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Olympic Design Awards developed by RPD.
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V8 Super Car keys collaboration from Italian automotive designer, a Danish industrial designer and an American artist to imagine the V8 engine form in a hand held object.
RPD International, a design and manufacturing company offering a global supply chain of people and facilities, has opened up access for Product Design agencies across the world.
This latest development means that designers will have access to the company’s worldwide supply chain of facilities and the ability to reliably produce units in over 40 countries.
“We have a huge supply chain, with an enormous amount of leverage and capability. We want to see everybody taking advantage of it” explains Josh Valman, Managing Director at RPD International. “The more volume we get through this supply chain the more powerful it becomes. So it could be that an agency of one person or 300 people now has the full force of our 100 plus factories in over 40 countries, with the reliability our relationships and purchasing volume brings.”
This will be good news to smaller companies dealing with small-scale manufacturing who may find it difficult to have their projects realised when going straight to the factories themselves.
“If you’re looking for small scale manufacturing, it’s very hard to get the reliability from a factory, mainly because they’re not going to make any money from it,” says Josh. “But if you’re going through us, we have lots of other projects in the same factory so we get preferential pricing and reliability. Essentially the power is that we’re doing all this supply chain work for massive corporates so the leverage we have with factories is very strong. If we say ‘I need this by next week’ it comes by next week, whereas if a small company goes down to China and says ‘I need this’ it is less likely to happen.”
RPD’s supply chain is powered by a breadth of clients which continues to grow ensuring reliability with more than 100 factories, each undergoing two years of testing before being fully accepted into the supply chain.
With competitive time scales and pricing, RPD covers projects from aerospace to marketing using a range of facilities and services. For designers simply seeking manufacturing services, there is also no retainer fee meaning the process is not only easier and more reliable but cheaper too.
“Normally we would charge a retainer to all our clients, but we decided if you’re only going to use manufacturing servies from us, we won’t charge you a retainer fee. You can just send it through and say ‘I need this drawing manufactured to this spec and I need it by next week.”
Designers simply send through a CAD or 2D drawing and spec for manufacturing. RPD then comes back with a price depending on location preferences, time scale and budget.
Josh adds: “We are doing this to increase the volume of purchasing in our supply chain. The more projects we run, the cheaper it will be for all of our clients.”
