COMPANY NAME Athanasios Babalis Design Studio (ababalis.com)
COUNTRY Greece
SECTOR Creative & Cultural Industries / Retail — furniture design and manufacturing
CIRCULAR BUSINESS MODEL Circular product design, Product life extension
CHALLENGE
Chair-making still works on a one-size-fits-all assumption. Chairs are built with fixed dimensions and permanent joints, so when a user outgrows the chair or their needs change, the chair is replaced rather than adapted. Children’s furniture shows the effect most clearly: adjustable children’s chairs exist, but their range is narrow and they are typically discarded after around five years of use. Obsolescence is built into the design.
Athanasios Babalis, an industrial designer in Thessaloniki with more than twenty years in furniture design, identified a gap in the market: there was almost no solid wood seating adjustable across a full lifespan. A market review carried out at the start of the project confirmed it — existing adjustable chairs target children and teenagers, rely on a small number of fixed positions, and are rarely designed for repair or part replacement. Solid wood makes the problem harder still, because its rigidity, grain direction and response to humidity resist the kind of modular connections that are routine in metal or plastic furniture.
SOLUTION
The Up2Circ project set out to design, prototype, test and prepare for market a solid wood chair that a single household can keep and re-adjust for decades. Seat height, seat depth, backrest position and angle, footrest position and the overall floor angle are all adjustable, giving one chair a fit range from age 5 to 85+, including users with reduced mobility.
Over twelve months the studio compiled anthropometric data across the full age range, reviewed more than thirty connection and adjustment systems suitable for solid wood, and built and user-tested two successive physical prototypes before finalising the design. The project closed with production drawings agreed with manufacturers, a full cost analysis, packaging and user instructions, a brand identity and marketing plan, and a business plan — a market-ready product rather than a feasibility study
CIRCULAR ECONOMY STRATEGIES/ BUSINESS MODEL IMPLEMENTED
The project applied the circular economy principles as follows:
– Narrowing resource loops: one adjustable chair replaces a sequence of chairs bought over a lifetime, removing entire production cycles rather than making each cycle marginally lighter. The chair ships flat in a carton that is 31% of its assembled volume, cutting transport emissions per unit, and uses natural wood with minimal stainless steel and natural oil finishes in place of composites and plastics.
– Slowing resource loops: the design target was to extend useful product life from around 5 years to 40 years or more. Every component is removable, serviceable and replaceable, so a worn or damaged part is exchanged instead of the whole chair. Two rounds of user testing were used specifically to make the adjustment process simple enough that owners actually re-adjust the chair rather than replace it —
unmarked adjustment holes on the first prototype confused users, and clear markings were added to the second. A ten-year warranty backs the durability claim.
– Closing and regenerating resource loops: the chair is built from sustainably sourced European ash or European beech, confirmed as appropriate by a wood technology expert from the University of Thessaly, with a small number of stainless steel components that separate cleanly from the wood at end of life. The business model provides for chairs to be taken back by the manufacturer, refurbished and resold, and for spare parts to be supplied throughout the product’s life. A licensing route to other furniture manufacturers is intended to extend the model beyond a single studio.
IMPACT
The environmental case rests on avoided production. Measured against a baseline of children’s chairs replaced every five years, serving 5,000 users over a 40-year period requires around 40,000 conventional chairs — approximately 400,000 kg of wood and 20,000 kg of metal. The same 5,000 users served by One Chair require 5,000 chairs over the same period, or around 50,000 kg of wood and 2,500 kg of metal: a reduction of roughly 87% in both material streams. Each avoided replacement also removes the associated manufacturing energy, packaging and transport, and the compact flat packaging reduces emissions on the chairs that are shipped. The project contributes directly to SDG 12 and SDG 13, and indirectly to SDG 7 through the lower embodied energy of natural wood.
Commercially, the project moves the studio from selling design services to owning a circular product. Against a baseline of approximately €25,000 per year in design service revenue, the business plan projects around €1.97 million over five years from chair sales, licensing and increased demand for circular design services. The chair is positioned at €750 retail, at the upper end of the junior chair segment and the lower end of the adult and senior segment — a price justified by the fact that one chair replaces several.
Social Impact:
The chair was tested by over 120 users in the region of Thessaloniki across three age groups: 60 children aged 5 to 16, 40 adults aged 19 to 65, and about 20+ people aged 65 to 88, ten of whom had reduced mobility. Their feedback shaped the final design, including a deeper seat, a repositioned backrest and a raised arm height that older users found easier to push up from. The result is a product designed for inclusion rather than for an average body. The service model — repair, refurbishment and component replacement — creates demand for skilled local craftsmanship and long-term customer relationships instead of volume replacement, in line with SDG 8, while the ergonomic focus across all ages supports SDG 3.
KEY TAKEAWAY
The Up2Circ project delivered what it set out to: a finished, manufacturable circular product, validated by two prototype rounds and 120+ users, with production drawings, branding, packaging and a business plan in place at the end of twelve months.
Two lessons stand out. First, in solid wood furniture circularity is decided at the joint — if parts cannot be separated and reassembled reliably, nothing else about the design extends the product’s life, and finding
connectors that were strong, affordable and simple enough for an untrained owner to operate took the bulk of the technical effort. Second, adjustability only counts if people can use it; the clearest improvement between the two prototypes came from making the adjustment process legible rather than from any change to the mechanism.
The main deviation was cost. The finished chair is more expensive to produce than projected, driven by material and production costs at low volume, and the economics depend on scaling up production. That trade-off — a durable, repairable product carrying a higher unit cost until volumes rise — is the central commercial challenge now facing the launch.