m.a.d. furniture design

Did you know m.a.d. furniture design runs across three time zones? Matt in China managing production, Dan in New Zealand running the engineering team, and Mark in the US leading design.

Why does this structure work? Because each person owns their role clearly enough that most decisions don’t need all three of them. Matt’s knowledge of the factories doesn’t need Mark’s input to function. Mark’s creative direction is clear enough that Dan’s engineering team can move without waiting on approvals. Dan’s technical work holds everything together in the middle without either of the others having to manage it.

Three people, three continents, fifteen years of furniture that reflects what happens when a company is built around actual strengths.

Fifteen years ago, two guys in an apartment in Shenzhen asked a simple question: what if the factories we work with every day were pointed at something worth making?

That question became m.a.d. furniture design. The answer is everything we’ve put into the market since.

Matt and Dan spent years inside some of the best furniture factories in Asia before they ever started m.a.d. When they did, they already knew exactly what those factories were capable of and what they were being asked to settle for.

That decision became m.a.d. furniture design and is still the reason our work looks the way it does.

Anybody can say their furniture is built to last. The more interesting question is how they know.

We built the m.a.d. LAB in 2018 specifically because we wanted to be able to answer that question with something more than confidence. It’s a 15,000 square foot facility in Asia where all of our ANSI/BIFMA testing runs in-house, on our schedule, against the products we’re actually shipping rather than samples prepared for a third-party lab. Every production run has a physical reference sample maintained against it, so when a shipment arrives on a project there’s a documented benchmark to check it against.

It’s not a showroom. It exists entirely so we can say we know our products meet the standard, not just that we believe they do.

Test reports and samples on request.

There’s a question worth asking before any commercial seating goes on a purchase order, and it’s simpler than most people expect. Not “does this look right for the space” or “is it within budget.” It’s just: can you show me the test reports?

“Commercial grade” is a phrase that has been stretched far enough that it doesn’t mean much on its own anymore. It appears on products that have been through rigorous independent testing and on products that simply look the part, with nothing documented behind the claim. The gap between those two things is invisible at the point of specification and very visible 18 months into a high-traffic installation.

A manufacturer who has genuinely done the work will hand over BIFMA test documentation without hesitation. If that question gets redirected or answered vaguely, that’s your answer.

Read more on our substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-208863912

Most furniture companies design a product and then ask a factory to figure out how to make it work. We’ve always done it the other way around.

After 15 years of working with the same manufacturing partners, we know exactly what our supply chain does well. Which processes run most efficiently, which material specs translate cleanly from design intent to finished product, and where complexity adds cost without adding anything for the person sitting in the chair.

That knowledge goes into every product from the first sketch, not as a constraint but as a design input. It’s one of the reasons our pricing lands where it does. Efficiency isn’t applied at the end as a discount. It’s built in from the beginning because the product was designed that way on purpose.

We get asked about our pricing a lot, especially how contract-grade commercial furniture comes without the contract-grade price tag that usually goes with it.

The honest answer is that it’s not cheaper materials or skipped testing. The Transit Chair is tested to ANSI/BIFMA X5.1 standards, with full-cycle testing run in-house at our own 15,000 square foot facility in Asia. The materials are contract-grade. The construction is built for the load cycles a commercial environment actually puts on a chair.

The price lands where it does because of how we built the business behind it. We skip the distributor middleman. We design in Chicago and manufacture through relationships we’ve maintained for over 15 years. We stock our bestsellers so there’s no lead time premium built in. Every layer we took out of the chain is a layer that isn’t getting priced into your project. Not a discount. A decision made fifteen years ago and built on ever since.

Read more: https://substack.com/home/post/p-206054200

There’s a poster on the wall of our Shenzhen office that gets looked at every single day. It’s a photographic work by Michael Wolf called Bastard Chairs, a collage of 100 chairs from the back streets of Hong Kong and mainland China, every one of them broken and repaired with whatever came to hand. Wire, rope, bike tire, tape. Wolf described them as a symbol of resourcefulness, and that’s part of why it’s there. But mostly it’s there because every one of those chairs started its life as a chair that failed.

A restaurant near our office opened recently, always packed, clearly a concept that was working. Within the first month three chairs had already been pulled from the floor, two with backrests bent beyond use, one snapped clean off. The operator carries that risk and so does the specifier who chose the wrong product for that environment.

At m.a.d. every product is tested to BIFMA standards continuously off the production line, not just once at launch. Because the chair that photographs well and the chair that survives a commercial environment are not always the same chair.

Photo credit: Michael Wolf
https://photomichaelwolf.com/ -chairs/1

Production lines change. Supply chains shift. A product that met every standard at launch can drift quietly if nobody is watching, and in commercial furniture that drift eventually shows up somewhere nobody wants it to.

At m.a.d. we test to BIFMA standards in design, in development, and continuously off the production line. We recently upgraded all our products to microfibre PU upholstery to exceed contract standards by two times, and we audit our supply chain partners actively at every stage of production.

The products that hold up in demanding commercial environments aren’t the ones that passed a test once at launch. They’re the ones built and monitored to a consistent standard, every production run. Your clients deserve that certainty, and so do you.