Zody Chair

Haworth History

User-controlled, ergonomic office chairs from Haworth provide support for a range of sitter needs, from a 60 hour, high-tech workweek to an office waiting area. Their office seating collections are engineered for comfort and durability, using sustainable processes and materials whenever possible. Adaptable. Sustainable. Ergonomic. These are hallmarks of the Haworth Brand.

First named Modern Products in 1948, the company was started by school teacher and skilled craftsman, Gerrard Wendell (G.W.) Haworth as a woodworking operation in his family’s garage. By 1954, Haworth was building office environments, such as innovative office partition systems/moveable wall products for the United Auto Workers headquarters in Detroit. Renamed Haworth, Inc. in 1976, Dick Haworth took the helm and drove toward growth, increasing the company’s size by 400 percent over the next 20 years. The company introduced a new pre-wired panel design, sold its partition business and pioneered strategic planning. Next they introduced Haworth (core) Values.

Haworth undertook a strategic, global expansion plan in 1988. They acquired numerous companies in Europe, North America and Asia over ten years in order to build a complete portfolio of product lines. Haworth also expanded its sales and dealer network, beginning its evolution toward becoming a truly global organization.

The Ideation Group, a specialized team of workplace scientists, designers, and analysts, was established in 1995 to focus on aligning the physical work environment with an organization's culture, work styles, strategies, and business objectives. Their science-and-design approach leverages an organization's unique assets to improve workplace effectiveness and user satisfaction plus they applied user-based research to create breakthrough concepts and products. By 2000 Haworth had acquired architectural interior companies to expand beyond furniture into adaptable interiors in order to respond to customers’ need for a better way to build interiors.

Hayworth won the 2004 NeoCon Best Large Showroom Award and two more times in the next four years with their re-imagined Chicago showroom. It also achieved LEED®-CI Gold-Level Certification in 2004. In 2008, One Haworth Center, their corporate headquarters was born with sustainability, design, and adaptability as the drivers.

“[We] can no longer use the tried and tested practices of the last 30 years to respond to the challenges we’re being faced with today. They’re no longer valid. They’re no longer relevant… Our customers need to demand more and our industry needs to set itself up to provide it.” — Bill Black, Haworth