O V E R V I E W

A start-up eyewear company Dresden Vision, makes affordable prescription eyewear created from recycled materials. They wanted to deliver a new experience in Australia for how people bought glasses.

Their idea was to make a mobile caravan store that would bring the product to their customers in a unique way that drove interest and exposure.

Dresden wanted to work with us because we specialised in the product Reboard, a 100% recyclable engineered paper board. With sustainability at its core, Reboard was the perfect material to manufacture the furniture in the Dresden mobile store.

R O L E

Industrial Designer

Reboard design, structural design, prototyping, testing, manufacturing supervision & project management.

C O L L A B O R A T I O N

Alexander Symes Architects - Caravan design.

Paramount Property Group - Caravan build.

2 0 1 5 - 2 0 1 6

B R I E F A N D C H A L L E N G E S

Reboard furniture I designed housed eyewear stock, lenses, product packaging, cash register, EFTPOS machine and even a plastic recycling/moulding machine that melted plastic into frames at the site.

All of the larger elements had to be on wheels to allow staff to easily move them together and strap them down during transport. This together with the combined weight of the product gave me a lot of challenges.

I spent a lot of time trying to work out the best way to make these units stronger, with minimal material to keep the total weight light.

I also gave a lot of consideration to how these units would be built by our production team step by step, how to make it easier for them and not to make mistakes along the way.

R E F L E C T I O N

Although the Reboard furniture looked great in the mobile caravan, the client loved them so much that they continued to create more furniture with us long after this project. I feel that there could have been a better solution.

Reboard is a great product but does not support long term use, especially when they are constantly being moved around and the draws being opened and closed. This became evident with the repairs we needed to make 6 months down the track.

I felt that the overall project was a success, but there were a lot of things I learned from this project, such as foresight into the product usage down the line, educating the client on what is realistic against their wishes, true cost of repairing a product and how people will interact with your product.

Dresden has grown much bigger now and currently has 14 stores in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.