What do you do when you have too many guests at your dinner party and not enough chairs? You probably have a few folding chairs stashed away in a closet somewhere. But folding chairs are ugly–and they still take up a lot of space.
“It’s a chair with a belt–that is a conversation starter, which is part of what design does,” says Bret Recor, the founder and creative head of Box Clever. “It’s not like pulling out the ugly folding chairs no one wants to sit on. It speaks to the need for space saving and not compromising what you really want to have as your home decor and the quality of your furniture.”
Cinch came about because one of Box Clever’s designers, Merric French, asked Recor if the design studio could partner with his parents’ furniture company in Australia. After months of discussion and prototyping, the partners created a chair that’s supposed to be beautiful enough to leave out all the time, but can be disassembled and reassembled whenever you need more space or more chairs.
The biggest challenge during the design process was making sure the chair would hold together. The designers played around with having a prescriptive order that people would use to put the chair together, and then a final piece you’d slot in–like a keystone–to make sure everything stayed put. But Recor wanted a design that wouldn’t require any instructions at all and didn’t require any pins that people might lose, so the team instead created a prototype very similar to the final version, where all you have to do is slot the legs into their holes in the frame, add the back and seat, and the chair is finished. But there was still a problem: The front legs had the tendency to come undone. That’s when they created the belt–and everything came together.
While Box Clever isn’t accepting orders yet, Recor estimates the initial cost of each hand-made chair will be $1,000–pricier than a folding chair, to be sure. But so much easier on the eyes.