Why Limited Editions?

I've been thinking for some time about making very small, limited runs part of Keiyosa

When you make things as a business, it's difficult not to gradually become focused on repeatability. How long does something take to make? Can I batch ten at once? Can I simplify a process? Can I keep it in stock? Can I make it efficiently enough for the price to make sense?

They're important questions. Keiyosa is a business, after all.

But I've realised that if I'm not careful, those questions can also begin to dictate what I make.

Some of the things I've most enjoyed making over the years haven't necessarily been the things that made the most sense from a production point of view. They've been the pieces where I've allowed myself to spend too long figuring something out, tried a material or process I hadn't used before, or added a detail simply because I thought it would make the object better.

I've been longing to get back to making more things like that.

 

Making fewer things

That's where Limited Editions come in.

The idea isn't simply to make an existing product, put a number on it and call it limited.

I'd like these pieces to give me the freedom to approach designing and making slightly differently.

If I'm only intending to make a very small number, I don't necessarily have to ask whether every process will scale. A detail that takes several additional operations might be perfectly reasonable. I can combine materials I wouldn't normally use together, experiment with unfamiliar techniques, make jigs for a single project and allow some of the design decisions to happen at the workbench rather than having everything resolved before I begin.

It also means accepting that some ideas might not work.

That's something that becomes surprisingly difficult when you're developing a product for a catalogue. Time spent pursuing an idea that ultimately goes nowhere is difficult to justify when there are orders waiting to be made.

With a limited project, the experimentation is part of the reason for doing it.

 

Not scarcity for the sake of scarcity

I'm slightly uncomfortable with the idea of making something artificially scarce simply to make it appear more desirable.

That's not what I want these editions to be.

The limitation should come naturally from the way the object is made.

Perhaps a particular process is too involved to repeat indefinitely. Perhaps I'm working with a small amount of a particular material. Or perhaps I've simply explored an idea as far as I want to and would rather move on to something new than spend the next few years reproducing it.

If that means there are twenty pieces, there are twenty.

If another idea only makes sense as five, there might be five.

Once they're gone, I'd like to give myself permission to close that particular chapter and start exploring the next one.

 

A small workshop

I also think this makes sense for what Keiyosa actually is.

We're not a factory, and I don't particularly want to spend my time trying to imitate one on a smaller scale.

There are advantages to working from a small workshop with CNC machines, a lathe, lasers, 3D printers and, increasingly, some rather unusual ways of combining them.

I can make a component very precisely on a machine and then spend time finishing it by hand. I can design and print a jig in the morning to solve a problem I've encountered that afternoon. Digital manufacturing doesn't have to mean mass manufacturing.

In fact, I've become increasingly interested in using these tools to do almost the opposite: to make small quantities of objects that would be impractical to manufacture conventionally.

Limited Editions give me somewhere to explore that.

 

Documenting more of it

There's another change I'd like to make alongside this.

I'd like to document these projects more openly.

Not just photographs of the finished object, but some of what happens between the original idea and that final photograph.

The prototypes that don't quite work. The fixtures and jigs that nobody normally sees. Changes of material. Machining. Hand tools. Finishing. And those occasional moments when something comes off a machine and looks exactly as I'd imagined it several weeks earlier.

I'm going to use this journal for the slower version of that story.

There will still be photographs and short pieces of video on Instagram, but I don't want every stage of making something to have to become a piece of content in its own right. Sometimes a photograph and a few words are a much better record of what happened.

And occasionally, I'd like to document an entire project properly on film.

 

Making things I want to make again

Ultimately, that's probably the simplest explanation for all of this.

I'd like to spend more time making things that I'm excited to make.

Things that might take too long.

Things that might require an unnecessary amount of work for a tiny detail.

Things that teach me a process I haven't used before.

Things that I might only ever want to make once.

And small editions of things that, once they're finished, I'll probably be quite happy never to make again.

That feels like a good direction for Keiyosa.

I've already started on the first one.