Now more than ever before in history, good design is global design. The plurality of cultures, generations and stylistic influences in modern workplaces has escalated and evolved in leaps and bounds since the office cubicle was first institutionalized across the corporate landscape. Responsible for furnishing many of those initial cubicles to offices throughout the world, Haworth recently launched a partnership in the North America with the Poltrona Frau Group; it is called the Haworth Collection. Boasting and assortment of furniture pieces made by Italian design giants Cappellini, Castelli, Cassina and Poltrona Frau, the Haworth Collection is the company’s much-needed brand extension into ancillary workspaces. What this collaboration ultimately does is inject high design and a real sense of specialness into areas that previously may have been programmed for functionality rather than style.
“The brands we have chosen to partner with are global design leaders,” said Kurt Vander Schuur, Corporate Brand Director for Haworth. “If you look at the designers who create products for these companies, they’re the best in the world. We had a very purposeful direction with the Haworth Collection. We currently have the horsepower and the bandwidth to discover great designers on our own, but we just couldn’t do it quickly enough to meet today’s corporate needs. Haworth is networked around the world and we will continue to leverage our global network to find more designers for this collection,” he said.
The Haworth Collection, along with the launching of the Integrated Palette of furniture systems at NeoCon, has marked a new stage in the A&D development of the country’s second largest furniture company. Seeking to make the critical leap from being a contract furniture provider to being a provider of complete interior spaces, Haworth’s recent introductions reveal the company’s intention to give designers freedom to create spaces as traditional or unconventional as their clients require. “We have worked really hard to make ourselves acceptable to the design community,” said Mr. Vander Shuur,” and the Haworth Collection is another example of using our global presence and our network to bring great products from around the world to the rest of the world,” he said. “We are not the same Haworth that we were ten years ago, and five years from now we will not be the same Haworth that we are today because we are trying to look to the future. Our next product meeting is next week and it’s in China; that is simply who we are today.”
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