Owner of the Month: Creating a vision
Ordering furniture, whether it’s for your living room or an entire school building, requires some imagination. How will this look in MY space? Should it face this way or that way? Will it go well with the other colors in the room?
To create a clearer vision, our dealers and internal sales coordinators can turn to Fleetwood for interior design assistance. Michelle Allard leads these efforts and directs other contract designers.
“The biggest part of my job is working on layouts of customer spaces so they can see what’s possible,” says Michelle, who joined Fleetwood in 2018 with more than two decades of experience in the office furniture industry. “I can create a 3-D rendering of a proposed furniture layout and show three or four other ways to design the classroom with the same product.”
These designs are a key part of winning business through the proposal and pricing process. Michelle focuses on larger opportunities and tries to turn around requests for help within 2-3 days. She also helped to create an entire library of furniture symbols (small-scale icons representing each of our products) so other designers working for dealers or architects can include Fleetwood products in their own renderings.
Michelle says she produces around 10 customer applications in an average week and can pull in temporary help when demand is especially high. She also enjoys feeding her creativity and professional growth by working occasionally with product designers and engineers.
“My mother was a teacher, so was her dad. I have two uncles who are teachers. So, I was excited about starting to work with the education market,” she says. “When you have the opportunity to observe in a classroom, you see how small changes can have a big impact on learning. Teachers and students are so appreciative of anything you do for them, so you feel you’re making a difference.”
Michelle says Fleetwood people have impressed her with their desire to make a difference in the business as well as in the classroom. “Because we’re all owners, we’re all on the lookout to reduce waste. There’s a greater level of cooperation here, and everyone is pulling their weight.”
SIDEBAR: The latest in school design
Michelle says her work tries to incorporate several hot trends in school design, including:
- “Architects are starting to design more useable spaces for informal collaboration in hallways and other common spaces. These are great areas for tutors to work with students or for groups of students to come together.”
- “There’s a big effort now to bring nature into the classroom. We call it biophilic design, and there are multiple ways to bring the outside in – whether it’s a view out the window, a painted mural depicting nature or actual plans within the room. Fleetwood’s new color palette was nature- inspiried. We’ve even started referring to our dark green storage cabinet as ‘the hedge.’”