There are office furniture designers who are perfectly capable of creating beautiful products like chairs, desks and casual seating. But when the industry needs a unified collection of products that spans the office, capable designers of such complicated systems are few and far between.

One of the go-to designers is David Allan Pesso, whose smart, meticulous designs have turned his one-man design studio into one of the most sought-after in the industry.

It didn't happen overnight. Pesso's career has spanned 30 years by becoming a strategic resource for his clients.

“My clients, be they existing or new clients, tend to come to me with problems,” he said. “In other words, I'm not kind of Blue Sky and ideation and trying to find a manufacturer to align with those ideas. I'm really just opening myself up to my partners and saying, 'Ok, where are your holes? Let's throw the right resources at it to come up with a proper solution that's marketable and manufacturable and saleable and profitable.' ”

The idea of helping clients with strategy lends itself to more complex problems. Pesso's career has evolved from designing simple freestanding products to systems.

“I guess it's just the way my mind thinks,” he said. “From a business perspective, it makes a lot more sense, as well, because I'm a partner with these brands. There's a huge advantage to being able to license a collection of ideas and products and solutions in a systematic format as opposed to a chair.”

His latest effort is a massive collection for JSI called Flux, a mid-century modern product line that started with adaptable casegoods for private offices, tables that could be stretched and adapted into a fully powered modular system of office plan furniture that utilizes a hardwired, eight wire, four circuit receptacle.

“It really was the first time ever I did a fully powered open plan benching system that's both static and kinetic in terms of height adjustability,” Pesso said. “Then, also running that into a third phase, which is a locker storage program.”

He took one common impetus for anesthetic, which in this case was mid-century modern, and was true to that, retaining that vernacular across all three platforms and 4,500 SKUs of product.

“That's a huge challenge,” he said. “Honestly, it probably took me 32 months to visualize all of that and develop it.”

He couldn't have done it without his three decades of experience. While at the Rochester Institute of Technology, he dreamed of being a sculptor at the same time he was creating limited production art furniture. He was influenced greatly by Wendell Castle, who taught at the School of American Craftsmen in Rochester and established a permanent studio in the area. Castle also served as head of the woodworking department at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

“It was the early to mid-1980s, and the whole art furniture movement thing was going on,” he said. “And Wendell was the father of all that. So I wanted to do what Wendell did.” But Pesso didn't have a trust fund and couldn't figure out how to do that financially, noting being an art furniture maker was kind of like being a poet — necessary for society, but not very lucrative.

So Pesso decided to work with manufacturers in the region like Hardwood House and Gunlocke. He said he realized he could create sculptures on a mass production format “because at the end of the day furniture is a three-dimensional object.”

Pesso had one job out of college — with an interior design firm — and he was laid off. He started doing mill work out of Hartford, Connecticut. “That kind of evolved my interest in art furniture,” he said. “I had a separate art furniture portfolio. I was chasing that. I was chasing furniture from day one. Once I decided from college that that's what I wanted to do, I stumbled into the contract industry. It snowballed from there, and I went through the school of hard knocks. I kind of learned it on my own. I had great mentors, guys like Paul Brayton and John Geiger and the Tuohy family. I was able to collaborate with them as opposed to dictate ideation. I was really able to build meaningful product systems with a variety of best-in-class brands. It just kind of evolved from there.”

Fast forward to Flux and the design process behind it. There are several phases to Pesso's design work. It begins with the orientation phase, the most time-intensive, and the one that builds trust between the designer and his client. For Flux, it meant heading from his New Studio in Denver to JSI's base in Jasper, Indiana.

Pesso visited all their facilities that would potentially touch the new product and learned about material processes, capabilities, and weaknesses. “In this case I was involved in the very early end of that orientation and helping them draft that design brief — what it potentially could be and just to give us a touchstone of what those parameters might look like, which even involved taking those guys to Cologne for Orgatec and showing them what I'm looking at, which is the best-case scenario to be involved early on in the brief,” he said.

