Remaking Ulla

Over the past 10 years, hundreds of vintage pieces have been rediscovered on the second hand market and many of them put into production again. Once I found out about the background, I contacted Ola Kettunen's son Ari in the US to discuss re-issuing the Ulla stool.

I had researched the company Backman and written an article about it some years ago, and through my exhibit at the design museum in Helsinki, I got in touch with both the Backman and the Rajala family, who had bought the business in the late 1970s. 

Backman Form or Nordic Upstream as it's now also called, has worked with virtually all Finnish design furniture companies since the 1980s, developing numerous classics in the process. They instantly found the project interesting and we started developing the concept together with Piiroinen to turn the welded design into a modular one, suitable for flat packing.

In order to make the Ulla stool viable for international distribution, I had to rethink the structure of the stool as a solid chair would make the package too bulky to ship outside of the Nordics.