Stelia takes focussed approach to perceived seat quality

Within the highly customised, relatively low-volume world of business class seats, manufacturers continue to encounter manufacturing quality problems that are all-too-visible to the airline and to the travelling customer. While these problems are by no means new, they are magnified both by the reduction in seat manufacturers (and indeed airline customers) following the mid-2010s round of industry consolidation and by the increase in more complicated, more customised seats over the last decade in particular.

Colour-matching problems between individual pieces of seat shell, for example, have driven the kind of smart design choices that involve avoiding two elements consisting of the same material adjoining, using a wider palette rather than a narrower one, and focussing on zones of flexible customisation.

But making those smart design choices requires a smart approach, and Stelia Aerospace’s is to treat the issue as one of perceived quality — by the airline — and to invest time and effort into capturing what the airline wants. Runway Girl Network sat down with Alain Bordeau, vice president of global sales and marketing, and Thierry Vinatier, head of perceived quality, to learn more.

“It’s a question of between what’s imagined by the customer, who is the designer, and reality,” Bordeau tells RGN, highlighting that, too often, an airline finishes up with a final product where “your feeling, your perception, is not what you imagined at the beginning”.

Some of this is a disconnect between the approach of designers and engineers — a ‘speaking different languages’ issue — and some is largely inherent to the process of industrialisation, especially during certification and production iterations.

Disconnects can occur as a seat moves from design to ITCM (initial technical coordination meeting) to PDR (preliminary design review) to CDR (critical design review) and FAI (first article inspection). And the disconnects can be different for each airline.

“When we start the development, we start with a brief, and we are very close to the customer and to the design,” Vinatier explains. “We ask them: what is the main most important thing in the development for the future usage of the seat?”

For example, for Lufthansa, the first thing is maintenance. “They accept, for example, some visible screws [on the] high-level finish from the seat. Also the feeling is to use the seat as a seat to work, with a lot of productivity everywhere, a large desk, lights, connectivity. With Air France, it’s completely different: the brief is to feel like at home, something very white, very soft. The priority is not at all maintenance,” he says.

In many ways, the seatmaker serves as a sort of pivot around which the design and engineering inputs into the product have to revolve. Key to Stelia’s approach here is a detailed perceived quality tool that it uses throughout the process, delving deeper into each element as the seat design and industrialisation progresses.

For the tool, Vinatier explains, “We have more than 900 points, checking if it’s aligned, if it’s at a good level with the expectation of the customer that we defined at the beginning… for each part, we answer nine questions: it’s three points for the look, three points for the shape, three points for the usage — for example, ergonomics, or the loads to push a button.”

Stelia Rendezvous seat pair in lay flat bed mode.

Stelia’s Rendez-Vous seeks to eclipse the rest of the market with the very residential, luxury interiors nature of its design. The seatmaker uses a detailed perceived quality tooI when developing a product. Image: Stelia

In the event of a disconnect, “as part of the convergence when we find we are not aligned with the targets, we work with the designer and we work with the airline,” Vinatier says.

As a smaller number of larger airlines place fewer individual orders for increasingly complex seats among fewer seatmakers, approaches like this can make all the difference.

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All images credited to Stelia