The Kari collection expands

New types of furniture were not just developed to expand the collection, they were created to meet a real need, and this way, to could also guarantee the demand. I was having a dinner with Pekka Korhonen and his wife Ruth Korhonen in a restaurant in Turku. Ruth and Pekka told us that they had sold 600 armless chairs. The problem was that it didn’t exist yet. I immediately started thinking about it, I got an idea and I drew a sketch on napkin with the main dimensions. The idea was accepted and Pekka made the first prototype based on it. Then I joined the work drawings together. The second prototype was created in a couple of days. A couple of weeks after the restaurant evening, the Kari 2 chair was ready for production.

The Kari 3 chair was born in 1982. In the absence of product testing machines, Pekka Korhonen tested the Kari 3 chair by dropping prototypes from the second floor level onto the concrete floor of the first floor and drawing conclusions about the degradation pattern. It was a really tough test! But as a result of the test, the connection between the legs of the chair improved. The parts of Kari 3 were initially assembled by hand presses. Pekka Korhonen developed a high-speed press for this purpose. The Kari 3 chair was awarded the first SIO prize at the Copenhagen Fair in 1982.