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COFO Wants to Manufacture Your (Really Good) Furniture Ideas

Desmond Chan and Randy Simmen of COFO are giving young designers a chance to turn their ideas into Canadian-made home furnishings

By Tory Healy
Photography by Arash Moallemi

Meet local design studio COFO. Short for Cofounders and helmed by Desmond Chan and Randy Simmen, COFO introduces Canadian-made home furnishings by emerging designers to the market. The goal is to champion homegrown talent and innovation, and introduce exceptional pieces – not mass-produced or expendable – to the competitive world of retail.

This is how it works: First, young designers answer COFO’s annual call for submissions by sending in their plans for original home furnishings. COFO evaluates these, picks their favourites and collaboratively fine tunes the designs through a series of revisions and prototypes. The final iterations are engineered and then fabricated from premium materials in a manufacturing facility just outside the city. The products are then sold online through COFO’s shop with a percentage of the profits turned over to the designer.

Want to check them out for yourself? Head down to their new space at Stackt Market (which we just so happened to name our Public Space of the Year for 2020). COFODESIGN.COM


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