NewHavenBIZ

n e w h a v e n b i z . c o m N o v e m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 0 1 8 | n e w h a v e n B I Z 13 AT A GLANCE Hugo & Hoby Company: Hugo & Hoby Industry: Home furnishings Year founded: 2015 Headquartered: New Haven Principal(s): Fred Kukelhaus, Benjamin Young No. employees: 2 F/T our classmates and peers really loved the designs (though we must admit we are very much am- ateur woodworkers ourselves). We did discover from nights of building in our basement that our grandfathers — Hugo Kukelhaus and Hoby Young — were both furniture makers. us the idea for Hugo & Hoby was born. We've come a long way from those basements and now work with a network of over 50 fabrication shops up and down the East Coast — from wood, steel, stone, glass, concrete and upholstery fabricators to make custom, locally craed furniture for commercial clients. At one point you were going to crowdfund your pieces, with designs chosen by those funders. How did that plan work out? Young: When we were still students at Yale SOM and first developing the idea for how to make locally craed, sustainable furniture affordable, we came up with the following idea and business model: Inventory is a killer for furniture companies. It's expensive to build, expensive to store, and has the risk of not selling. is means high markups to account for the risk. So we came up with the idea to crowd- fund each design on our website, to not hold any inventory, build batches to order, and ship products direct to consumers through the mail using our website as our platform. We would feature designs on our website, collect orders over a discrete period of time (for example, two weeks) and then build the batch of designs with local furniture makers who we had partnered with in the region. ese designs would ship in the mail and customers would quickly assemble these very durable designs in around five to ten minutes. Convenient to order, affordable and sustainable designs — without high markups or middlemen. But you don't actually manufacture yourselves. We no longer do any production ourselves in-house. We work extremely closely with our partner shops though and spend almost a third to half of our time in shops each week discussing designs, reviewing fabrication, coordinating deliveries, checking designs for quality control, etc. It's a very personal and relationship-based. ese partner shops operate their own small businesses and so are contracted rather than employees of Hugo & Hoby. We do some final assembly and final finishing in our New Haven warehouse as needed (for example attaching steel frames to wood tops from two different shops in our warehouse) or putting a patina on a steel frame. We also do any needed touchups, fixes, etc. either in our warehouse or at the client site. Where are most of your partner shops located? e biggest conglomeration of our partner fabrication shops is located in the New Haven area, within 30 miles of New Haven, with many shops in New Haven itself, so many, many of our products get built in Connecticut and New Hav- en. We're also a Made in New Haven company — a city initiative they started about two years ago [to promote local manufacturing]. You have now mostly gotten mostly out of the residential and into the commercial sector, right? Young: We ultimately decided to switch our end customer to exclusively focus on custom furniture for commercial clients — restaurants, offices, universities, hotels, and developers — in- stead of individual residential customers. ese clients care a lot about durability, have a great design sensibility and have the scale to purchase their own batch of designs themselves as a single buyer for efficiency and good pricing. Can you give us a quick understanding of how the process works, from design to build? Young: Hugo & Hoby now works with a network of over 50 local fabrication shops from D.C. to Maine to design, build, and fabricate beautiful custom furniture for commercial clients. We work with a vast range of materi- als — from wood, steel, stone, concrete, glass and upholstery. We can practically build any custom piece at this point. Our process starts with carefully listening to our collaborators and clients on the project — sharing our design knowledge, expertise from past projects, and the vast knowledge that comes with working with an incredibly talented group of furniture makers up and down the East Coast. We generally are working alongside an architecture firm or inte- rior design firm who is managing the build of a commercial space — from a new hip restaurant to a corporate office, co-working space or a new residential hall at a university. We then work with our clients to provide renderings, shop drawings and material samples of proposed pieces and come up with a budget. From there we work with our amazing group of fabrication shops to build these custom designs - ensuring that pieces are built to spec, delivered on time, and meticulously craed. We then deliver and install the designs in these commercial spac- es. Making sure our customers are extremely satisfied from start to finish is what we specialize in. Large construction projects are very complex and it takes a team to make it happen. We try to be collaborators and team players at every stage of the project — working with all parties involved from the architects to the construction company to ensure a smooth project — from start to finish. In recent decades only people of some means could enjoy lasting, handmade furniture. Where does this desire for quality products, instead of throwaway products, come from? Is it generational? Young: We're big believers in buying quali- ty. It's much better to buy less things, but only things that last the test of time. As consumers, our society easily falls into the trap of price being the only thing that matters. e businesses that sometimes succeeded were those that could offer the lowest price. But it's a slippery slope: e external cost of the impact these cheap, unsustainable products that end up in landfills is almost never considered in the true cost. I do think there's a pendulum swing and a return to high quality, durable designs has certainly returned. ere's a movement towards buying from local craers and designs made from sus- tainable materials. It's easy to be short-sighted as consumers and because our generation is highly mobile, oentimes we purchase cheap designs knowing that we're going to move soon. It's not until people start to grow roots in a location, start having kids, purchasing their first home, that they really start investing in quality. From the commercial side, we see offices, restaurants, hotels, universities, and developers all investing more in high quality, locally craed furniture "Through our work, we're building stronger communities and trying to do our part to protect our beautiful planet." - Entrepreneurs Fred Kukelhaus and Ben Young Continued on next page

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