When Beat met Lukas: FluidSolids

Beat Karrer knows how to pay a compliment.

‘He gets shit done,’ says the seasoned Zurich designer and founder of game-changing material innovators FluidSolids of his fellow Swiss industrial designer Lukas Scherrer. Like creative, entrepreneurial brethren, but without any of the rivalry and psychodrama that you find in real families, Karrer and California-based Scherrer have, as commercially successful, company-owning designers in their own right, designed an ongoing, collaborative partnership that sees them cleverly cross-leverage their respective competencies and contact databases to maximum enterprising effect.

It all started when they were both invited to run student workshops at a Swiss university. ‘We both drove the students the same way,’ explains Scherrer, former senior designer at the Palo Alto office of international design consultancy IDEO and founder of SHIBULERU, a San Francisco design firm that innovates for high-profile start-ups and Fortune 500 clients. ‘We weren’t interested in them liking us, but learning something. I saw Beat putting the same pressure on his students and thought “Well, this is pretty compatible.”’

Joint jury stints for various design awards on both sides of the Atlantic followed, cementing their relationship and deepening their understanding of each other’s MO. What they identified in each other was not only the opportunity to pool their talent, business acumen and resources, but also to inspire and push each other, along the lines of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. ‘Every time we talk, it sounds like we’re bullshitting,’ says Scherrer. ‘“I’m going to build a factory.” But the next time I’m over in Switzerland, Beat has a factory!”

The factory in question is Karrer’s new, state-of-the-art FluidSolids research and production facility in Zurich, where he and his team of alchemist-materialists have developed a paradigm-shifting production technology – one that sees industrial by-products transformed via a specially developed, proprietary process into a high-performance, biobased and sustainable material. Intelligent plastic instead of landfill. Suitable for compression and injection moulding, as well as extrusion, Karrer’s FluidSolids lend form to both consumer products, such as furniture and electronics, as well as elements for construction.

In the spirit of their collaboration, FluidSolids’ new HQ also functions as a quasi-showroom for Scherrer’s work, its recent fit-out seeing his PIER office-furniture system for premium design manufacturer Vitra installed for Karrer’s young and dynamic team. It is, in effect, the first European presentation of Pier, which was launched stateside earlier in the year at NeoCon in Chicago and has already been specified by a large blue-chip client for their headquarters. For Vitra, of course, it’s an opportunity to align their brand with one of the most innovative start-ups about.

This is just one in a series of mutual leg-ups that the Swiss duo have given each other. For example, at last April’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, furniture brand Living Divani presented Scherrer’s super-rational Aero shelving system, designer and manufacturer having been introduced to one another by Karrer. Scherrer, meanwhile has connected Karrer to consumer-electronics clients in Silicon Valley, which has led to a number of exciting projects. ‘When I’m in the US, he opens the doors to clients,’ explains Karrer, ‘and when he’s in Europe I open the doors for him to lots of places in the furniture world.’ Each is able to offer the other local, cultural understanding, knowing in depth not only who the players are in their respective regions, but also the way in which business is done on the ground.

But Karrer and Scherrer don’t just talk to the talk. They walk the walk. Or, indeed, jump on a train. Or catch a plane. Like a road-trip buddy movie, they go where they see opportunities. Have passport, will travel. Scherrer explains: ‘With Beat, if we need to go somewhere, then we go somewhere. You have to invest. To go there, to talk about it, to get excited about it. Then people get excited about it. What doesn’t work is when you call someone and say “I’m that designer. I want to work with you. I’m awesome.” What works better is when you’re a team and introduce each other. It’s about credibility. People fly on holiday to the wildest places. We just fly on business to the wildest places.’

What clearly works well for the pair is the way they combine real smarts with a genuine desire to change things. Scherrer: ‘Our approach has always been “We’re in the area anyway. Why don’t we drop by? We’re designers, you’re designers. We’re not sales people, so we’re not going to sell you anything.”’ As a result of his ongoing collaboration with Karrer (‘Years of going to meetings with him’), for example, Scherrer, understanding the capabilities of his Zurich-based colleague’s materials technology, helped a California-based client of his to move from manufacturing its plastic parts in ABS to FluidSolids.

Such is the transformative potential of the wonder material – both in literal terms and those of the creative imagination – that it has pride of place in the San Francisco office of Switzerland’s international innovation platform, Swissnex. In the lobby, among such respected brands as Vitra, Ruckstuhl and Creation Baumann, you’ll find a book-shelving system fabricated entirely from FluidSolids. ‘Our collaboration with Beat Karrer and Lukas Scherrer is a prime example of how we like to work,’ says Swissnex Associate Director Sophie Lamparter. ‘We started collaborating in 2014 after Beat’s nomination for the Design Prize Switzerland, when we brought the awards exhibition over to Dwell on Design in LA, the largest design fair on the West Coast. It was great visibility for an innovative and design-driven Switzerland. Beat and Lukas are a major part of this.’

And this is what it’s all about. Two Swiss creatives sharing a platform. Indeed, each continually working to expand and elevate the platform for the other. What goes around, comes around. Call it karma. ‘Lukas and I, we both have a pretty big ego,’ admits Karrer. ‘But we’re old enough that it works very well to have these two egos side by side.’

Now, that’s how to get shit done.

© Architonic