office-furniture
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Autonomous Started With a Standing Desk. Now It Wants Your Whole Office to Think.
A New York furniture startup shipped millions of desks and chairs to more than 30 countries, then bet its next act on a stranger idea: hardware that reasons. Here is how a Kickstarter desk turned into an AI hardware workshop.
The Office Chair Became an Empire: Inside MillerKnoll’s Modern Design Machine
A century of modernism now runs through one portfolio - from Aeron chairs and Knoll classics to textiles, healthcare rooms and home stores. The bet is that the future of furniture belongs to a company that can sell an object, furnish a building and explain why the room should work that way.
Staples
Staples spent four decades selling the things that make work possible. Its more interesting act is turning a familiar office-supply store into the place where America finishes the fiddly jobs the internet cannot.
Karen John
Karen John is the founder and CEO of Heartwork, a New York furniture company she launched in 2012 to drag the workplace out of its sea of gray, black, and beige. Trained as an industrial designer in Milan and an engineer at Stanford, with an INSEAD MBA and a former VP of Merchandising stint at Design Within Reach, she rebuilt the most boring category in office design - storage and lockers - into something people actually want to look at. Heartwork builds steel furniture and smart lockers domestically, leans on color as a cultural tool, and has raised a Series A backing John's bet that beauty and durability belong in the same room.