Hem | ScandinavianDesign.com

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Great design can enrich lives. That’s what Hem believes. As an independent design brand and platform for progressive thinking, the company aims to inspire the creative community through collaboration, innovation and experimentation, collaborating with vanguard designers and renowned European manufacturers to deliver progressive designs of the highest quality, readily available and economically shipped worldwide.

A direct-to-consumer challenge to old-school design retail

Hem was founded in Stockholm in late 2014 by the Swedish industrial designer Petrus Palmér, who launched the brand entirely online out of frustration with how the design industry did business. As Palmér has put it: “Most brands are operating in a traditional business model, partnering with middlemen. That makes them distant, put on pedestals, merchandised and sold by other venues.” Hem’s direct-to-consumer approach was built instead around a closer relationship with its own community — feedback channels straight from customers to the brand, and organic growth driven largely by word of mouth as the wider D2C movement took hold.

A network of vanguard designers

That founding philosophy shaped who Hem chose to work with. Faye Toogood designed the Puffy seating collection, later expanded with a velvet upholstery option, while Max Lamb designed the solid-ash Max collection, built, as Hem describes it, with “strength as a primary requirement” to endure for generations. Staffan Holm designed both the Udon chair — blending European and Japanese carpentry traditions — and the Alle round media table, and Anderssen & Voll designed the Kumo sofa, a modular seating system also inspired by Japanese design concepts.