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Hudson is an elegant table particularly suited to dining or less formal meeting areas where a softer ambiance is needed. Available in a variety of top shapes that can be linked to provide flexibility in dining areas or form larger tables for meetings. A full range of cable management options can be specified so Hudson can step up to the mark when the latest technology is required. The Workbench Collections represent the best of British furniture design and craftsmanship. Developed to meet the most demanding needs of the corporate market whilst also meeting our aims as an environmentally responsible furniture provider. You can see Hudson at the Workbench Showroom, 3 Sutton Lane, London, EC1M 5PU.

Standard solutions shouldn’t mean compromise, here our standard Eve table is used to maximum effect in this stunning meeting room. The ability to tailor standard designs enables clients to select materials that complement the room's ambience, vary sizes to suit the space, and integrate the latest technology, resulting in the perfect on budget meeting room solution. The Workbench Collections represent the best of British furniture design and craftsmanship. Developed to meet the most demanding needs of the corporate market whilst also meeting our aims as an environmentally responsible furniture provider. You can see the Eve Collection at the Workbench Showroom, 3 Sutton Lane, London, EC1M 5PU.

Job Role: Technical Furniture Designer An exciting opportunity to join our design team in Clerkenwell for a technically minded designer, working in a fast paced company specialising in high-end corporate furniture and joinery. Qualifications & Skills Skilled in AutoCAD, Solidworks, Keyshot & Adobe Suite. To be knowledgeable in furniture materials and construction techniques with experience in creating manufacturing drawings and liaising with various workshops. Project management, site meetings, client liaison and assisting the sales team will also be encompassed within the role. All applicants to have BA or BSc Honours within Furniture/Product/Industrial Design and have relevant industry experience. To apply, please send your portfolio, CV and covering letter to rob@workbenchltd.co.uk

Job Role: A&D Sales Manager An exciting opportunity to join the Workbench team in our London showroom and cultivate existing and build new relationships within the A&D community. Workbench is an established high-end British furniture and joinery manufacturer with vast potential for growth in the A&D community. As part of our portfolio we have also recently partnered with an internationally regarded seating brand. Our innovative, sustainable and flexible products and solutions are hugely appealing to Architects and Designers and will help the successful candidate open doors to build lasting relationships. Responsibilities Build brand and product awareness in the design community. Drive product specification through A&D firms. Identify, qualify and record on CRM all project activity with A&D firms early in the design process. Maintain all relationships and projects within our CRM. Work within the Sales team to pool knowledge on prospects to help exceed. individual and team goals. To be involved with the marketing team to make sure material is both current and relevant. Participate in all networking events and company initiatives. Qualifications Degree in furniture or interior design would be advantageous. 3+ years experience in selling to the A&D community. Strong communication skills and ability to build relationships. Good presentational skills. If this role is of interest please contact joe@workbenchltd.co.uk

We are delighted to announce that our Earth table has been nominated in the ‘Public/Leisure/Office Furniture' category of this year's FX Design awards. The Earth table is designed with beautiful natural stone or lively natural waney edge solid timber tops, with a distinctive fluted base. Using natural solid timber and stone, every Earth table is unique. With infinite stone options and endless beautiful solid timbers, the aesthetics of the table can be determined through the client’s own selection of materials. Earth has been developed with circular design front and centre. The materials for the Earth range have been selected to give clients maximum opportunity to reuse and repurpose, with minimal environmental impact if the tables need to be recycled. When designing the Earth collection, we have taken a step back from complex integrated technology so we can take a step forward with its design circularity. By embracing natural materials and simple design construction the tabletops are easy to resurface and refinish. Technology is encouraged to be mounted to the underside of the table perimeter keeping the natural material free of details that make it difficult to repurpose. If the client does require integrated cable management Workbench has detailed a cable tray that allows easy updating and part replacement. The Earth range is supplied with a calculated carbon footprint for the product as well as future avoided carbon calculations if the client reuses the product at the end of service. All our products are designed to meet our waste hierarchy policy of reduce, reuse, repurpose & recycle. Workbench is in a unique position to be able to design for reuse at the start of a products life and the Earth range encapsulates this. We can’t until the FX Awards on the 29th November when we find out whether, in a field of world class entries, the judges consider Earth to be the best of the best! You can read more about the Earth collection here... Workbench Earth

