Wilkhahn

About

Wilkhahn is a German furniture manufacturer based in Bad Münder, Lower Saxony, that produces office and conference furniture, including task chairs, conference and multipurpose seating, sit-stand stools, soft seating, mobile and stand-alone tables, and acoustic screening elements. The company was founded in 1907. Friedrich Hahne and Christian Wilkening founded a chair-making factory that year in Eimbeckhausen, near Hanover, now part of Bad Münder, producing solid beech chairs from local timber. Their sons, Fritz Hahne and Adolf Wilkening, took over the works in 1946, and Fritz Hahne led the company until 1982. The contracted name Wilkhahn, formed from the two family surnames, came into use during the 1950s. In December 1970 Fritz Hahne announced a fifty per cent profit-sharing scheme for employees, taking effect in January 1971. The firm trades as Wilkhahn Wilkening + Hahne GmbH+Co. KG and remains connected to the founding family: Jochen Hahne, the third generation to lead it, was chief executive for more than two decades before moving to the chair of the supervisory board in autumn 2021, and Götz Stamm was appointed chief executive in January 2025. Headquarters and the main plant stand at Fritz-Hahne-Straße 8 in Bad Münder, on a site that also holds an administration building by Herbert Hirche from 1960, four tent-roofed pavilions with suspended timber beams designed by Frei Otto in 1987, and production halls by Thomas Herzog completed in 1993 that cover 8,000 square metres and carry a solar installation and planted roofs. Product development runs through both outside designers and wiege Entwicklungsgesellschaft mbH, a development company in Bad Münder founded in 1985 out of Wilkhahn's own development department that also works for clients in other industries. Earlier ranges were shaped by designers including Georg Leowald, Herbert Hirche, Roland Rainer, Walter Papst and Wilhelm Ritz; later collaborators include Klaus Franck, Werner Sauer, Andreas Störiko, Fritz Frenkler, Justus Kolberg and the office ProduktEntwicklung Roericht. Construction typically combines die-cast aluminium bases and swivel arms with through-dyed polypropylene and polyamide components, polyurethane cushioning and covers in fabric, leather or Fiberflex. Seat shells are made to be unscrewed and reupholstered so that a chair can be refurbished rather than replaced. Wilkhahn received the German Environmental Prize of the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt in 1996; its Bad Münder headquarters holds EMAS validation and ISO 14001 certification, in 2001 it was the first company in Lower Saxony certified under EMAS 2, and FSC chain-of-custody certification has been in place since 2013. The FS chair, designed by Klaus Franck and Werner Sauer in 1980, was the first Wilkhahn chair built around a single-piece flexible seat shell; its self-regulating mechanism adapts to the user's movements without manual adjustment, and more than two million have been sold. The Confair folding table, designed by Andreas Störiko and introduced in 1994, is a mobile conference table that one person can fold, wheel and link without tools. The ON task chair, designed by wiege and launched in 2009 after a five-year development phase with the German Sport University Cologne and others, uses a patented three-dimensional kinematic system called Trimension, built around two separately moving swing plates; it received the German Federal Ecodesign Award in 2012. The Stitz sit-stand stool, from ProduktEntwicklung Roericht, stands on an elastomer bellows filled with quartz sand and supports a posture between standing and sitting. The furniture is specified mainly for offices, boardrooms and conference rooms, and for seminar, training and multipurpose spaces, where the mobile tables and stackable chairs suit rooms reconfigured frequently. Wilkhahn Asia Pacific, a subsidiary founded in 1999, has manufactured at a facility in New South Wales, Australia, for 25 years, and its ON, FS, Graph, Timetable and Confair lines carry Australian Made certification. Products are available through the brand's official website and its dealer network, supported by national subsidiaries. Wilkhahn is a long-established German manufacturer of office and conference furniture, working in the contract seating and table segment from a main plant in Lower Saxony.