Construction system inspired by Legos and…Friday 9 Feb 2024
Lundqvist Trävaru in Piteå, Sweden, is making it easier for ordinary people to build things made from wood by using a system that’s reminiscent of Lego and digital design solutions inspired by computer games. That may sound playful, but the owners’ objective is to revolutionise the construction industry – and they take it very seriously. A modern production plant near the harbour in Piteå, a long way north on the east coast of Sweden, is home to a construction company that’s almost 90 years old. Lundqvist Trävaru AB was established in 1936, manufacturing furniture for the Swedish Armed Forces. Customers nowadays can directly design their own building in 3D on the Lundqvist website and get a price for the kit and assembly straight away. The system automatically creates shopping lists, transport bookings and drawings for applications for planning permission, too. The company has a turnover of SEK 240 million, employs 60 people and is anything but traditional in its approach these days. Owners Jens Lundqvist, Deputy CEO, and Samuel Holmström, CEO, have been working since 2014 on realising their shared vision of smarter, more flexible, more fun ways of building using wood – by taking the world of computer games they grew up with and incorporating it into the business. “As far as I’m concerned, it all began because the slowness of many of the processes in the industry and the fact I couldn’t spend as long as I wanted on the right things when I started working in construction really wound me up. I was cutting and pasting numbers from one program to another, and customers had to wait an age for a price. That was when I started to form an idea of how an ideal system could work,” says Samuel. Construction kit similar to Lego Lundqvist is now at the digital cutting edge of development thanks to the construction system developed by Jan Lundqvist, Jens’ father. He got his idea from Lego bricks, which can be combined in almost endless configurations. Following a devastating fire that destroyed all of the company’s assets in 2004, he made the crucial decision to invest fully in the kits on a profit-and-loss basis. The Internet achieved a major breakthrough soon after, and the timing of that meant the kits could soon be delivered all over Sweden. This new focus sparked his son’s interest in taking over the family business one day. At around the same time, Samuel Holmström – who’s about the same age as Jens – was looking for a new career path when his plans to study computer engineering at university were dashed when he failed to gain the grade he needed in maths. “There was a misunderstanding that I’m sure we could have resolved, but that said I was keen on a job ad from this small, exciting company by the name of Lundqvist that said its construction system was similar to Lego,” says Samuel. Game developers - the key to success He then became the first person to be taken on by the company in 2010, and he soon realised how much fun could be had testing ideas and seeing their impact quickly – a major positive of smaller companies. He and Jens were quick to contact Luleå University of Technology when they took over as majority owners. As part of a degree project, they worked together with computer game designers, computer game developers and systems scientists to create a prototype of the system that’s now used on the website to design holiday homes, garages, machine shops, stables and other structures. “One of the first people we took on together was a game developer who’d been involved in the project,” says Samuel. More digital developers have been recruited since then and, of the 60-strong workforce, only four currently have a background in traditional construction. “One unexpected effect of our focus on digital development is that as our digital systems have improved, the threshold for working with us has lowered. You don’t have to be a construction engineer to do everything, which has given us the advantage of being able to focus more on people than on their actual skills when we’re recruiting,” says Samuel. More >> Source: Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget (SCA) | ||
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