Wow... what a week that was! Clerkenwell Design Week was back to its very best, the streets of Clerkenwell were thronging and the showrooms had a buzz that has not been seen for a while. It was wonderful to see so many people out enjoying themselves. We saw record numbers of visitors in our showroom where, amongst other things on display we had our new Earth stone topped table and credenza, and Glimpse partition range with rotating fins. We also had a raft of exciting new seating products from Lammhults. On Tuesday we hosted a breakfast presentation from Arthur Holm who gave us an expert insight into how technology can be seamlessly integrated into furniture. With their stunning motorised monitors and speakers, they really are at the cutting edge of technology integration and are an essential consideration if you are specifying technology into high end corporate spaces. Gracing the showroom and straight from the Lammhults factory in Sweden we had Bau, a modular seating series finished in a glorious vibrant red fabric, this range can be employed as a solitary easy chair or combined to create a variety of seating configurations. Down at street level in our foyer we showed the Sunny chair, another Lammhults product that definitely takes the title for the most comfortable chair that you will ever sit in! So comfortable in fact that once visitors were ensconced, they didn’t want to leave! Wednesday saw Chris Lefteri visit our showroom, Chris is a materials and sustainability expert, and he led a talk presenting his new publication Sustainable CMF Design. Chris gave us a fascinating understanding of new material technology and showed how materials can be utilised in a truly sustainable way. He also dispels some myths about recycling that frequently populate this subject. Thanks Chris, we are now that much more knowledgeable, and we really look forward to seeing you again next year! Other exhibits attracting attention included SpaceShifter, a flexible room divider storage planter. Designed by MF Design Studio and made by Workbench, SpaceShifter has a multitude of configuration options and introduces the natural calm of beautiful green foliage into the workplace. Pogo also proved popular, this compact drop-in VC table with class leading environmental credentials is an incredibly useful addition to any flexible office space, enabling users to access video conferencing facilities with the convenience of an electric rise and fall worktop. And our range of Genie pedestal tables can’t go without a mention, with their absolutely striking Smile Plastics tops. The focus on new trends was apparent with the use of high quality, natural materials, often giving durability levels that exceed manmade counterparts. Thinning of timber sections to reduce material usage, and developing products that have a clear component form so that individual parts can be replaced rather than the whole product. A big thank you to everyone who came to see us and made the event such a success. If you didn’t make it this time our showroom is available for visits with our team always on hand to guide you and assist with any queries that you may have.

Wednesday the 24th May is a big day in the Workbench calendar as we are privileged to be hosting a Clerkenwell Design Week breakfast talk by Chris Lefteri. Chris is a big hitter in the world of material technology and as a 'Led By Materials' Consultant, Speaker & Author, he runs a design studio that bridges the gap between the material industries and the design community. For anyone involved in the design industry his presentation offers a fascinating and authoritative insight into sustainable CMF design. His new report "2023 Guide to Sustainable CMF Design" has the potential to dramatically change our understanding and approach to material use and recycling. "This report aims to bring clarity to the processes that are used for recycling some of the most common materials in product design today, as well as sharing insights for how to use recycled materials more efficiently and ensuring that recycling continues to improve in the future" Chris will be speaking at the Workbench Showroom, 3 Sutton Lane, Clerkenwell, on Wednesday 24 May at 9:30am, breakfast will be provided. This is a great opportunity to meet Chris and ask questions in an informal setting. Spaces are limited so hurry! To book your place please email porter@workbenchltd.co.uk You can download Chris’s report here…

