A New Zealand office furniture maker has hit the big time, designing an office chair that could have sales of more than 200,000 units a year.
Lower Hutt-based Formway Furniture signed a licensing agreement about 18 months ago with American firm Knoll, the world's fourth-largest office furniture maker,for it to make and sell the "Life" office chair.
Formway managing director Rick Wells said the Americans would make the chair for 50 countries and his company would produce it for New Zealand and Australia.
He said at the launch at Te Papa in Wellington yesterday that he expected the product to earn $15 to $22 million annually in foreign exchange, once it was established in the market.
Wanganui firm Axiam would make and export the armrest components, supplying Knoll's factories.
Annual worldwide sales could be 200,000 chairs, including about 30,000 in Australasia.
He said 10,000 had already been sold in the United States, where the chair had been on sale less than eight weeks.
Formway would receive royalties from Knoll sales.
The lightweight chair took four years to design and is 65 per cent manufactured from recycled materials.
It features an "intuitive" system that automatically adjusts to the person's weight, with no use of the chair controls required.
Wells said the design took "30 person-years" of work and was the biggest single design project the company had done.
He said Formway presented Knoll with a prototype chair design about two years ago, and they then helped refine the design.
The Americans and Europeans told him at a big Chicago furniture expo in June that the product's design "went beyond the best in the world". The chair won the top award for the best seating design at the event.
Economic Development Minister Jim Anderton praised Formway at the launch, saying the company was well on the way to joining the ranks of New Zealand's great achievers.
He said the chair's lead designer, Mark Pennington, was a key figure in the Government's design industry taskforce set up in May.
