Ahrend

About

Ahrend is a Dutch furniture manufacturer, founded in 1896 and headquartered in Sint-Oedenrode, that produces office seating, desks and tables, storage, acoustic and privacy products and room-in-room pods for workplaces, healthcare buildings and schools. The business began in Amsterdam, where Jacobus Ahrend set up an agency in drawing and painting supplies in 1896; the company's own account describes a drawing board and a compass box as its first goods. Office furniture entered the range in 1926, and in 1941 Ahrend took on the steel furniture manufacturer De Cirkel, which gave it a base in metal production. In 1967 De Cirkel and the steel furniture maker ODA were brought together with Ahrend in one company. The centenary year of 1996 brought the Dutch royal designation, and the business became Koninklijke Ahrend, or Royal Ahrend. The Central and Eastern European contract furnisher Techo was acquired in 2005, and 2015 added Presikhaaf school furniture and the Dutch manufacturer Gispen; the nine former Techo branches began trading under the Ahrend name on 1 January 2021. Royal Ahrend is a private limited company governed by Dutch law, with the Bermudian HAL Trust as its ultimate parent and controlling party; HAL Investments records a shareholding of 98 percent. Rolf Verspuij has been chief executive since December 2023, and the head office is at Kofferen 60 in Sint-Oedenrode. Design work is divided between an in-house studio and outside collaborators. Marck Haans has headed the design department since 2010 and is credited with the Ahrend Balance and Team_Up desk collections and the Aero conference table, while lead designer Kees de Boer developed the Ahrend 450 school furniture set of 1998, the Ahrend 456 teaching table of 2012, now sold as EDUU, and the Ahrend 230 office chair. Paul Brooks, Ben van Berkel of UNStudio, Basten Leijh, HofmanDujardin, Marijn van der Poll, Justus Kolberg and Frans de la Haye have all contributed products. The group manufactures in six of its own production locations, among them Sint-Oedenrode, a wood hub in Prague and a plant in China, and runs a Circular Hub at Veghel that refurbished 66,740 items in 2024. Circular construction runs through much of the catalogue: modular parts that can be replaced, Cradle to Cradle certified materials, take-back arrangements, asset management and furniture-as-a-service contracts. Two chairs from the De Cirkel period are the products most often associated with the company. The Revolt, designed by Friso Kramer in 1953 while he worked at De Cirkel, is a four-legged chair whose frame is folded from sheet steel rather than the tubular steel then common, carrying separate seat and back shells. Kramer worked with Wim Rietveld on the Result chair of 1958, built by the same cut-and-folded sheet steel method, which received a Signe d'Or award and was first used as a school chair; HAY reissued the Result in 2017 and the Revolt in 2020 in collaboration with Ahrend. In the current range, the Ahrend 2020 task chair by Paul Brooks, launched in 2010, uses click connections and Torx screws so that parts can be swapped out, and about half its weight is recycled material. The Ahrend Remode, designed by Ben van Berkel of UNStudio and presented in May 2024, is a modular task chair weighing 14.5 kilograms in which 78 percent of the plastic is recycled, 62 percent of that recovered from ocean sources; it received a Red Dot Design Award for product design in 2025. Ahrend names its markets as office, education, healthcare, working from home and store furnishings, placing the furniture in workplaces, schools, care buildings and retail interiors. Products reach buyers through the brand's official website and its dealer and showroom network, which covers more than twenty countries, and the company offers fit-out, refurbishment and leasing services alongside the product ranges. Ahrend is a long-established Dutch manufacturer of office and contract furniture, operating within the Royal Ahrend group alongside the Gispen and Techo brands.