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John Walton: Hello and welcome to The Chain, a special limited run podcast focusing on the supply chain around the 2026 Aircraft Interiors Expo — From The Up Front, the home of in-depth independent aviation journalism at the very heart of the passenger experience.
The Chain delves deep into the often creaking seats, cabins, and interior supply chain. We sit down every episode with an industry expert from a company making up a key part of the chain. I am The Up Front editor in chief John Walton, and today I'm joined by Weiwei He. Weiwei, would you introduce yourself please?
Weiwei He: Thank you John. My name's Weiwei: I’m the director of Tangerine. We are a strategic design company based in London, and we sit in the very front end of the aviation supply chain. We create creative visions where passenger experience is imagined, defined and translated into practical cabin solutions.
So we usually create this cabin strategy and passenger experience vision, and we work with the supply chain to make the industrial design of the cabin environment and the colour, material and finish, and create that brand experience for airlines.
John Walton: And so when you get involved with airlines, is that usually on a sort of more strategic level, like you're their sort of strategic design partner? Or is it more one-on-one on a project level?
Weiwei He: It really depends on what our clients want. We have those long-term clients like British Airways and Japan Airlines. We've been working together for decades and they know us and we know the brand and we create a continuously cabin interior to renew the brand. And sometimes we got a client coming yo us for very specific projects: for example specific colour/material change for one or 10 aircraft. And sometimes we have a client come to us: they want to create completely new cabin environment where you want to start from zero and create something bespoke.
John Walton: Yeah, I was following over the last couple of years, you'll work with Japan Airlines on their new A350-1000, and was fortunate enough to fly that. It's a great cabin: it both feels very modern for Japan Airlines. Yet still sort of really Japanese in concept, in, conception. And maybe that's just 'cause I'm talking to you today from Tokyo, but it really does, it, it fits so neatly into that aesthetic for sure.
Weiwei He: I think you, you get our design intention very right. 'cause that, that's intention, that's ambition from Japanese airlines because they want to create something totally Japanese, but also can be filled and appreciated from the international passengers. So well done. That's our intention.
John Walton: Excellent. It worked. And as so you are selected for inclusion in the supply chain by an airline essentially. Do you work with anyone else? Do you work with a seat maker to sort of put their CMF together? Tell us a bit more.
Weiwei He: So working with airlines is a majority of our work. However, we do work with seat manufacturers to create the next generation product to sell to airline clients because we know the passenger very well. We know the airline very well, and know the industry chain very well.
So we worked with Collins for many years to create those new seats that's hiding upstairs in the AIX secret rooms.
John Walton: Yeah, it's always fascinating to get to to just pop back there every so often and see what see what's going on upstairs for sure. When you interface with the rest of the supply chain, how far deep do you go as a design consultancy? Are you looking at, obviously you're talking to seat makers, right? But how much further down into the sub suppliers and component manufacturers, do you go?
Weiwei He: We actually go quite deep. It really depends on the project. So there are two sides of things. One is CMF. So for that one we go very deep. For example, if we, create a new fabric for the airlines, we need to sometimes work with the dyeing of the thread to make sure that's the correct colour overall.
And if we work with with a laminate — we work with Schneller — that's working with a very detailed and many runs of sampling. And that's material side. And the other side is is industrial design. With seats or component manufacturers, also, if we do very tiny minor customisation, usually you just deal with the seat manufacturer.
If you want to do something deeper, you need to work with, paint companies. You need to work with lighting companies to make sure that's exactly what you want to the end product.
John Walton: I guess over the last few years, has that become easier or more difficult or the same? How has that changed? I mean, Obviously we hear a lot about, the supply chain becoming more constricted and the seat makers wanting to be more homogenous in what they produce and in what they certify and therefore have to recertify.
How has that changed recently?
Weiwei He: It is getting more and more difficult. And I think, overall because of the supply chain delays and the shortage of supply chain programs get delayed a lot. Also, because of that, on top of the certification issues suppliers tend to do very conservative things.
