Jess Sorel devises a design process for West Coast Industries, boosting the manufacturer’s competitive edge.
The son of a diesel truck mechanic and a soprano-turned-painter, Jess Sorel seemed destined for a career that spanned mechanics and art.
Say, industrial design, as it turned out.
His 10-year-old, Denver-based design consultancy works across a range of disciplines, including furniture and product design as well as the creation of environments. Sorel Studio is where furniture manufacturers such as West Coast industries come for Sorel’s creative, mechanical and artistic talents. His collaboration with West Coast Industries has proven successful in building brand recognition and a more relevant collection of thoughtfully designed furniture pieces (including the Move, Cruz, Kone, Blok and Vista) for the Contract and Hospitality furniture industries.
In 1990, while Sorel was a student at the San Francisco Academy of Art, instructor Martin Linder showed his own furniture designs in class. Immediately struck, Sorel knew then that furniture design was his calling. After maxing out on every class Linder taught, he completed his industrial design major at California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in 1992.
Post-college, he settled in at Metro for 12 years, seven of them as design director. In 2008, he launched his own studio and a prolific, successful practice.
Around the same time, Mona Lindquist signed on at West Coast Industries, first as sales and marketing director and then president, she recognized the company’s technical mastery as well as its commitment to creative collaboration with clients. There was incredible potential in the master artisans of the factory. The talent was there, it just needed the freedom to run.
The 75-year-old company was operating purely on tribal knowledge, with little room for growth. Lindquist and the executive team at that time enlisted operations leader Wiki Che to bring structure and process to manufacturing, and to help build an engineering department. She tapped Sorel—an acquaintance from their shared time at Metro—to develop the company’s first, all-important design process.
“It’s an incredibly complex undertaking,” says Sorel. “It touches everything. For example, how do we offer designers a generous and effective range of materials and finishes without causing manufacturing to choke, and so on. The complexity can be crippling.”
Over the next painstaking months, West Coast’s manufacturing went from building products from scribbled notes and memories to a 10-page design process document, right-sized for the company. “Our hope was to leverage both Jess’s institutional knowledge and his aesthetic—to bring his unique talents to bear on both our manufacturing process and design capabilities—and it worked,” says Lindquist.
"We worked together to make sure new products embodied the new brand, while celebrating the West Coast legacy."
The company actually used Sorel’s first furniture design for West Coast, the Move table, to test the new process—from multiple design iterations to its realization as the clean and versatile silhouette it is today. Move embodies the company’s shift to thoughtfully designed and engineered products—products that are flexible enough for both hospitality and contract environments. These proprietary designs speak to both the new brand and West Coast industries’ existing client base.
“Simultaneously, Mona was building a brand,” says Sorel. “What do we stand for? What do we want to be known for? Designers for years had looked at West Coast Industries as their ‘partner to execute,’ while the company wanted to be ‘their partner to design and execute.’”
Sorel was a resource to Lindquist as she worked through a new company perspective and a visual language that matched its design customers’ level of sophistication. “We worked together to make sure new products embodied the new brand, while celebrating the West Coast legacy. It’s a fine line to walk,” says Sorel.
Today’s visitor to the company’s new website, as well as a showroom in Oxnard, California, will see little that’s reminiscent of West Coast Industries, circa 2009. The brand and manufacturing metamorphosis is nearly complete, unveiling a rebellious spirit that Lindquist says was always fighting to emerge. The venerable company’s new design-first philosophy welcomes designers to play, collaborate, and join in creating furniture’s next wave.