Tide is a product that was designed to solve a problem. Workbench has been problem solving for 13 years and while presenting solutions to clients’ time and time again, Workbench designs always look as good as they work. Tide is just another example of Workbench’s approach to a problem, producing a fully flexible and agile bar code reader housing. The demand for the efficient entrance and exit from corporate office spaces has transformed over the last few years and accelerated during covid, with flexible working spaces the barcode reader has become an essential piece of technology to facilitate this. Workbench designed Tide to flexibly house bar code readers for the signing in and out of buildings. Tide is a beautifully detailed unit with ergonomic and tactile qualities that allow barcode readers to be fully flexible, easy to use whilst protecting the software. Tide has been adopted by a global corporate financial information company. It is currently being used in their offices across the world. It allows efficient access in and out of the corporation’s offices whilst maintaining security levels and accommodating high volumes of visitors if required. Tide can be tailored to fit multiple bar code readers and finished to match colour palettes. It is currently being considered for booking in and out of hot desk areas in flexible workspaces. Workbench’s focus on sustainable design starts with the design team and feeds into the decisions made while producing a product like Tide. Tide is made from milled aluminium which is 100% recyclable. Workbench specifically looked at materials that are easy to recycle. The unit has purposely been designed so that the top clear section and magnets can easily be removed, and the unit can be recycled by any responsible metalworker or via the usual waste recycling available in corporate office. Tide has a carbon footprint of 38.7kg CO2, with avoided carbon possibilities if this unit is recycled (Based on a single Tide unit, the CO2 calculations were performed using conversion factors published in the Inventory of Carbon Energy (ICE) database and the ONS database and calculated and verified by qualified consultants, Carbon Lens Ltd company registration 10078669).

Pogo has been shortlisted as a finalist in this years Mixology Awards 2023 Task Furniture category… Pogo has been recognised for its design as a self contained rise fall collaboration desk which allows full technology integration with the flexibility of changing individual parts as technology changes. Designed with circularity in mind, Pogo embraces the Workbench waste hierarchy policy, reduce, reuse, repurpose, recycle and as part of the Workbeyond initiative has solutions to adhere to this hierarchy by reusing the fundamental elements therefore reducing overall waste. Environmentally technology is one of the most difficult requirements to sustainably integrate into a product as it changes rapidly. We are not able to stop these rapid advances so when designing Pogo, Workbench embraced this. Pogo is designed using individual parts and standard fixings where possible. This allows components such as the VC screen, power presentation, actuators and top to be swapped out on a part by part basis without having to replace the whole desk. So if technology changes or Pogo needs to adapt it can! This dramatically increases the length of service for the user. Pogo has elegant and slim profiling. Despite the high quantity of equipment and the flexibility of the desk height the table is compact with considered profiled edges and soft curves to all its components. The power is presented to the user via the Workbench Caplet plate in the desk top which accommodates an off the shelf power bar with interchangeable canisters so should the power and data feed need to change new canister presentation can be retro fitted. The screen bracket is designed to allow for multiple variations of screen, and is designed as a separate part so if the screen mounting moves away from Vesa plates, or a specialist screen is required it can be accommodated. At Workbench we calculate our carbon footprint for scope 1, 2 & full scope 3. All our products are designed to meet our waste hierarchy policy of reduce, reuse, repurpose & recycle. Workbench is in a unique position to be able to design for reuse at the start of a products life and Pogo encapsulates this. You can see POGO at Clerkenwell Design Week, 23-25 May in our Clerkenwell showroom, 3 Sutton Lane, London, EC1M 5PU.

So, we have calculated and communicated our carbon footprint, but what now? Well, we need it to go down, and keep going down until it can’t go down anymore. This isn’t just about numbers it’s about why we need to know them and what we do with them once we do. Knowing our number allows us to plan, set targets and aim for a deadline. We can action a net zero plan because of the vast amount of research we have completed into the company practices. Looking into our operations, subcontractors, choice of materials as well our process as part of the carbon calculation journey means we have the knowledge we need to start our plan properly. We highlighted our big impacting areas in our PAS 2060 document [link] and in our first year we targeted the areas that delivered the greatest positive return. This did not mean we overlooked the smaller contributors; we are aware that although they don’t impact as much, they impact nonetheless. For the second year we are focusing again on our big hitters, which includes materials and subcontractors, these go hand in hand from a carbon footprint point of view. The material and labour cost in any product is a relatively high percentage of the carbon footprint no matter what you specify, this is due to the production processes involved to create a product, in particular a tailored product. As an SME we do not have the billions to invest in ground-breaking chemical recycling, nor can we power workshops with solely renewable energy without spending millions of pounds investing with every supplier, which is not economically viable in the immediate future. Instead, we have looked for slower but perhaps eventually more effective long term carbon reducing strategies. We are currently limited to the changes we can make to the materiality of most products, we use sustainably sourced timber, steel and stone etc, but we can look to the design. Using our research into the circular economy, our circular design process is one answer. SME’s face many challenges due to size, but it is also a positive. Although our new circular design approach by its nature will take time to start having an impact on our overall carbon footprint, our size makes us nimble, and it has been implemented in record time. The ‘slow’ pace for it to deliver is due to the nature of circularity, our furniture is often in use for 10-15 years, it is only once furniture has come to the end of its life, whether that is old age, change in taste or new tenants, that it can begin to reduce our footprint. Our products are designed so they can be dismantled easily, key elements like tops and bases can be reused separately, we can refinish or adjust the overall design if required but fundamentally we keep our products away from landfill. Reusing lowers the amount of new material we will need to create new requirements, and this then starts to deliver real carbon reductions. We will be sharing more ideas on what designing in circularity looks like for the workbench furniture collection. The challenge we face in today’s economy is what to do with a product once we are finished with it, at Workbench we’re working to fix that problem before the product has even been fabricated. [Graph showing the predicted decrease in CO2 emissions as workbench continues to adopt environmental practices within the business model. This graph is a forecasted prediction and is likely to fluctuate year on year]