They want to know, when they look at the concept we created, they want to know, oh, can we certify it with current products? If it's no, that's a huge risk. That's going to delay the overall, delivery timeline, lead time. And then that will make the airline think, oh, is it worth it to add that extra little bit of extra heart, make it extra nice? And lots of airlines will be frightened to, just stay with what they already have.
So that, that's a little bit sad from our designer's point of view.
John Walton: Yeah, I can imagine, if you find the perfect, the perfect new laminate or perfect new switch or something that looks really different and makes things stand out in that, sort of, very tactile way within the cabin, and then you're like, oh, actually, can we get it certified?
Is that gonna be the straw that breaks the certification, camel's back kind of thing?
Weiwei He: Yeah, it's not everyone's fault because at the end of the day, it's a program. You need to control the risk, but it's just a little bit sad [to] move backwards. We want to see new things, new innovations, new experience, and bring more to the passengers.
John Walton: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Thinking more widely, what is the current state of play in the supply chain that you sit at right now? Like looking at between you and your customers, the airlines and the suppliers that you work with there, what's, how does it feel overall?
Weiwei He: It feels… to be honest, we have several programs being held because the client cannot get a slot for the delivery of aircraft. And we've got programs that's been delayed over a year. And we could have used that year to create something more interesting, but we just ended up waiting. So that, that's really a shame.
So that, that's really not ideal situation, I have to say. I really want to prompt the whole chain to, to think about a way to move forward towards better outcome for the cabin interiors.
John Walton: Yeah, no, for sure. And we are moving on to our next question really — what those challenges are above you in the chain with aircraft OEMs and that sort of thing. And yeah, that's gotta be very frustrating to have, got everything fixed and set to a deadline, and it's a very hurry up and wait feel to it for sure. How do you deal with it? Is there anything that you can do to avoid that? For example
Weiwei He: There's one project I want to talk about. We are currently working on a project with China Southern Airlines that was initially planned for an 18 months program. So with that pace, you only do very little customisations, but the client have big ambitions: they want to do much. Within that initial time, we couldn't.
But with the delays, it actually becomes a 30 month program. So if we know that at the beginning, we could create something much better than that. So we, after that, we tell the client, okay, if you want to do something more ambitious, you need to start really early.
Even when there's no immediate plan for the aircraft delivery, you can start thinking about that. You can start to work with us. We can use that extra bit of time to explore things, to find out what you really want, and then show that design to the supply chain and get them saying, oh, is there any risk in the certification? Is there anything that could be changed? So we use that time to work with the supply chain to make the design, make the concept more mature, more closer to production.
And when the project really starts, we can immediately respond. And that's our suggestion from a design company's view, to the problem.
John Walton: We've talked a lot about the sort of the early meetings, right — ITCM, initial technical coordination meeting, if you haven't been listening to the series already. A lot of what people are saying is, look we want to be involved, as early as possible, before ITCM.
But obviously for a lot of suppliers that's, it's almost work at risk really, because they haven't yet been appointed to the program. And a lot of them are saying we are willing to go a certain extent with this, but we can't throw all of our resources at a program that we haven't signed on the dotted line for yet.
How do you as a design company deal with that? Is that something that — you obviously are very familiar with all the suppliers that you use, right? You were saying you've got a piece of laminate you can go to Schneller, and you are familiar with their product line.
How can an airline, for example, leverage that sort of set of expertise with you at an early stage? Almost a sort of way of working with the suppliers before they start working with suppliers?
Weiwei He: I think first the airlines and the supply chain needs to be very transparent. They know, when we start this type of work with the supply chain, they know they're not chosen yet, but they also know the challenges they're facing. They also know our intention is to ease the, longer play, whoever wins it, that's to use their workloads. So they will participate and they were trying to help, and — it's right, they haven't signed a contract, they cannot put too much resource on it. But to be honest, you don't need that much resource.
