Liberty Diversified International, the parent company of Safco, is launching Onsemble, an entirely new independent brand that promises to champion the power of collaboration and help its customers break free from the siloed, individual workplaces of the past.
The timing couldn’t be better as companies rethink the workplace and seek out new ways of fostering a sense of community and collaboration in a post-COVID world that still totters between in-office and hybrid work.

Creating a new brand is never easy, but Onsemble has a marketing and design dream team behind the launch. Kristy Howe, the general manager of the new Onsemble brand, has been at the company for about a year after leading marketing at Anderson Corp. and as a leader in 3M’s e-commerce business. She is joined by industry veteran Shawn Green, vice president of product, marketing and innovation. Green has been with the company for about three years after recharging design at KI and stints at Knoll and Steelcase.
The team has created Onsemble as a new brand that will offer a comprehensive range of contract furniture designed for the ever-evolving needs of the modern workplace and learning environments. Their product categories, including non-panel-based systems, diverse seating lines and modular storage solutions, prioritize interaction and shared experiences.
“The market is hyper competitive and demands differentiation,” said Howe. “Know who you are, know what you’re good at and be loud and proud about it. (The market) has an insatiable appetite for novelty. But I would contend they don’t just have an insatiable appetite for the next chair, the next color, the next thing. They have an insatiable appetite for ideas and problem solving.”

The evolution of the workplace is part of the brand story, but Onsemble goes beyond mere customization. It offers a comprehensive suite of furniture made-to-order with industry-leading lead times of 4-6 weeks. This approach empowers clients like architects, designers, and facilities managers to create spaces that perfectly reflect their specific needs, while streamlining the procurement process.
The new brand is being launched at NeoCon where it will share space with Safco (11-1147) in THE MART. According to Green, one half of the Safco showroom will be dedicated to Onsemble and the other half will remain Safco.

Onsemble’s initial product catalog will be built using some products from Safco — good products that might not fit perfectly under that brand — and some entirely new products. Additional products are already being developed.
“We want to be really clear that this is a new brand, and this is what this new brand is intended to do from a solutions perspective more than just the product,” he said. “We want to be able to connect the dots and develop a broader set of relationships.”

As a brand, Onsemble will offer its furniture collection at mid-market pricing to make the products accessible to a wider range of organizations, from higher education institutions to small and medium businesses.
“Onsemble is a combination of some things that we developed as well as wholly new products,” said Green. “We’ve got this mentality that we can’t make everything; we’re not as vertically integrated as everyone else in the industry. The things that we do make, we want to make really well and then compliment those with strategic sourcing partners primarily focused on North America, which gives us the flexibility to do things like custom colors and customization for our clients, but also that our initial strategies be highly coordinative, more like an apparel approach. So, the idea that, ‘This goes with this.’ They may not be exactly the same colors, but they’re coordinative colors. We’ve been very careful about how we’ve curated this offering, kept it small, very synergistic.”

Green said Onsemble wants to be a resource for designers. The brand is designed to give them a place to go for something that is unique and differentiated but still highly pragmatic and practical. There’s a difference between being intentionally quirky and really being different as a derivative of need, he added.
The Onsemble name is a play on the word ensemble. Ensemble is a group of items viewed as a whole rather than individually. The brand wanted to play off that and have an ensemble of products, an ensemble of workplace, an ensemble of cultures.
Onsemble’s team is working to prepare new products and introductions for NeoCon. There’s a new desking system to launch, BIFMA testing to complete and marketing materials to create. It’s been a busy spring at LDI’s Minneapolis headquarters.