It’s one thing setting yearly targets, it's another knocking them out of the park. Our carbon footprint for the year 2021-22 has been posted to the United Nations Climate Neutral Now website [click here]. Workbench has measured scope 1, 2 and full scope 3, and our calculations have been verified by a third party. In the last year we have not only reduced our carbon intensity but we have also offset the entire remaining carbon footprint, 1,081 tonnes of CO2 with investment into a United Nations hydro power project. Workbench for the second year running is carbon neutral. So what did we do to reduce our intensity ? At Workbench, we always look to improve, and like many things it often starts with the small changes, changes like packaging. During our first year of carbon foot printing, we learnt boatloads about our company by taking a deep dive in to the facts and figures required to calculate a carbon footprint. Calculating our carbon footprint allowed us to set our first targets; one of which was to reduce our single use packaging by 10% for the next year. We ended up reducing our single use packaging by 20%! By swapping out for blanket wrapping on many large-scale projects, we dramatically reduced the waste. However blanket wrapping comes with its own problems and is a great example of why seemingly obvious carbon choices at the start of a project can create bigger problems down the line. Blanket wrapped product is not as easy for our fitting teams to handle. Due to the high-quality and value of our products we have to weigh up the vulnerability and possibility of having to repair damage when blanket wrapping, against the carbon cost of single use packaging. Our journey into the sustainable packaging world has further to go and we will continue our investigations to find the most effective and environmentally safe options, while also keeping our product in perfect condition during deliveries. So, targets for this year? We are now updating our software, and investing time and resource into creating functions that will help us more accurately document what our products are made of. Better recording of the materiality of the furniture we produce no matter how bespoke presents real opportunities for our clients when reporting their own carbon footprint. Doing so allows us to identify which components in products have a high carbon output, so we can look to replace parts with more sustainable options as well as identify how we can design in a longer life cycle, or better still a circular life cycle. Workbench has learnt a lot over the last few years about its carbon footprint and there is much more to come. As we focus on our supply chain for carbon conscious practices and more sustainable solutions our clients will continue to see the benefits of working with us. There is no sign of this carbon zero journey slowing down. As part of our carbon neutral pledge we have invested in Project 2936 : 24 MW Bhilangana – 111 Hydro Power Project [click here], full project outline [click here]. This project provides a wealth of opportunities socially, economically, as well as environmentally. By providing energy to areas previously without, along with jobs, infrastructure and training, the project will aim to ‘adhere to and contribute to India’s national policy of providing clean energy’, which benefits all nations.

In the UK we are lucky to have an abundance of beautiful timbers to choose from and at Workbench we have the expertise to be able to select the very best to produce beautiful furniture for your interiors. If you are looking for waney edge (sometimes referred to as live edge) then Elm is the perfect timber. We selected a stunning Scottish elm for one of our latest projects. Scottish elm has been far less susceptible to Dutch elm disease so there are some lovely timbers to choose from. Selecting the best plank size and quality to maximise useage and minimise waste is key. With sustainability at the heart of the table design the cable management was kept simple whilst achieving all the client requirements meaning this solid table will deliver years of service and can be continually resurfaced and reused by the client. Designed by us, tailored by you. Our new Earth table range is launching in March 2023. Featuring natural stones and timbers.