We have this idea: we are actually practicing it. We have this program with our client. They have two suppliers, three suppliers, and we create concept design, we’re showing them our design. They hold three different conference call with us, with the engineers. They look at the data we created.
They immediately can point it out: what could be the risk, what could be, a better way from their manufacturer method. And we just adopt those changes. And then we create a concept that's quite mature and we have a next meeting with them, just to review the data again and saying, oh, those are the things that could be done.
And by the time we've had three meetings, they are already quite confident: Okay, we can do this. With the supply chain, we still need a little bit more time than customization other than the baseline products. That's inevitable, but that's already reduced lots of risk and that will make this progress so much smoother. Actually, one of the suppliers said, oh, thank you doing this way. You should promote it. That's the right way for us to move forward.
John Walton: Oh, okay. Let's promote it then. How does, what's the levers that you can pull in that sort of process?
Weiwei He: Yeah. We actually started eight months before the ITCM or the ITCM is not confirmed. They as well as — the airlines have clear idea what they want, what kind of aircraft they want, what kind of seating product they want, and we started to work with them to create concept and create a few concepts for them, focus on different supplier, different seatings and to present to them, to their senior managers, customer experience team, get their feedback, get the crew and passengers feedback. Then we confirmed our concept, that's happy within the airline.
And then we show that to the suppliers and see this is something we want to create: can you give us feedback based on your baseline product? Then we send the kind of samples to the CMF company suppliers and they can start it to do samplings and probably doing a two runs that's close enough to give a quote for the airlines and the seating manufacturer will be able to give a quote to the airlines.
Then you've got a concept, you've got a quotation, and airlines know exactly what they want, and the seating manufacturers know exactly what they want to, what the airline client wants to achieve. Yeah, you don't have to, you don't have to invest a lot. And the supply chain does not have to invest a lot in this process.
John Walton: That early involvement can really make an interesting change, so let's imagine that I'm a new supplier or an existing supplier with a new product. What's the best way for me, as a supplier, to get involved with you as designers, with you and your place within supply chain, to say: look, this is something we'd love to see on an aircraft. We think that it'd be really beneficial, really useful, really beautiful. Whether it's a functionally interesting or stylistically interesting or, fingers crossed, both of those things.
How does that, how do you incorporate those new ideas? Where do you take those those new products in from and how do you work with them?
Weiwei He: One way because, a lot of the airlines, they would like to put their stamp on things. They would like to make customisations. And so we would like to know, okay, this is your product. How did you create this product? What are the themes [you have] designed to be customised and in what way can be customised?
So that's the first step we would like to know: we don't want to create a concept that just flies away from your baseline product, and you're going to spend so much money to do that. We don't want to do that. We want to know exactly what are the smart ways we can do things before we even start.
So that, that is really a good start. And also for the CMF companies, constantly looking for new solutions and — well, they’ve already set up a really good relationship with our CMF team. They’re constantly coming to present the new products. And then when we see the interesting, visual effects, we'll recommend it to our clients.
So they have a really good way. CMF companies, our material companies, always have better relationship with design consultancies than the seat manufacturers. We do need to talk to the sit manufacturers: Oh, the client is interested in this seat. Can you tell us more about it? They also, they will introduce it to us.
John Walton: It's, it is always funny. I think that the the material suppliers are so connected in that sort of often it can feel like actually you almost speak with one voice sometimes that things like a RedCabin or a Passenger Experience Conference, right?
So yeah, absolutely agree with that. But I guess, looking at some of the challenges in, in terms of your, management of those suppliers or selection/ management of those suppliers, depending on the role that you're playing in the program. What are some of those some of those challenges that you are facing and how are you, how do you resolve them?
Weiwei He: Challenges? You mean the technical challenges or…?
John Walton: Yeah, I think mo mostly technical challenges, but there's something else, feel free to throw that in as well.
Weiwei He: Yeah, that, that happens all the time, because as industrial designers you do need to work within constraints. Artists do whatever you would like to have. You have to be a problem solving mindsets all the time. So you have a vision, hoping suppliers will be able to realise that, but that's not always the case.