Everything changes in phase two of the process. It is the ideation/exploration phase where Pesso works mainly on his own for several months. He goes through what he calls “ideation mining” and trying to find a catalyst for that kind of vernacular that would really transcend the entire brief.

Pesso works digitally on a couple of different CAD platforms. He also retains a 3-D visualizer who can make amazingly lifelike renderings. In the case of Flux, Pesso presented two potential directions — both digitally. “We just did it … on a conference call, sharing our desktops and just showing the presentation,” he said. “That way we can get all the mind share that's got input on the final direction in one meeting, from various locations, and just do it digitally.”

Once Pesso gets buy-in at the highest level of senior management on the direction of the product, he moves into phase three, which is just developing the entire vocabulary. Usually, at that point, he and the client have a target date, perhaps NeoCon or some particular date to launch a product or to show a product. At that point, Pesso and the client develop those vignettes or prototypes, which he calls P1 or first prototypes for that particular event.

“So we're building a real product and probably go through a minimum of two to four iterations of prototypes,” he said, noting he works closely with the client's factories and engineering during this time. “We do some 3-D printing on smaller parts components to validate some of the geometry. I work with a product engineer out of Woodbridge (Ontario) outside of Toronto, who can add a lot of value from an engineering and printing perspective. We can offer turnkey engineering and prototyping, but in today's day and age, most of the manufacturers I work with want to (be hands-on) ... because that's also part of the learning curve of not just building, but selling, creating, boxing, shipping. It's all-encompassing.”

Pesso and his clients learn a lot from building products at the factory level. From there, once he gets final signoff and approval, market validation begins, very often in the form of focus groups and dealer feedback and input.

“We do a final documentation phase of creating all the CAD geometry for the entire scope (of the project),” he said. “In this case, when you literally have 4,500 SKUs, that typically encompasses an entire quarter — three to four months of visually illustrating those in full-scale CAD drawings. You get disappeared during that point in time to make sure all that stuff aligns and lines up.”

That point of the project also includes a lot of back and forth with the client. In the case of Flux, it included almost daily conference calls with the entire JSI team. Pesso's final deliverable is an enormous data dump of CAD geometry the client imports into its CAD platform, which generates their internal manufacturing, CAD geometry, and documentation.

It's a huge effort. But the payoff is great when the product is launched. For JSI's Flux, the product platform was so large it was launched at NeoCon in 2018 and 2019.

“It's just been exhilarating to go into JSI's showroom the past couple of years and have the majority of the product in there representative of your thoughts and ideas and years of hard work,” Pesso said. “The biggest thing is you don't want to walk in there and be surprised. So we do a lot of planning and conversations and validations even of what's being shown at NeoCon.

“Not that I have the final say on what they're showing, but again, part of that collaborative effort is them validating with me and vice versa and making sure that what they're showing ... is the best representation of the features and benefits of the product.

“I always go in on Saturday so I can just quietly take it in and look at the landscape and the silhouettes and all that geometry that we've generated over the years. And to me, it's just truly exhilarating, as it is walking into an actual environment. You can be in New York City and walk through a space and see the landscape of your product. It's the same kind of feeling. It's a sense of pride, I guess. And it's a good feeling.”

As a young designer, Pesso said he used to say “yes” to every project that came his way. He's learned over the years to be more selective with his partners and projects. That means as a “one dog studio,” he usually doesn't work on more than one project at a time.

“You've got to give birth to these things and put yourself totally into it 100%,” he said. “It's not something you leave at five and come back at nine in the morning and pick up where you left off. It's an all-in effort.”

One project is usually enough since Pesso tends to do large-scale lines. He is currently working on a health care furniture effort with a client that will be introduced in 2020 or 2021.

In between projects, Pesso can be found on his motorcycles. He favors the (fast) Ducati and rides in the mountains near his Denver home and studio.

So 30 years on, what keeps Pesso going? Simply put, he said he still loves what he does. “I genuinely look forward to getting up in the morning and coming into my studio and creating something that hasn't been thought of before. That's kind of an exciting process. Then secondly, it's really the challenge from my partners. I'm doing something new almost every day, and being able to work with Flux is a great example of working with a collaborative team.”