Podium Designs

The founder, owner and head designer of Procson pulpits is industrial designer New Zealand born, Stephen Procter.

Having studied commerce, languages and design, he moved to Australia in 1999. Back then, he worked for a Sydney based design consultancy. During his time there, he designed many products for Australian companies and in his spare time, various products for churches.
 
In April 2007 he showed a groundbreaking range of children’s furniture at the Salone Satellite in Milan, winning the top award for the Satellite and attracting considerable press attention. Click here to see more. 
 
Then he turned his attention to church products. In particular, pulpits.
 
Now, here at Procson, Stephen heads up a team of Pulpit Specialists who are constantly refining the pulpits in our existing church range and designing new podiums. The process from the initial idea to full scale production is an involved one that takes many months. The pulpits on this website are the best from 32 lecterns that were built and tested. They are the result of many prototypes and rigorous testing over many months and years of research and development. 

We often get asked why do we have so many ideas, do so many CAD (computer aided design) drawings and models, build so many prototypes and yet so few make if through the process?

That's because pulpits fail at the development process for several reasons: stability, weight, aesthetics, cost and ergonomics (design for the human body based on anthropometric data).

Many of our great looking ideas ended up being too heavy to lift or not stable enough (we couldn't get them through the tipping phase of our testing). Conversely, many stable and lightweight pulpit ideas just were not good looking enough for today’s modern churches.

Even after a pulpit design is released for sale, we constantly refine it. This is based on our own tests and feedback from our customers. In particular, our 'tough but fair' customers are very helpful. These are churches, like Hillsong church, which use our lecterns and tables under extreme conditions. A lectern at Hillsong church or Hillsong conference will be constantly moved, bumped, knocked, carried, transported, disassembled, assembled, televised and used by some of the worlds most well known preachers. Feedback from extreme usage situations helps us to constantly improve them, giving you a better pulpit experience. As a result, we make incremental improvements to the balance, weight and production quality and make subtle aesthetic improvements to produce an ever better pulpit design.

After all, we are Pulpit Specialists, so it's what we think about all the time.