workplace-design
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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.
Ellie Cunningham
Ellie Cunningham is the CEO of Canoa, a Brooklyn-based design-technology company building a browser canvas that unifies mood boards, scaled floor plans, real product data and FF&E schedules for interior designers. A Pratt-trained interior designer who spent years running global design operations at WeWork, she stepped up from COO to chief executive in October 2024 and is steering Canoa toward a circular, low-carbon future for commercial furniture, where good pieces get reused instead of dumped.
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.