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Bernardo Urbina founded a unique company, a high-end boutique woodshop building custom-designed and sustainably crafted furniture from recycled wood and carefully treated plantation trees. By using Autodesk Fusion 360, Bernardo Urbina Design (BUD) has been able to offer unique creations and guarantee manufacturing quality to exceed the expectations of its clients.
Project summary
Bernardo Urbina Design is a furniture design studio in Costa Rica focused on using materials such as overlooked and untampered wood, which allows them to give them a new life and turn them into carefully crafted works of art.
Image courtesy of Andrés García Lachner
Bernardo, the founder, has a long career in luxury furniture design in New York, Milan, and Cebu. He began recycling materials into furniture when Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, an initiative that contributed to employing people affected by the storm.
After three collections, Bernardo returned to his homeland of Costa Rica in 2015 to establish his first studio. He discovered an opportunity in a specific market segment: foreigners with vacation homes in that country, who are looking for sustainably made, unique furniture and personalized attention in English.
To ensure the efficient use of both recovered wood and plantation trees, as well as to maintain close communication with its customers, it was necessary to have a software tool that would support the development process of each piece.
The challenge
When the woodshop opened to complement the studio in Costa Rica, BUD began working with clients who needed to visualize what the final pieces would look like. The woodshop required plans and renderings approved by the client to back up the fabrication of each piece.
Through the recommendation of some colleagues, the company found out about Autodesk’s Fusion 360 solution. This is a CAD, CAM, and 3D-modeling, cloud-based, printed circuit board software for product design and manufacturing. In addition to offering iOS compatibility, this solution ensures the manufacturing feasibility of each design, which matches perfectly with their “made-to-order” business model.
Fusion 360 connects directly to the CNC router, a computer-controlled machine that performs automated cutting to maximize agility and does not need additional software.
Image courtesy of Andrés García Lachner
“There is no doubt that moving to Fusion 360 has allowed us to take our customization offering to another level. The implementation of this tool has helped our designs exceed our clients’ expectations. It is an organic technology that allows us to do everything from a single software solution, without having to open different programs or change formats,” assured Bernardo Urbina, Founder of the company.
Clients
Bernardo Urbina Design does not work in bulk, but it rather cater to its clients’ needs. It deals exclusively with unique pieces, which means that each piece of furniture has different details and sizes. In addition, the company uses materials with its own characteristics and measurements. As a result, each piece must receive the client’s approval before it goes into production.
In addition, the company has a focus on sustainability, so it must ensure maximum utilization of materials before starting the parts production in order to minimize waste.
The solution
With Autodesk Fusion 360, the Bernardo Urbina Design team can receive a request to create a new piece of furniture with specific sizes. From there, the team begins to develop the piece’s prototype and search for the materials to use.
Then, Bernardo designs the idea using Autodesk Fusion 360 to ensure that it is feasible to manufacture and provide a blueprint to the client. After the customer approves the drawing, he processes the wood, and the part goes into fabrication. At this point in the process, the CNC machine helps turn the design into the final part with 100% accuracy.
The results
Image courtesy of Andrés García Lachner
Bernardo Urbina Design has simplified the furniture design and manufacturing process by using Autodesk Fusion 360. Everything works in the same ecosystem. It makes it quicker to produce a piece of furniture that was designed by hand. Once the blueprint comes into the tool, instead of producing it in two weeks, it is possible to make the cuts in 30 minutes. Through modeling in Fusion 360, you also have clarity on the sizes of the table or material you require to obtain all the necessary cuts.
Fusion 360 connects perfectly to the CNC machine and maximizes its capabilities, which increases agility and efficiency during leveling or materials cutting. With the introduction of Autodesk Fusion’s new Nested feature, now he gets more accurate cuts and can arrange the parts to get 95% to 98% efficiency use of materials.
In addition, he has optimized the use of CNC for the manufacturing of chairs. These present a particular challenge in furniture development due to the convergence angles, visualization, and ergonomics in an equation that must meet high expectations of comfort.
These benefits have allowed Bernardo Urbina Design to focus on maintaining constant communication with its clients to achieve their complete satisfaction.
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