Hasta La Ideas

Here’s an unusual path to launching a new furniture product. Frederik Frøsig and Jonas Larsen, two friends and vintage furniture enthusiasts from Denmark, quit their jobs in 2018 to start an Instagram-based vintage furniture reseller. The venture met with success, and in 2022 Frøsig and Larsen decided to design and launch their own furniture design: This Teddy sofa.

In a sense, it’s minimum viable product. Two L-shaped pieces of foam and two foam rectangles, each wrapped in a corduroy slipcover. The only structure consists of three pieces of bent tubing.

The idea is that you can reconfigure the sofa into a bed, a larger chillax space or an impromptu playspace for children. The slipcovers are all removable and machine-washable.

The duo formed a company, OMHU, to commercialize the sofa. They also added a larger variant by adding two more foam rectangles and one cylindrical back section.

I’d say they’ve met with great success: Just two years after launching the Teddy, they’ve already got showrooms in Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark; in Malmo, Sweden; in Hamburg, Munich and Berlin, Germany; in Madrid in Spain; and in London in the UK. It’s an example of a simple design that took off quickly.