When that's difficult, we need to use our creative thinking and problem solving approach to find an alternative way to solve that. We, for the last program, we have quite big issues for the cabin decompression, and we created — well, together with the supplier, we created a curtain type of structure for the bulkhead that solves the problem, that’s achieved what the client want to have. But also certificatable. So that's something that shows our approach.
John Walton: Cabin decompression is one of the things that comes up a lot, certainly in the, in the sort of forward cabins that, that we at The Up Front tend to write about. And that's something that people are running into along with doors and egress and and even some good old chestnuts like head injury criterion as well, coming back.
Weiwei He: Yeah, but the problem is you think something someone has already done before will be able to — you won't be able to do that. And that's exactly what we thought. But turns out there are some tiny changes in the seat [that] make it impossible. So you have to find a new way to solve that problem.
So that's something we find: the certification process is little bit like a black box. You would never know on the last stage, we know exactly the same seat in the same location in the last program, it works perfectly well, but now the certification changed a little bit. Now you need to move the crew seat.
John Walton: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, it's that's such a common sort of thing for people to say to me like that it feels like that just happens all the time. Even with the same regulator, right? We've seen a bunch of seats recently, where between regulators, they take a different regulatory view.
And that's in some way understandable if, of course, slightly frustrating from a design and manufacturing point of view. But yeah it, it's when that sort of, it happens: same seat, same aircraft, same regulator.
Weiwei He: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Weiwei He: So we will have to, we'll have to anticipate that all the time. We have to be flexible and trying to find a solution together. Yeah. With the chain.
John Walton: so Weiwei, the last question that I love to ask everybody is wave a magic wand and resolve one supply chain problem. What is that problem and how do you resolve?
Weiwei He: Yeah. Like I mentioned earlier, I think from designers, because we're not producing things, we have no influence on how things are certificated. We can only take suggestions. We can only take, people's experience. So what we could do is to spread the knowledge around the client: start program early and start this transparent dialogue across the chain, and also working with the chain to start to solve the problems from very early on. That’s my solution. If there's one
John Walton: it feels like a very sensible magic wand in this case. Just so putting that down concretely a bit I guess what can all the folks within the chain do to try and make that reality?
Weiwei He: Be open, be collaborative, and sometimes yes, you are in a competition with other suppliers, but you never know which one we’ll choose. And the whole industry will benefit from it if you support this kind of process.
John Walton: I see so much collaboration opportunity out there. But yeah, there are still sometimes those paper walls between between suppliers of, folks even on the same program, sometimes working a little bit at… counter productively for the size of the whole program.
Tt's been fascinating to observe, certainly. Coming back to your Japan Airlines example there is one supplier that you used on the program who, when I got on board said, do you mind any chance have any pictures of our products on the actual aircraft, because we don't have them yet.
Weiwei He: Oh, that's all the time. That's a classic. Yes. Yeah. Sometimes we design something, we have the data, but we don't have the real photo of it. We ask the crew to take a photo sometimes from the clients.
John Walton: For sure. Weiwei thank you so much for joining us on the chat. It was a really interesting episode and a really unusual perspective. Where can The Up Front’s readers and indeed listeners find you to discuss more?
Weiwei He: Yes, I would love to. Thank you so much for inviting me. This is a really good chance and also I could, like I said, I want to spread out the message, collaborate more early, the whole chain and the airlines should think about this earlier.
John Walton: Yeah. Absolutely. And where can folks find you to have those discussions? Will you be at AIX this year? Are you
Weiwei He: We will be, I will be at AIX, but however, as a service provider, we don't have a stand. You can reach me at tangerines email [mail AT tangerine DOT net] and we can set up meetings.
John Walton: Fantastic. Weiwei, thanks very much indeed. Listeners, you can find more of the chain and all of our in-depth independent aviation journalism on the passenger experience at The Up Front, on theupfront.media, and we'll be back with another episode of the chain very soon.
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