A new model of business: Laker Studio and the Continental Shelf

With COVID-19 the spur two industrial designers needed to finally get a joint business off the ground, the pair have pooled their talents and produced a uniquely innovative product.

David Caon and Henry Wilson. Picture: Nick Cubbin

Pivoting – the ability to quickly change the direction of your business when the market no longer needs the products you’re making – might be one of the most over-used buzzwords of the COVID-19 pandemic. For industrial designers David Caon and Henry Wilson, however, the shift in attention was less of an about-turn and more a case of bringing something that was on the backburner to the fore.

The pair, who have their own separate design practices, had been working on a concept for a business they could launch together – one day. In the end it was the unexpected take-off in working from home and the halting of international travel that transformed their dream into a reality.

The Continental Shelf.

Caon was mentored by the Australian designer Marc Newson and worked in Newson’s Paris design studio for four years for such clients as Qantas, Dom Perignon and Samsonite. In 2009 he established his own design practice, Caon Studio, in Sydney, and started working for Qantas in his own right. He designed the interiors of the airline’s 787-9 Dreamliner, lounges in Singapore and Perth and a refresh of the fleet’s A380s, and was deep into working on Qantas’s Project Sunrise – the company’s bold plan to run non-stop flights from Sydney and Melbourne to London, New York and Paris – when the world went into lockdown. In an interview with WISH in 2016, Caon told writer Jeni Porter that the national carrier made up the bulk of his studio’s output.

The Continental Shelf.

“Certainly, my work with Qantas quietened down given the effect the pandemic has had on that business,” says Caon. “But it has given me the opportunity, well actually it’s given me a void of time, where I can put more energy into something new that Henry and I had been talking about for three or four years. I just suddenly had the space to put more energy into this and that really allowed us to develop the idea much faster.”

For Wilson, it wasn’t that he suddenly had a lot of time on his hands but that his hands wanted to get back to the thing he does best: designing objects. Wilson established his own design studio in Sydney in 2012 after completing his Masters at the Design Academy Eindhoven in The Netherlands. He has designed furniture and products such as lighting and accessories as well as the interior of two stores for Aesop (and other products for the Australian beauty brand). Despite the introduction of Wilson’s revolutionary A-Joint table system in recent years, his work has moved away from furniture and has been focused on the smaller items cast in bronze, aluminium and brass or carved from stone, such as hooks, handles, light fittings and home accessories, which he sells directly and through select stockists, and ships all over the world.

The metal rail is fixed to a wall.

“I felt that my practice had become very much about casting and stones and that sort of thing, and that’s all very well and good but things creep up on you and I was spending more time managing stockists overseas and sales and transportation,” says Wilson. “The business for me had become a kind of logistics business and it was very hard to find time to design. So, doing something with David was a nice way to use some of the know-how from his office – a much more design-focused business than mine had become. Working together was really about creating a product together and that just evolved into a bigger idea.”

The idea the pair they had been working on in the background for a few years is a modular shelving system that consists of a number of components designed to attach into a metal rail that is fixed to a wall. “The shelving thing came from the idea that we’ve all lived in rented houses, and having a knowledge of building and having done renovations and knowing how expensive things like joinery are,” says Wilson. “There was a desire to make something that you could add to with different elements and expand, and also take it with you when you leave, which is an alternative to just doing cheaply made built-ins everywhere. People often ditch the built-in joinery when they move home, leaving it to the next people as part of the permanent fixtures and fittings.”

Wilson’s A-Joint design

When the pandemic hit, Caon and Wilson figured the new work from home age would be a good test of their shelving product’s flexibility – its unique point of difference. There are similar shelving systems on the market, something the pair readily acknowledge, but their product, the Continental Shelf, has a wider array of configurations and possibilities. “Our point of difference,” says Wilson, “is that we have elevated the concept. We don’t use Laminex, we use real wood veneers, and we do a slightly more sophisticated colour palette than just black or white. We wanted to move away from that purely industrial looking, utilitarian style and make it something a bit softer that could work in a home or a workplace.”

