Small team - Many hats
Crabtree and Hargreeves was very much a small family business and as such I wore many hats during my time there: from design to painting, fitting to after-care. This multi-dimensional understanding of the business allowed me to make informed decisions about our how I changed the manufacturing and production processes and allowed me to grow the business substantially in doing so.
When I joined the company we were using Sketchup for everything - design, technical drawings and exporting images to show clients.
Sketchup is great and intuitive to use. However our furniture was bespoke, there were no set door sizes or frames so it was time consuming to manually model each kitchen in sketchup.
I moved gradually moved the team away from Sketchup and towards systems that offered better rendering, parametric modelling ways of exporting the 3D drawings into technical drawings.
I eventually spearheaded the research, acquisition and training of a CNC milling machine.
In combination with Cabinet Vision software we were able to design kitchens , export technical drawings to carpenters and export CNC code to the machine for automated manufacturing.
The downside at the time was that the rendering was very slow, hard to tweak and did not look as good as solutions I had used by combining Sketchup with VRay.
I managed to export from Cabinet Vision and used Blender to create Renders for clients. They were not perfect but they gave a good indication to customers as to how the design would look.
Before moving on to Wren Kitchens, I was looking into how we might integrate XR technology into our sales and manufacturing pipeline.
My eventual goal would have been to build an XR space for customers to preview their interiors. The minimum version of this would have been simple the ability to walk around and the more elaborate version of the programme would have allowed users to try out a variations of a space or make tweaks to the design.
I created this YouTube video to see how it would look and to see how accurately I could export 3D panoramas from Blender. This alone would serve as a useful sales tool as it allows customers to look pan around a space on their phone, perhaps whilst standing in their existing kitchen or interior.