Industrial design guru Yves Béhar is selling 75 percent of his design firm, Fuseproject, to Chinese conglomerate BlueFocus Communications Group, reports say.
Béhar, who’s worked at Frog design and Lunar Design on projects for Apple and Hewlett-Packard among others, founded Fuseproject in 1999. The agency has designed or contributed to the looks of a variety of well-known tech products, including several Jawbone products, the Ouya gaming console, the Vessyl smart cup, the Edyn garden sensor, the August smart lock, Jimmyjane vibrators, and PayPal’s new logo, just to name a few.
“We still have the freedom to run fuse the way it should be run, with the means to grow on a global scale,” Béhar wrote in an email to Fast Company.
“Nothing is changing in the way I run fuse — I’m still CEO, we still choose our own projects, and design our own way, and are fully integrated with our venture partners Jawbone, August, Herman Miller. We’ll just do more of it.”
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He added that the two business are planning to build new practices, such as a nonprofit consulting business, for example.
BlueFocus is listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange with a market cap of $3.5 billion, with revenues growing 60 percent to ($560 million) in 2013.
