Introducing Jennifer Newman

Designing a new product every month, Jennifer Newman is prolific. Her colourful, engineered furniture is robust (hence her popularity with clients like Nike, Spotify and Google), but also sculptural, a testament to her background in fine art.

'I’ve always been a colourist,’ says Jennifer when we chat about the connection between her artist background and her distinct furniture design, which mixes playful, vibrant colour with geometric shapes, honest construction, and hardwearing materials. In just over a decade, the company has grown from an idea born out of Jennifer’s frustration with the lack of long-lasting, sustainable outdoor furniture on the market to a thriving family business based in Clerkenwell. As well as her standard collections that are often found in homes, Jennifer develops bespoke furniture for clients like Nike, Coca-Cola, Virgin and Microsoft and for Waitrose’s outdoor cafés, the Bartlett at UCL and the RAF Museum. Sustainability and the circular economy are at the heart of the company, with each product manufactured within 30 miles of London.

Despite the differences between creating a canvas and a chair, there are clear parallels between Jennifer’s artist practice and her exacting approach to form and materiality today. ‘When I was working as an artist I would get hold of a material (it started with oils) and would then push that medium as far as I could, experimenting with different mixtures and additions before moving on to something else,’ she explains. Today this drive to explore materials informs Jennifer’s design process. ‘Where my art background comes in is pure proportions’ she explains. ‘Everything has to be scaled, even though the form looks quite basic.’ The Café table, for example, is a delicate but deliberate square-shaped perch welded from one piece of sturdy aluminium. ‘It’s the simplest thing you can imagine but it took four prototypes,’ she laughs. ‘It was a millimeter out but it was just wrong. It’s ridiculous. People wonder what’s wrong with me: a product will look fine but I need to push it until it’s exactly right.’

While Jennifer’s work on canvas was abstract and full of colour, towards the end of her career she started painting on aluminium – a material now present in much of her furniture collection. Her experimental, research-led art practice involved layering and scratching off paint from metal surfaces and eventually took her to the Swedish lab of industrial paint manufacturer Beckers where she would make work with ever more experimental processes, in collaboration with the company’s R&D experts.

Jennifer’s eventual move from art into furniture came just under 15 years ago, though a need for better furniture rather than as part of a masterplan. While building her home in Wiltshire, she paused her painting to focus on building full time and as she was searching for rust-proof, aesthetically pleasing outdoor furniture, she found the market severely lacking. ‘I was familiar with aluminium and its potential so I scribbled something down on the back of a cigarette packet and found a local fabricator. I spent a lot of time driving around visiting different workshops and absorbing everything I needed to know from the thickness of the metal to the bending capacity.’

These experiments later became her first product, a table named Groove. ‘Most of my training was in life drawing – I’m a big football fan because I love studying the movement of the players,’ she says. ‘Groove evolved from the idea of drawing a line in furniture. At first it was this pure, flat surface but it was too plain. I was looking at the piece as I would canvas and I introduced a groove down the centre for no reason other than to take away the boredom of the look. As it transpires, it was a stroke of luck because it also reinforces the table.’ Standard outdoor chairs looked ungainly underneath this streamlined, elegant form, so Jennifer developed what would become the stool Cube. ‘In the winter you can stow them underneath so it looks really clean, almost like a minimalist white sculpture.’

First friends, then friends of friends commissioned her to make them tables. ‘At that stage I never had a table of my own. As soon as I’d make one it would be snapped up,’ she says. ‘It was fun. Painting had felt quite self-indulgent, whereas the idea of making something useful was really pleasing.’ Before long orders were coming in so quickly that Jennifer felt that she should take the next step and turn her passion into a business. ‘My family were grown up and away from home so it was the perfect time. It would definitely have been very difficult financially when they were young as I needed a to earn a salary.’

Now Jennifer Newman the design studio is very much a family affair. Her husband Bernard Rimmer is the company’s structural engineer, while eldest son Joe left a lucrative career in the city to take over the accounts. Son Kris has only recently departed from the business to work for office furniture stalwart Steelcase. Alongside this tight-knit team long-term relationships with loyal fabricators support Jennifer’s quest for perfection. ‘I spend a lot of the time on the workshop floor, tweaking, pushing materials further. I’m always looking for new materials or new ways of working with materials. We work with probably the best welders in the UK and we’re very loyal to our fabricators.’

Jennifer is currently experimenting with hot rolled steel, a material formed when molten steel is passed through huge rollers creating an elegant patination on its surface. ‘It’s as honest and true to the material as you can get but having said that it’s still protected so it’s very practical.’ Over a decade on from that first table, much of Jennifer’s inspiration still comes from the needs of her family or the studio in Clerkenwell and prototypes (like those for her soon-to-launch domestic range) will be trialled before going into production. The success of her business stems from spotting a gap in the market and then doing things against the grain – a happy byproduct of being self-taught. ‘I’m delighted I didn’t train in product design because I think everything I do now would have been beaten out of me,’ she says. ‘Things have to be flat-pack to go into the back of the truck to be economical but right from the very beginning I knew I didn’t want fixings – I wanted the shapes to be pure.’

You can stay up to date with Jennifer Newman’s news and launches by visiting her profile page here.