see a lot of fast furniture stores around at the moment. What is the Frontal Lobe vision for building a long-term furniture brand that is an advocate for quality and intergenerational use and value? 

B: We are, I guess, higher end and higher value – which comes as a result of locally producing high quality, low volume products with quality materials, but I would love to think that we are accessible to the mid-market. I think some of it’s just reprogramming our way of thinking around how quickly we need something. We’ve become super used to thinking, ‘I need a new couch – let’s go to the furniture store this weekend.’ Right? 

L: Yeah, right.

B: I don’t think too many people think, ‘We need a new couch – let’s start saving so we can buy a high quality couch that will last for years and years.’ We want everything right now and it’s a relatively new phenomenon. So I think we can relearn again that actually to maybe save a little, or to postpone a purchase in order to buy a higher quality locally made product that will last substantially longer, in the end, makes far more economic and environmental sense. I remember, as a kid, paying off a layby on a guitar that I loved – it took me a year but man was it sweet when I finally got to collect it! Does that answer your question?

L: Yeah I think so, that was good.