How Maiden Home Crafts Custom-Made, Built-to-Last Furniture at Attainable Prices
The brand was born out of two epiphanies, noho Co-CEO Richard Shirtcliffe told Living Cozy. The first was a design insight. Namely, Shirtcliffe notes, after decades of pioneering performance ergonomic seating for the office, noho’s design partners at Formway spotted the need to bake dynamic ergonomic comfort into beautiful residential furniture.
“Essentially we were born to move but typical home furniture doesn’t permit us to,” says Shirtcliffe.
The second epiphany was a more personal experience. Whilst surfing with his family in Bali, Shirtcliffe was shocked by the amount of unchecked sea plastic. “The opportunity that presented was to bring together these origin moments into a brand that creates ‘life-enriching furniture’ that enriches homes, bodies, and planet,” he says.
The first of those ‘life-enriching’ products is the revolutionary noho Move chair, which is designed to bring a new kind of comfort to everyday life.
Created from thousands of hours of research into how we live, the sustainably crafted chair has a patented mesh seat design that flexes in 4 ways and offers support that cradles your body. Its revolutionary design ensures correct posture and dynamic ergonomic comfort.
The Move was designed to support modern life at home from dining, to relaxing, to working. “I think we live life very differently from our parents,” says Shirtcliffe. “Homes are more open plan and casual; typically formal rooms are rare; and a huge percentage of family life happens around the ‘hub of the home’: the kitchen/dining/family table.”
And much of what we do at that table “is not dining,” he explains. “Given that, we need furniture that supports all of those activities and variety of postures demanded by them.” With the Move, noho set out to solve the challenges of modern living in a way that’s beautiful, styling and incredibly versatile.
Dig deeper: Read our review of the noho Move chair here
Shirtcliffe believes that business success and sustainability go hand-in-hand. ”It’s weird, isn’t it? That ‘sustainability’ is still a sub-category of products in any category,” he explains. “Why isn’t that table stakes?”
”It’s weird, isn’t it? That ‘sustainability’ is still a sub-category of products in any category. Why isn’t that table stakes?”
noho is driven by the idea that it’s possible to create beautiful furniture, that improves the well-being of both users and planet. “And if we’re going to do that, surely we have a responsibility to honor that right down through packaging and business model,” Shirtcliffe says. “So we did the hard, hard work of figuring out how to create a ‘life’chair from recycled materials, and ship it in plastic-less packaging.
To craft the Move, noho has partnered with Aquafil, whose regeneration process turns recovered fishing nets and end-of-use carpets into regenerated nylon that goes into its chairs. The brand also takes a “less-is-more approach” to packing, and all of its packaging materials are 100% recyclable.
noho also sees itself as a triple bottom line business which means it gives equal weighting in the business to People, Planet and Profit.
“Clearly, to have maximum positive impact as a business we need to be profitable over the long term,” notes Shirtcliffe. “But we don’t believe that that should be at the expense of the well-being of our team, nor the planet.” As such, noho opted to incorporate as Public Benefit Corp, and seek B Corp status.
“Our purpose is to change the way furniture is designed, made, and experienced."
“Our purpose is to change the way furniture is designed, made, and experienced. The ultimate, for us, is to be ‘net benefit’ to the planet,” adds Shirtcliffe.
The noho Move chair is $375 and has two color options: Cloud (white) and Ironsand (black). If you’d like to add some extra color to your chair, the brand also offers a range of toppers made from sustainably sourced New Zealand Wool.
