A new modern outdoor furniture in stock program, dedicated to the commercial and hospitality industries has just been launched in Ontario, Southern California.
The program, established and mainly designed by patio furniture designer Paul (Chengyu) Duan, has 10 chair collections and 2 table collections as first year rollout, to ship from their CA warehouse.
“It’s about, and only about the combination of crafted minimalism design, commercial quality, mid-price, and inventory in US,” said Duan.
“There has just been this gap of price, design style and quality that needed to filled in the past 6-8 years, especially with the overall increased need of simplicity, personality and demand for quality,” said Duan, “We’ve been thinking and planning about this for over 6-7 years and finally put our hands around it and connected the dots of what I and my team know the best in the last 20 years of experience in patio furniture industry.”
“It’s minimalism but more on the crafted and mature side.” Duan added when describing the overall design genre.
“We focus on quality steel and aluminum metal work both in sheer design and craftsmanship,” said Duan, “we avoided fully woven products for quality and cost competition concerns, and honestly couldn’t afford adding cushions to the line at least this year due to the terrible delay in fabric supplies.”
When talking about goals for the company, “to grow in size and go after the mass is simply not what we are, ” Duan said. “that way we will pretty much be chasing historical data, and not being able to inspire, lead and last, which is our brand mission.” “We are ok being a little bit different and not too big.”
Being a patio furniture designer, Duan has worked in patio furniture industry for 20 years mainly on the manufacturing and designing/engineering side. In his earlier years he had worked with Winston, Woodard, Mallin, Kettler Germany in engineering. Duan is one of the few factory-grown designers who has his hands around all aspects of the design and manufacturing process to help him achieve his design and business goals.
Decades in patio furniture profession has allowed Paul Duan to learn from all aspects from designing the section profile of a synthetic wicker yarn or an aluminum extrusion, or creating the right sitting pitch, to a glamour setup by a beach house. Later years in his career he has been involved in customer service, Ecommerce, sales and marketing.
For example, there is only one size of stainless-steel bolt across the entire program, just for the ease of production and customer service. “Maybe it’s not a proud thing to say but I do need to approve even the CAD drawing of a nylon foot glide. And won’t feel comfortable without doing so.” said Duan.
Paulduan Creations now has representative teams mainly covering the west coast and sunbelt states with some dealers east of Mississippi.
Paul is also a landscape photographer. Most of the photography used in Paulduan Creations website and social media were from his work, mainly in LA beach cities and eastern Sierra mountains or lake Tahoe area.
“If there is a difference from my product photography, that’d be it’s always not about the furniture being in the middle of the shot, but the beauty of nature and how we be humble, admire and continued to be inspired to live simple and live alive."