Growth through partnerships and design methods in Blindes Work

Co-creation as a tool for transformation

In the social economic enterprise Blindes Arbeid, the focus is on developing the business and the brand through new partnerships with private companies and furniture manufacturers such as Skagerak and GETAMA. At the same time, the company and culture are developed 'from within' with design methods such as discovering customer needs and developing new products through agile experiments.
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One of the reasons why the employees of Blindes Arbede have been recognized by international designers, such as Lars Vejen and Søren Rose, is that the employees master a unique craft. As Kristin Espedal, director of Working for the Blind, puts it:

‍“We have worked to focus on the value of the products and thus be more recognized for the craftsmanship we make.”

Curiosity on several social economy companies

More and more public and private actors are curious about the development of social economic enterprises. Socio-economic enterprises, which have to operate in a private market, but at the same time can take special social considerations in terms of their business focus and by employing employees who are challenged by low attachment to the labour market. These can be young people who have challenges at some point in their lives or different groups of citizens with disabilities, such as the blind and visually impaired in Blind Work.

Origins and purposes of FLOW

Blind's Work gained its first experiences of collaboration with the use of design and design thinking in practice through H.O.W. — Hands On Woven, which is a tactile toolbox that enables blind weavers to be co-creators in design, development and production. A course that has been awarded the Danish Design Award — and which helped lay the groundwork for the latest Flow project, which has been supported by the Danish Business Authority — and which Louise Werge has run as project and design manager in close collaboration with director Kristin Espedal and partner Anne-Mette Scheibel from Resonans.
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The purpose of the Flow project has been business development. The method has been to test how design management can support new forms of cooperation externally in terms of product development in the market and internally in terms of streamlining product development and attention to design, materials and sustainability. The project has developed a design profile and a Code of Conduct. It must provide coherence in the development and marketing of products and ensure an increased focus on sustainable materials and production, good craftsmanship, and the social value: employment for the blind and visually impaired. For customers, a correlation between design, craftsmanship, environmental and social sustainability must be what provides the increased value.
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The approach in the development project has been co-creative and outreach to support that Blindes Arbeid can design and produce new brush products with a higher added value. The increased value comes from a new supply chain with a focus on sustainability, the inclusion of external design capabilities in the design, and the employees' focus on collaboration and experimentation. At the same time, the work on developing new design products gives employees a greater job content and increased skills.

Results of FLOW

Concrete results of FLOW are several brush products developed in the project. HAIRY, a functional piece of jewellery designed by Lars Vejen was featured in the beautiful award-winning exhibition at Galleri A. Petersen. And at the time of writing, marketing is underway of new design products from the brush area in Blindes Arbeid in the form of two beautiful broom sets designed by Søren Rose Studio.
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Finally, the Flow project has contributed to sharpening Blindes Arbeide's business model and business development, among other things, by optimizing the production model and design profile, as well as linking to the UN's Global Goals and communicating the company's triple bottom line regarding social, environmental and economic sustainability.
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The process of change is of course still ongoing in Blinde's Work — and one of the things that has supported the changes in practice has been the close collaboration with project and design manager Louise Werge. As Louise puts it:

“I have had the experience that there has been a very great and widespread curiosity and willingness to join the process and invite in. Employees have been open to the fact that development processes and new collaborations require us to move into something that we do not know or can guarantee the outcome of. Daring is one of the most important strengths for creating and supporting future and sometimes difficult change processes and development projects.”

As director Kristin Espedal states:

‍“The purpose of FLOW has been to develop new products that can be better translated on the market, increase professional pride — and also create greater growth with proper market value. We have been concerned with designing products with a focus on the entire supply chain, in order to get clarity and transparency that the values of quality and sustainability hold. A collaboration with DTU students put a spotlight on the life cycle of our products and the C02 footprint. It is clearly something we will be working on further. A new product we have chosen must be locally Danish produced from wood, metal and of course our brushstone binding.”

The next steps

Blindes Arbeid continues the strategic development of the company with the long haul in the development of culture and competencies, as well as through a new exciting collaboration with the Social Capital Fund. The cooperation will be used as investment in production equipment, optimization of sales channels and marketing, as well as continued empowerment of employees in order to get even more people with visual impairments to work.

Invitation to Collaboration

In general, Blindes Arbeid is a company that is very concerned with external collaborations. In addition to continuing cooperation with designers and companies regarding brushes that can clean furniture or with Skagerak regarding the production of Skageraks Vent Stool, Director Kristin Espedal wants better strategic cooperation relationships with municipalities and other public actors:

“We need municipalities to see the skills development needs of the unskilled workforce. And invest in the fact that a person can learn something -- until a person can produce a product. We would like to collaborate even more with municipalities on the learning part, so we share the economics around it. For example, we have good experience from Aarhus Municipality, which has covered the costs of training when an employee has started on the flex job scheme. We need to focus on the social value creation that we as a social economy company contribute to, which, however, we cannot support only through the power of the market — but through collaborations and partnerships with both municipalities and business.”

Read the article at Denpublie.dk