Learn why Red Engine built their internal design team on Vectorworks

PROFILED FIRM: RED ENGINE LTD. | LOCATION: LONDON, UK

CHANNEL PARTNER: CADVENTURE

Cadventure are proud to be working with Red Engine to support the growth of their in-house Design Team using Vectorworks which started during the Pandemic in 2020. Read on to understand more about what was behind that decision and how this has supported their growth.

“One of the great thing about Vectorworks for us apart from the drawing functionality is the rendering capability on elevations and the sketchy line appearance which give it more of a hand drawn effect”

Red Engine is the team behind Flight Club and Electric Shuffle. It first opened its doors to Flight Club Darts back in 2016 and has become the home of Social Darts. Electric Shuffle first opened its doors in 2019 and is their fast growing shuffleboard concept.

Co-founders, Steve Moore and Paul Barham developed the concept of automating scoring and gamification into these two brands whilst adding hospitality and bar elements for the ultimate experience.

Since then, they have opened multiple locations across the UK, America and Australia, now launching 8 to 10 venues a year globally. Each venue project takes around 12 to 18 months to complete from site identification to opening its doors to customers so can be a long journey and they produce a lot of design information and drawings.

For many of the early venues the Red Engine team were outsourcing the interior design to an external agency. As the appetite in openings grew and both the Flight Club and Electric Shuffle brands were becoming more established it made sense to internalise the function. During the pandemic in 2020 Red Engine decided to start building their own internal design function and produced designs for the Flight Club in Bristol and Electric Shuffle in Dallas with the new team.

Jimmy Dare (Red Engine – Property Design Director)

“Setting up a completely new function in the business through lockdown was a massive challenge! This is when we first researched and selected software that would suit the team requirements. It’s also already an established product across the hospitality sector which helped as we looked to grow the team with relevant experience”

They decided to invest in Vectorworks Architect through Cadventure, which was driven around the stability, ease of use with graphics and quality of the output for drawings and rendered elevations. This approach has proven successful and now they complete all the UK interior design schemes using Vectorworks.

As they have franchise and licence partners in multiple countries, it can become challenging for design teams to interpret and use the information sent to them with multiple types of different design software used around the world. This can be because of different formats, measurement, etc.. Vectorworks solved these issues with multi format exports and dual dimension styles in metric and imperial. This simple feature within Vectorworks helped the process be more efficient for the design team.

After Red Engine had completed their first couple of projects, they set about growing the interiors team to also accommodate the concept and design intent packages for all international partners and franchisees. Over the last two years the team has grown to its current size of ten designers.

Jimmy Dare (Red Engine – Property Design Director)

“The efficiency and quality of service we can offer to our licence and franchise partners is greatly improved by using Vectorworks software”

During the recruitment process they found that a lot of people within the hospitality industry have experience using Vectorworks which means that their hiring process smoother and increases the recruitment options. They can employ team members with Vectorworks knowledge so no training is needed, and they can hit the ground running and focus on the project and brand development.

Deirdre Hayes (Red Engine – Head of Interior Design)

“The team that we have developed over the last two years is really efficient with the use of this software programme”.

This is just one of the many examples of how Vectorworks has improved the workflow for a company in the most simple but effective way. To learn more about Vectorworks and how it can help you, reach out to us.