Back in 2020, New York design studio Jumbo unveiled a spun aluminum chair modeled after a fortune cookie as part of its Creature Comforts series inspired by pandemic life. “During quarantine, takeout Chinese food has been a guilty pleasure,” the studio’s co-founders, Justin Donnelly and Monling Lee, told Azure in a story that ran about the collection at the time. Today, Jumbo launches a production model of Fortune in plastic with Heller. But make no mistake — while this new edition maintains all the charm of Jumbo’s initial design, it is nevertheless a careful reworking, underscoring the differences between a conceptual furniture piece and a functional seat for the masses.
A year and a bit after it first posted about Fortune, Jumbo received a surprise email from John Edelman — the former Design Within Reach CEO who went on to buy Heller after Alan Heller passed away in 2021. “John found it reposted somewhere and tracked it back to us,” says Donnelly. “He sent an email to hi@jumbo.nyc saying ‘Hey, is this your chair — and would you be interested in making it with Heller?’” At first, Jumbo read the email with disbelief. “But that’s how John rolls,” Donnelly continues. “And after our conversation started, things went really, really quickly.”
For Donnelly, the Heller brand was wrapped up in some interesting personal history. “Gary Hustwit, the documentary filmmaker who made Helvetica and Urbanized used to live above me,” he says. “So I remember seeing Helvetica when he first released it in 2007, and in that movie, he interviews Alan Heller several times — they talk about working with the Vignellis and they talk about the [Hellerware] cups. That was probably the first time I got exposed to the original vision of the company.”
Since officially taking the reins of Heller in 2022, Edelman’s mission has been two-fold: reintroduce the brand’s classics (most recently, a toilet brush designed by Philippe Starck in 1995) while also building out a growing portfolio of original offerings. Hence putting a student project that he discovered at ICFF into production as the Swell catchall last year — and crawling the internet for other promising talents like Jumbo. “It’s really evidence of the democratizing power of social media — as much as I want to stay off social media,” says Donnelly. “We were really touched to be tapped for this. It’s an honour to now be featured alongside Bellini, Gehry and the Vignellis.”
That said, it still took Donnelly a minute to wrap his head around working in Heller’s signature material. “We had not worked in plastic before,” he says. “I actually did a retreat with Inga Sempé at Vitra in 2016, and she was very clear, ‘Don’t any of you dream of doing a plastic chair — I’ve never done one and neither should you.’ But then this opportunity came and working in plastic became very exciting to me.”
So what won him and Lee over? “I think that doing plastic work for production is a very different thing than doing a one-off or edition series,” he says. For one thing, there’s the price aspect: Heller’s Fortune chair (launching exclusively at Design Within Reach and through Heller’s webstore) retails for $1,175 USD, making it one of the most affordable lounge chairs in DWR’s catalog. Donnelly is also proud that the chair includes more than 25 per cent recycled content — which pushed the chair’s production partners beyond the eight per cent that they originally proposed. (The plastic is also 100 per cent recyclable.)
Beyond changing the design’s material, Jumbo and Heller worked diligently to improve its comfort. Donnelly is the first to admit that the original, spun aluminum version of the Fortune chair was more an expression of form than something created with the human body in mind. “It was very beautiful, but excruciating to make and quite uncomfortable,” he says. Leveraging expertise from his former DWR gig, Edelman tasked Jumbo with pursuing a rotation-moulded double wall design for the plastic version of the chair. “The section through the final chair is pretty informative, because the inside shell has nothing to do with the outside shell,” explains Donnelly. “It comes to these incredible pinch points but also has huge balloon areas with all this interior volume. You get a chair that’s very comfortable, but also has these perfect funnels and arcs on the outside.”
To fine-tune the chair’s comfort factor, Jumbo invited friends and family to hang out on prototypes. “Honestly, you don’t know where the pain points are until you sit in something for a while — there’s a five minute chair, a 15-minute chair, a 30-minute chair, but our goal was to get to something that you can be comfortable reading a book in,” says Donnelly. “And frankly, that took a lot of iterating. My college roommate is 260 pounds, and another friend is five-foot-two. So the two of them really gave us clues about what we needed to do to make the chair as universal as possible.” In particular, the top rail and backrest shapes evolved a lot to accommodate a range of seating positions and allow people of different sizes to all sit with their feet on the ground. Adding to both the chair’s versatility and engineering complexity, it also incorporates drainage to allow for outdoor usage.
Along with Cookie (a creamy yellow colour that honours the chair’s original inspiration), the design launches in five other food-inspired hues: Oatmeal, Olive, Tomato, Dark Cherry and Licorice. “I have to give credit for the colours to Monling, because she is an amazing colourist and really recognizes how colour drives these powerful nostalgic associations,” Donnelly says. “To us, one of the best ways to not to contribute to throwaway culture is to create things with emotional resonance. And I think the form and the colours of this chair really do that.”
Fortune launches today at DWR’s studio at 957 3rd Ave, and will also be on display this Sunday in Heller’s booth at ICFF. Find more NYCxDesign 2024 events in our festival guide.
The post Heller Brings Jumbo’s Fortune Chair From Instagram Into Real Life appeared first on Azure Magazine.