Baking USM Haller

Bo Bech is a baker in Copenhagen.

Bo Bech bakes one kind of bread. It’s available in one size. At one price.

Bo Bech bakes one batch and when that batch is sold out he closes the shop.

As a business concept it could not be simpler.

Just try explaining it to an average German who has heart failure if presented with a choice of less than 17 types of bread.

A baker ? With one type of bread ? How does it survive !?!?

Which, to paraphrase the late Rabbi Lionel Blue, is a lot like USM Haller.

Every since the majority  of “design” stopped being something innovative created to improve our lives and became something modern created to make a profit, design has of course become something that needs to be renewed every few months.

Otherwise no one would buy it.

Perhaps the best example of this is apple where every couple of months Steve Jobs takes his lucky black roll neck pullover from the cupboard and proudly announces that the new iHype is there: 3% lighter, 2% blacker and with an integrated Old Norse dictionary.
And the assembled public are joyous that they now know the word gulr
But no one questions the sense of it all.
It is after all “design”

The furniture industry is of course just as guilty in this respect as all other branches of product design and the inevitable consequence of this policy can bee seen at IMM Cologne every January.

The counter weight is System USM Haller.

USM Haller produce one product, based around one chrome-plated brass ball.

A furniture maker ? With one product range ? How does it survive !?!?

It does what it does well.
OK and with the Haller tables it does have second important product range. Just imagine Bo also baked one kind of cake per day.

As with Bo Bech USM Haller simply offer the public a product that they want and understand at a fair price and always in the same, reliable, quality.

They don’t listen to trend analysts. Don’t try to move into markets outwith their ability. Don’t hire star designers to get good media coverage.

As a product System USM Haller has remained unchanged for neigh on 50 years and will continue to remain as it is for the next 50.

Perhaps the only things that has changed over the last four and a half decades is the public conceptions about where USM Haller units can be used.

Once the sole preserve of lawyers and engineers, today USM Haller is accepted in the home, in museums and libraries, in airports and hospitals.

Otherwise its very much case of “as you were”

Personally we’d be very happy if more designer furniture producers stopped following the German baking industry’s approach to product ranges and instead followed at least the spirit of  what we can learn from USM Haller – stick to what you can do, do it well and offer consumers functional products that work.

And wonderful as this analogy unquestionably is, please don’t try spreading jam on your USM Haller sideboard!

Bo Bech: Simplifying baking in Copenhagen