The new furniture brand Inside Weather offers “midcentury-inspired” pieces, like the Vita chair, which is a dead ringer for a Carl Hansen design. Courtesy Inside Weather
Hoping to achieve the success of Casper and Warby Parker, direct-to-consumer brands are flooding the home furnishings market.
One newcomer is Inside Weather, a venture capital-funded furniture brand that offers flatpack sofas, chairs, and storage pieces that are made in America, (supposedly) assemble in less than 10 minutes, and can be customized over 30,000 ways.
Founded by Ben Parsa, the former chief operating officer of the shuttered furniture startup Dot & Bo, Inside Weather claims to have solved many of the pain points in furniture shopping with a lineup that is stylish, affordable, and easy to buy. Customers pick a silhouette, then tailor the details—like upholstery, wood finishes, bases, and armrests—to suit their taste.
“We’ve found a way to offer an incredible range of furniture options, a way to manufacture them in a timely manner, and we’ve developed the management software to track and deliver every variable,” Parsa tells Curbed. “All of this difficult work culminates in one easy, end-to-end experience for the customer, and not only that, but a product that is affordable, custom-made, and easy to use and assemble.”
Oh—and a couple of the pieces are dead ringers for midcentury design classics.
Inside Weather’s Vita chair (from $398) looks a lot like the CH07 lounge chair by Hans Wegner for Carl Hansen, and its Nola chair (from $98) riffs on Charles and Ray Eames’ shell chairs. Its marketing copy invites customers to “redesign the classics.” The company believes it offers a different product after changing designs to meet the demands of today’s shoppers—the customization, how the chairs are assembled for easy shipping. Parsa tells Curbed in an email:
“It may not seem like it to the naked eye, but we’ve redesigned these pieces quite a bit. It’s a similar silhouette of course, but we’ve done a lot of R&D to enable them to ship flat, and to fit with our overall ethos of customization and easy assembly.
It’s no secret to anyone that the designs from which our Nola and Vita chairs take inspiration are prohibitively priced, and we see ourselves as serving those who, for a variety of reasons—whether it’s price, or a limited run of options—want something more customizable and more affordable like a Nola or Vita chair. Ultimately we view them as different products that address a different set of needs.”
But are these “reinterpreted classics,” or just rip-offs? It’s complicated.