Natalie Hartkopf was fresh out of college, standing in a Seattle design firm’s lobby with a single chair in her arms, when she learned the hard way how the furniture business actually works.
“I just show up with a chair, just doing a delivery drop-off, and they’re like, ‘Okay, we’re going to gather the team, we’re going to bring them around,’” Hartkopf recalled. She hadn’t brought a catalog. She hadn’t brought snacks. She hadn’t prepared a presentation. “Sheer panic” is how she described the moment she realized she was expected to present Hightower Furniture on the spot.
That baptism by fire happened not long after her father decided to start a new business connecting Scandinavian furniture manufacturers with U.S. designers. Hartkopf joined at the beginning — she says she was “thrown right in the deep end” — and more than two decades later she is chairperson and co-owner of Hightower, the furniture manufacturer the family built from that idea.
Hightower has marked two decades in business. The company started as a bridge between Scandinavian product and the American market, began meaningful growth by 2006, and didn’t hire its first employee until about 2008 or 2009 — meaning for a few years it was just the Hartkopf family running the business. Hightower is a certified Women’s Business Enterprise and is owned by Natalie, Wendy and Rachel Hartkopf.
The early years, she said, is where the company’s product instincts were formed. Hartkopf spent five years doing outside sales in New York, working out of a showroom at the New York Design Center, and even handled logistics herself, riding the metro to Long Island City to receive shipments and add labels before sending furniture back out to customers.
“I feel like I’ve touched a lot of parts of the business over the last 20 years,” she said.
Those years of asking designers what they needed, and not finding it, shaped how Hightower built its catalog. “I think I was asking a lot of questions. I wanted to know what the designers were looking for, what they weren’t finding, what they expected,” Hartkopf said. With around 10 manufacturing partners to draw from early on, the company could pivot quickly toward whatever type of seating, table or material designers said was missing. She calls it a mix of curiosity and “a little bit of naivete” that let Hightower move faster than competitors.
Hightower’s manufacturing footprint is now split between domestic production in High Point, done largely through licensing arrangements with its overseas partners, and relationships that have expanded well past Scandinavia to include Spain, the Netherlands and Italy. Alongside that, the company has spent the last five years building out the in-house Hightower Studio Collection with its own design and engineering team. The company is a certified B Corporation, a designation Hartkopf said reflects Hightower’s focus on governance, environmental impact and scrutiny of the materials and suppliers that go into its products.
Hartkopf, who now splits time between Seattle and France, was recently named to leadership roles with both BIFMA and IIDA. She said the appointments grew out of a long-standing interest in where the design and manufacturing sides of the industry talk past each other and where they don’t talk at all.
Asked what the industry gets wrong in its relationship with designers, Hartkopf didn’t hedge. She pointed first to product-development timelines that can run three to five years for a single chair, arguing manufacturers need a better balance between anticipating what’s coming and simply responding to what customers are already asking for. Her sharper critique was about information: manufacturers, she said, aren’t “empathetic enough” to how hard it is for specifiers to sift through incompatible formats and figure out where a product stands on price, lead time, aesthetics and compliance all at once.
She also took aim at the industry’s obsession with novelty. Sales reps, she said, often struggle to get appointments at design firms unless they’re pitching something brand new, a dynamic she believes discourages companies from marketing meaningful improvements to existing products. “We’re fueling this cycle of always having to have something new,” she said, adding that the resulting waste, in unsold inventory and abandoned product lines, is “a huge problem in our industry.”
On the future-of-work debate that dominated design conversations for much of the past several years, Hartkopf said the urgency has cooled because the industry has accepted there isn’t a single answer, not because all the questions were answered. What persists, in her view, is the tension between collaborative space and space for focused, uninterrupted work, something she said applies as much to office layout as to how constantly people are pulled at by notifications.
On sustainability, Hartkopf pointed to supply-chain transparency as unresolved fights. Hightower participated in a Declare Equity label pilot aimed at improving visibility into Tier 2 suppliers, the vendors that supply a company’s direct suppliers, which she said exposed just how quickly that visibility breaks down once you move past a company’s immediate supply chain, particularly as manufacturers are forced to switch vendors amid ongoing disruptions.
Despite being one of relatively few women leading a manufacturing company in the sector, Hartkopf said she draws most of her guidance from employees who’ve worked elsewhere in and outside the industry, and from an informal network of other women running similarly sized manufacturing businesses.
Looking ahead, she said her priority is material innovation and circularity, an interest she said is partly why she’s spending more time in Europe, where she sees some of the most advanced thinking on material reuse. She recently completed IIDA’s Certified Design Futurist course. Her goal for Hightower over the next five-plus years, she said, is for the company to be defined by responsible manufacturing and materials with genuine end-of-life planning, as eco-friendly materials that were experimental a few years ago start to become commercially viable.
