Meet the Member – Design Reform Oy

By mindfitconsulting 16 Apr 2021

Who are you? My name is Reijo Markku, industrial designer and working as managing director at Design Reform Oy, which I founded 33 years ago.

What is your company specialized in? Our roots are in industrial design but over our 30 years of existence we have expanded our services from brand design to dynamic marketing and training tools. In our slogan, we give a service promise that we `Design for success`. It often means strategic long-term collaboration, and understanding of broad design thinking. On the other hand, if our customer’s success depend on one missing design piece, we can solve this one problem with our expertise.

Tell us about your clients and other key shareholders or partners? We have a wide customer base from both the public sector and the corporate world. On the public side, I could mention Helsinki and Lappeenranta. In the sector of business-side clients, we have focused on the engineering companies that are either already established their position in the international market, such as Metso, Outotec, Kone, Raute and Valmet. Or our customers are strongly on their way to international success such as Flowrox, Picosun and Mobidiag.

What services or products do you offer to other YardMate members? Naturally, we offer YardMate companies our full range of services, from industrial design to brand design and brand management. We also have strong expertise in dynamic visualizations on the industrial 2d and 3d-field and Virtual Reality. Often, it is just world-class visualizations that open the eyes of the clients. We’ve also offer Virtual Reality content productions, which right now seems to be more and more demanded in market. The Virtual Showroom concept we developed during corona is a recommended tool for remote communication for any company that wants to stand out from its competitors, look to the future and do successful business.

What are your expectations for YardMate? It would be great to work in shipyard sectors and to develop the industry and YardMate companies towards more and more international success. The dream would also be to be part of some great multidisciplinary development project where you could meet YardMate’s big and small businesses and tranfer the network expertise in order to create commercial product or service.

What are your future needs regarding personnel? We are a small and vibrand design agency, but also ready to grow especially in that Virtual Reality sector. We are looking for marketing and sales professionals who really understand what our customers expect out of our expertise. On the other hand, if and when the Virtual Reality boom heats up, we also need creative VR designers.

What are your future needs regarding sub-contractors and partners? We are constantly looking for reliable and creative subcontractors for our network who are ready to take on challenges and solve them. Who knows, if we can find subcontractors or even partners inside YardMate. We keep all doors open.

Anything else you wish to say to us? I really hope that YardMate could become a major commercial player, able to harness the right team for each project from its professional network.

The links for the videos of these pictures:

Outotec animation

Raute virtual showroom

Picosun virtual showroom