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Why school furniture? So my first post.

It’s nice that you are on this site! Let me start by introducing myself:

Introduction, or initiation  

Good morning / good evening: my name is Andrzej Polanowski and I have been selling furniture for over a decade. My adventure with chairs began in 2012, when I started working in one of the largest factories of bent chairs in the world – in Fameg (acronym for the Polish: FAbryka MEbli Giętych, “Factory of Bentwood Furniture” in English). As I am a Commercial Director, my job is not only to sell, but also to coordinate the implementation of new chair models.  

 

And during each implementation of a new chair design, the implementation team always asks itself constant questions:  

 

  • is the new model ergonomic?
  • is the model comfortable? (as if they were two separate aspects…)

 

Since 2012, we have implemented many different models of chairs – I hope you know some of them … – that received favorable opinions, including on ergonomics. However, in 2018 at the furniture fair, during one of the many conversations about furniture – my interlocutor aggressively said “if you are so good, you have such a tradition behind you, you will design good furniture for children – there are no such on the market …”.

 

Do you know the moment when random words have such power that they hit the fertile ground to take root there? For me it was exactly like that – at this moment – because it was the time when I was the happy father of 2-year-old Antoś, and my daughter Marysia was to be born in a month. This conversation – accidental and unexpectedly important – gave me so much food for thought, especially in the context of my children and their future education.

 

Halfway, discovering that Sitting is a new smoking

The ground is the ground, but you have to prepare for the project, so I started by reading all the available literature. My thinking has completely reevaluated scientific articles about the impact of a sedentary lifestyle on our body… So many years of work in the production of chairs, and these articles have completely changed my idea of ​​ergonomics. Until now, the ergonomics of chairs for me was, in short, a synonym of sitting comfort. Simple isn’t it? And yet…

I realized that if we design chairs so well and they are so ergonomic, why does about 80% of the population experience severe lower back pain at least once in their lifetime?

The Americans called this our new lifestyle “sitting is a new smoking”. It was very telling for me. I think each of us has a few friends among our friends who have had sciatica or other back problems. Unfortunately, it is our “sedentary” lifestyle that causes most of these problems.  

 

Looking through the offers of Polish manufacturers of furniture for schools in the category of chairs, in 99% of cases we get chairs that are … scary … look like torture devices and “treat” the user in exactly the same way. That is why I always suggest to adults who buy such chairs for their pupils, that they spend 8 hours on the same model (of course in the size for them) during their work. Hmm, I wonder why most of them are looking for a different chair in the middle of the day … 🙂  

 

At the end, or why and what next…

Unfortunately, what we have on the market now is more due to ignorance and little attention to issues as important as sitting! And sitting is an activity that we unfortunately do for most of our day.

 

I decided to take the matter into my own hands and this is how the idea for the holme brand was born – a brand whose task is to educate and create furniture that is friendly to our body.

 

I’m not saying that I know everything and I found everything that has been published about healthy sitting 😊 But I hope that in the next materials you will find a lot of interesting information, helpful for parents, teachers, uncles, aunts, etc … Because healthy sitting is our common case. I think so.