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Design and Manufacture
We believe that less is more. Rather then lots of mediocre podiums and lecterns, we prefer one or two fantastic designs.
Rather than try to make a large number of different podiums and lecterns, we prefer to concentrate on a few great designs and work on them to make them fantastic. The great American furniture designer Charles Eames said 'God is in the details'. On great furniture you see great details (that is the joints, the finishes etc). We believe that church podiums and lecterns should have great detailing too.
We are constantly refining the podiums and lecterns in our existing range and designing new ones. From the initial idea to production is an involved process that takes many months. The podiums and lecterns on this website are the best from 32 that were built and tested. They are the result of many prototypes and rigorous testing over many months of development. Click on the images below to see parts of our development process.
Why do we have so many ideas, do so many CAD (computer aided design) drawings and models, build so many prototypes and yet so few podiums and lecterns make if through the process? They may fail at the development process for several reasons: Stability, weight, aesthetics, cost and ergonomics (design for the human body based on anthropmetric data). Many of our great looking ideas ended up being too heavy to lift, or not stable enough (we couldn't get them through the tipping phase of our testing). Conversely, many stable and lightweight podium and lectern ideas just were not good looking enough for todays modern churches.
Even after a design is released for sale, we constantly refine it. This is based on our own tests and feedback from our customers. In particular, our 'tough but fair' customers are very helpful. These are churches, like Hillsong church, who use our tables, podiums and lecterns under extrememe conditions. At Hillsong church or Hillsong conference, our podiums and lecterns (click for Hillsong conference) will be constantly moved, bumped, knocked, carried, transported, disassembled, assembled, televised and used by some of the worlds most well known preachers. Feedback from extreme usage situations helps us to constantly improve them, giving you a better lectern experience. As a result, we make incremental improvements to the balance, weight and production quality and make subtle aesthetic improvements to produce an ever better podium and lectern design. After all- we are specialists in the field of podiums and lecterns, so it's what we think about all the time.
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