
On the whole, our industry enjoys a wonderful alliance between suppliers and specifiers. When “hitting on all cylinders” those relationships can be truly symbiotic, and this story begins with a great relationship between Gary Hart of Hart Associates, the Tuohy sales representative in Kansas City, and Populous Architecture. Mr. Hart was of the opinion that Tuohy and the product design practice at Populous should be working together on new products.
Populous is most famous for architecture on a grand scale – think major stadiums, sports arenas and convention centers, and the urban planning involved in those mega-projects. Capitalizing on its proximity to Kansas State University and the excellent combination Master’s Degree program the university offers in Interior Architecture and Product Design (IAPD), Populous has built an accomplished product design studio under the leadership of Senior Principal, Adam Stover, KSU class of 2002. The project team for what became the Pleat Collection was led by Garrett Steinlage, KSU class of 2017.
At the urging of Mr. Hart, an exploratory meeting was arranged between a team from Populous and Matt Elder, who is in charge of product development at Tuohy. The meeting produced an agreement to work together on a seating collection with a broad range of applications ranging from the private office, where Tuohy is strong, to hospitality, where Populous has deep experience.
I asked Mr. Stover to comment on how the Product Design practice at Populous decides which companies to work with and which products to work on. He said, “For Populous, it’s a couple of things. Our focus is to create solutions where we see voids in the market and the manufacturer’s portfolio. In this case, we saw a need at Tuohy for a seating collection with a wide variety of bases, designed to integrate into a variety of applications and verticals based on materials and configurations. The depth of flexibility allows a designer to utilize the same collection and manufacturer throughout the project while being able to tell different stories along the way.”
“The first priority is that we’re solving a problem and not just creating another widget. When it comes to working with a company, you can’t really solve a problem if you don’t know the company, their capabilities, and the people involved. I’ve known Gary Hart and Jeremy Aug [Tuohy VP of Sales] for a long time, and over the years we’ve developed a level of trust in Tuohy and their collaborative approach, projects, and the obstacles that occur along the way.
“Just like anything, I wish I could say everything always goes right, but that isn’t reality, and it’s important that when problems do arise, we can jump on the phone and go straight to the source and know that we are working together to solve the problem. The manufacturer and their design representatives are extensions of our team. It is important to work with companies we know and trust and to work on solving real voids in the company’s portfolio and real world needs we see on our projects.”
I asked Tuohy CEO, Dan Touhy, what the company was hoping to achieve with the product. He said, “We had been talking about expanding our seating portfolio, and because Tuohy is pretty concentrated in the private office segment, we wanted a product with ability to play in the hospitality market, but was refined enough to work where we’ve traditionally been strong.”

Once the agreement to collaborate was in place, and the problem was set in the broadest terms, the Populous team set about designing the solution. The team Mr. Stover put together along with himself and Mr. Steinlage included Felicia Balestrere and Kuebler Perry. Within a few weeks, they sent Tuohy sketches that outlined their ideas.
“We loved the ideas and because our area of expertise is wood our plan was to make the chair using a molded plywood shell,” said Mr. Elder said. “But after a fair amount of exploration, we realized that we couldn’t keep some of the aesthetic details we had fallen in love with, so we shifted gears and began working on molding the shell of engineered plastic. I knew we’d need help engineering a very complex, multi-functional molded plastic shell, so we brought Conrad Marini, of the Toronto area development engineering firm, CMM Design Associates onto the team. Once that decision was made and the full Pleat team, including Populous, Tuohy and CMM, was in place, the rest was just solving the problems as they arose.”

“We spent many iterations making sure the comfort was there for each of the base types. We had to make small adjustments to attachment points and geometry for each base to be sure the chair is comfortable for a range of body sizes and seated positions. And throughout the process, we all worked hard to protect the aesthetic details Populous wanted and we loved. It was a great team effort with everyone playing their part.”

Product development is a team sport, and each member of the team I spoke to was full of praise for the work of the others. In my opinion that is one of the best signs of a high-functioning team. It takes dedication to the best possible result and a willingness to try dozens if not hundreds of approaches in order to keep desired details – whether you’re talking about comfort or the stitching of the back-pleat, or the way different fabric choices interface.

When I visited Tuohy last December, I was treated to a review of the latest prototype. I particularly liked the shape of the “bucket shell,” especially the simple way the arm was made from an aesthetically unique folding-over of the edge. I say simply, but the team assures me it wasn’t simple from a tooling design and molding standpoint. At the time of my visit, they were still working on the adjustments to accommodate the five base types, making sure the chair was comfortable on each one.
This year the art of launching a product in our industry is in uncharted water, so it’s my hope that officeinsight can be one avenue for our audience to see “what’s new!”
I congratulate Tuohy on a splendid design and development result, and I hope their dream of selling the chair into hospitality projects as well as corporate office projects comes true.



