Vitra

Vitra was founded in 1950 by Willi and Erika Fehlbaum, who took the company's name from the display cases, or vitrines, it originally produced as a shopfitting business near Basel, Switzerland. In 1956 the family moved production into a new office and factory in Birsfelden, where the firm remains headquartered as a Swiss family-owned company. A 1953 trip to New York introduced the Fehlbaums to the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson; Willi negotiated a European manufacturing license with Herman Miller, and Vitra began producing Eames and Nelson designs in 1957, the deal that turned a fittings maker into a design-furniture manufacturer. The company later added its own campus across the German border in Weil am Rhein, including Frank Gehry's Vitra Design Museum (1989) and the Herzog & de Meuron-designed VitraHaus (2010). Vitra also runs a circular-economy retail arm, the Vitra Circle Store, giving showroom models, trade-fair pieces and other used furniture a second life; the Amsterdam-area outpost of that program operates from Zaandam, north of the city, while Vitra's B2B Amsterdam showroom is in the Houthavens district. Panton and Eames pieces remain part of the current range sold through Vitra's dealer and showroom network.