An example of the product’s adaptability is the last-minute addition of a desk to the list of possible components. “The desk wasn’t really a part of the thinking at the beginning to be honest, but then with the whole work from home thing we thought a clip-on desk would make the concept a lot more versatile,” says Wilson. “You can clip off the desk and slide it under a bed and then you’ve got a really nice credenza that would be suitable to put your television on or whatever you like. We hit on the idea of it being so much more than shelving; it could have all these features that you can put on or take off and reconfigure.”

Wilson’s A-Joint design

The shelving system, according to Caon and Wilson, can be just as easily used in commercial or industrial settings as in residential ones. As if to prove the point, Wilson recently undertook a major renovation and extension of his house cum studio in Sydney’s Darlinghurst, by architect Brad Swartz, which showcases the many uses of the Continental Shelf system. The street frontage of the terrace house is home to design offices for both Wilson and Caon on the top level, and a showroom for their new joint venture on the ground floor. Through a small courtyard is Wilson’s spectacular and finely detailed new three-storey residence. The ground floor houses his workshop, the middle level his bedroom and office, and on the top floor is the living and dining space.

Says Caon: “If you look at it [Wilson’s residence], downstairs in the workshop it’s literally just the metal shelving directly onto the wall and in that sense the shelving system becomes very technical, which is a great thing for a space like that. But then you go upstairs to Henry’s office and it looks completely different. It’s much more refined and even has a cocktail bar component with a polished brass front.”

“People often think it’s a different product,” says Wilson. “It’s really a bit of a chameleon in a sense and it does strike a good balance across those different types of spaces.”

The Continental Shelf system is just the first in what Caon and Wilson hope will be an ever-expanding line of products, so they formed a company and gave it a name that wasn’t their own. They called it Laker Studio. “We searched for ages for a name and there is no real significance to this one. We knew we didn’t want to use our own names and a lot of names we came up with in the beginning we eventually forgot, but Laker seemed to stick. And we liked the way it looked and sounded,” says Caon.

One of the reasons for not using their own names is the pair plan to invite other designers to create products for the Laker business. “Normally it goes the other way – we get asked to design things for companies overseas – but we thought it would be interesting for us to bring that here,” says Caon. “People we have maybe worked with in the past or friends of ours from overseas could potentially be interested in doing something for an Australian brand and I think that would be a unique proposition for some designers.”

The cocktail bar component of the Continental Shelf

About 90 per cent of the Laker shelving system is made in Australia, with a limited amount of componentry sourced from Asia. Some items are kept in stock, but the average lead time is about six weeks, according to Wilson and Caon. In Australia Laker is available through Living Edge. From a sales point of view the pair is looking beyond the local market. “I don’t think we will limit ourselves to the Australian market and that might influence what happens to the manufacturing eventually,” says Caon. “They could be made in Europe for a European market and in Australia for the Australian market, which would make a lot of sense from an environmental point of view with the transport, and also from a business point of view.”

At launch the pair have also decided to include Wilson’s A-Joint design under the Laker brand, as well as a timber stacking chair called Rake. The A-Joint is a multi-use table joinery system that can work in numerous configurations. The A-Joint is made in either bronze or aluminium and supports the tabletop while simultaneously securing the legs, which slot into it. The top or legs can be replaced as often as you desire, without needing to change the joint.

“It made sense to roll in other projects such as the A-Joint,” says Wilson. “That product is something that I have been doing for a long time and it had just stagnated in my own practice because it requires a lot of back-end infrastructure to have it working really well. It’s a furniture system and it doesn’t really fit with a lot of the other things I’m doing in my own brand now, but it made sense for it to be part of Laker.” Adds Caon, “We’ve also been able to take things that we were doing with the shelf system and develop new products and accessories for the A-Joint. So those two systems now are sort of working together and in the process we’ve created a new ecosystem for new products to come into.”

Wilson says his and Caon’s skills complement each other perfectly. “I come at things from more of an art practice, while David sees things from a more industrial design perspective,” says Wilson. But for both of them, being their own client is where the fun comes into it. “Taking a product that we self-initialised and then have Henry and I working on it together as joint creatives is something that is quite refreshing for me. Taking my process and Henry’s process and putting them together and producing our own product – for us that was a totally new undertaking and really just a breath of fresh air.”