Most bespoke projects that go wrong do not go wrong in the workshop. They go wrong in the brief. A maker quotes against one set of assumptions, the client had another set in their head, and the gap only shows up when the piece is half built and the event is on Friday.
This is what a fabrication workshop actually needs from you, in the order we need it, and what you can safely leave to us.
The six things that let us quote properly
1. What it is for, not what it looks like
Start with the job the piece has to do. A plinth that holds a handbag in a window for six weeks and a plinth that is loaded and unloaded twice a night at a party are different objects, even if the drawing is identical. Tell us the setting, the audience, how many times it gets moved, who moves it, and what happens to it afterwards. We can design around almost anything once we know that.
2. Sizes, even rough ones
You do not need a technical drawing. A sketch on the back of a running order with three numbers on it is enough to start. What we need to know is the space it has to sit in, the thing it has to hold, and any dimension that cannot move, such as a doorway it has to pass through or a shelf it has to sit under.
3. The real weight
This is the one people forget, and it is the one that decides whether a piece works. Tell us what is going on it and how heavy that is, honestly. A five tier cake is not a decorative load. A bronze sculpture is not a decorative load. We engineer to the real weight and then add margin, but we can only do that if we know the number.
4. Your date, and which date it is
There is a difference between the date you need it in your hands, the date it gets installed, and the date the doors open. Give us all three if they differ. Most of our projects take two to three weeks from sign-off depending on the nature of the job and how busy the workshop is at the time, and knowing the real deadline lets us tell you straight away whether that works.
5. A budget range, even a wide one
Nobody likes giving this one, and we understand why. But a bespoke piece can be made five different ways at five different prices, and without a range we will guess. Say something like under a thousand, or somewhere between two and five thousand, and we will design to it, or tell you honestly that what you have described cannot be done for that and what can.
6. Anything that has to be approved by someone else
If the piece has to pass a brand team, a venue, a landlord, a fire officer or a head of procurement, say so at the start. It changes what we specify and what paperwork we prepare alongside the quote. Finding out at the end that a venue needs fire rated materials is an expensive way to discover it.
What you can leave to us
You do not need to know what it should be made from. That is our job, and the answer depends on load, finish, budget, how many times it gets handled and whether it goes near food. You do not need CAD. You do not need to have solved the engineering. And you do not need to have a finished design at all. A reference image, a rough sketch and a sentence about what it has to do is a perfectly good starting point, and it is how a large share of our work begins.
What good looks like from our side
A brief that works usually arrives looking something like this:
- We need a display stand for a product launch at a hotel in London on 14 November.
- It holds one item, about 4kg, roughly 300mm across.
- It needs to be about waist height and it has to look like brushed brass to match the brand.
- It goes in a lift and through a standard door.
- Budget is somewhere around 800 to 1200.
- The venue will want to see a risk assessment.
That is six lines, and it is enough for us to come back with a drawing, a material specification and a fixed price. Everything after that is refinement.
What happens next
Once we have the brief we come back with CAD drawings and renders so you can see the piece before it exists, along with material options and a fixed quote. Nothing is cut until you have approved that. Where a finish matters, we send physical samples. If the project is confidential, we sign an NDA before any of it starts.
If you are working on something now, the fastest way to start is to send what you have, however rough. See what we make and how we work, or start a project.
