Winnipegger designs best seat in the house

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This article was published 18/11/2023 (1032 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A doctor’s visit led to chairs — plenty of chairs, all across the globe.

And, for Winnipegger Nicole Marion, a deal with one of the largest furniture companies in the world.

“It’s so exciting and so fantastic,” Marion said. “I really hope this comes full circle and ends up in doctors’ offices.”

The Percy lounge chair, she means.

The chairs come in a variety of colours, such as “traffic red,” dark blue, leaf green. They’re options through NaughtOne, a British branch of corporation MillerKnoll. The international business drew around $4 billion in sales this year.

Percy is not the first item Marion, 45, has designed, nor is it her first to be sold. However, it’s the first she’s created for herself, and the first time NaughtOne has partnered with somebody from Winnipeg.

“They were the pinnacle of where any of my furniture designs could potentially go,” she exclaimed.

She’s well versed in creating couches, coffee tables and cat towers.

Marion stumbled into designing furniture while a graduate student in the University of Manitoba’s architecture program.

For one assignment, she designed a baby blue sofa and built it through Palliser Furniture. The finished seat is in her mother-in-law’s basement, she said.

“What I really loved about furniture design was that it was kind of a smaller scale, and just a bit quicker gratification,” she said, comparing it to something such as planning a bridge.

Marion worked in sales at EQ3 before joining their product development team in 2005. She moved to Gus* Modern in Toronto, creating coffee tables and sofas before returning to Winnipeg’s EQ3 in 2015.

“I was really interested in being that freelancer,” Marion said.

The time came after her 2017 maternity leave. She took a two-year role with Article, an online furniture shop, while starting to freelance on the side.

She wanted to design something for herself, she said.

She had already formed Studio Marion, her freelance business, when she was sitting in a doctors office and noticed a tube following a curvaceous path around a chair.

“There was nothing special about the chair, but I did like that one detail,” Marion remembered. “(I) thought, ‘If I really beefed up that diameter of the tube, what would that look like?’”

Once home, she began drawing, which led to 3D software renderings and a submission to the 2020 Interior Design Show in Toronto.

Shape Industries, a manufacturer on Hutchings Street, made Marion’s prototype. The chair was named the best prototype at the Toronto show, which spotlights new products and famous designers.

“I felt strongly that it shouldn’t just be sitting in my living room. It should go into production,” Marion said.

She contacted different furniture businesses. NaughtOne, after much back and forth, committed to the lounge chair.

It officially launched last week and will be sold globally. Contemporary Office Interiors in Winnipeg sells the chair.

Commercial entities will likely be the main clientele, Marion noted. A NaughtOne price book starts the Percy lounge chair at $3,469, with price increases based on customizations.

“It’s an entirely different experience when (I’ve) just designed for myself, made one of them, had my kids hanging all over it in our living room,” Marion said.

“And now (it’s) out in the world.”

Both Marion’s experience and the Percy chair’s lauding during the 2020 Interior Design Show factored into NaughtOne partnering with the Winnipeg resident, Nadean McNaught, managing director for NaughtOne, wrote in a statement.

“We were drawn to Percy’s bold and expressive design,” McNaught added.

Marion isn’t done.

“I think it’s time to design something else for myself,” she said, adding it was a fun, rewarding process.

Hardware may be the next area she tackles.

gabrielle.piche@winnipegfreepress.com