Jul 01
Fyrn’s lineage traces all the way back to the Hitchcock Chair Company – a business founded in northern Connecticut in 1818 with the innovative idea of mass producing chairs using interchangeable parts.
The company had a 100-year run until the Great Depression hit, nearly wiping them out completely. But in the early 40’s, a group got together to revitalize the business, and one of those folks was Fyrn Co-Founder Ros’s grandfather, who led Production.
A 4th generation woodworker, Ros spent his childhood in and around wood shops, first working as a teenager for his father’s general contracting business and later working in his father’s custom door shop and alongside his brother building timber-frame homes.
Ros also saw and heard first hand the challenges his grandfather faced while leading production at the Hitchcock Chair company – from warehousing to distribution to the servicing of furniture.
A move to the Bay Area in the 1990s marked the beginning of Ros's eponymous woodworking business, a custom cabinetry and furniture shop that regularly took on jobs for some of the most high-end builds and remodels in the city.
After more than fifteen years of working for some of the best-resourced clients in the Bay Area, Ros felt compelled to explore inventive ways to scale to high-end craftsmanship. This exploration resulted in a proprietary parts-and-pieces system, now called Stemn, that enables not only for operational efficiency, but true circularity in furniture.
Together with co-founder David Charne, who shared his conviction that a systems approach to design could solve challenges in the furniture world, the two thoughtfully built Fyrn with a core philosophy that the way something is made matters just as much as the product itself.
Over 200 years after the Hitchcock Chair Company came to be, Fyrn continues to operate in the same spirit as the Hitchcock Chair company -- bringing craftsmanship to more people through a lens of innovation.
