Our core mission is simple and uncompromising: design integrity, calm, purposeful forms with meticulous detail. Quality materiality, honest woods, refined metals, and durable finishes. Responsible practice, circular thinking, low-impact materials, and long life. People-centred comfort, ergonomics you feel, creating a sensory experience. Choice as standard, options that suit brand, function, and place, and service & longevity, products built to perform and be renewed.
People have made Boss Design what it is. Their ideas, skill, commitment and creativity shape every product and give our company its spirit. Technology matters, but ultimately everything we make is guided by human hands, and by lasting relationships with customers built on trust, dialogue, and respect.
In May 1963, Jack Cartwright graduated from the Kendall School of Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Ambitious and imaginative, the young designer formed a company under his own name with the aim of creating contemporary seating.
Hiring a production specialist, Jack Cartwright summed up his company’s philosophy as: “To provide the market with upholstered furniture of modern design, produced with exceptionally high quality and priced within reach of many.”
From a two-person outfit, the company grew and grew. Establishing a reputation for attractive, usable, well-made modern furniture, the Cartwright name spread across the United States and around the world. We continue to manufacture at the same factory in High Point, North Carolina, surrounded by nearly 75 acres of natural woodland.
In 2015, the company joined the Boss Design Group – a leading UK manufacturer of award-winning commercial furniture. With new opportunities opening, our skilled team remain dedicated to creating beautiful, long-lasting furniture for our customers.
“Quality was never a strategy, it was simply how I was brought up. My father was a carpenter, where attention to detail mattered, and from that I developed an early fascination with furniture, materials and the integrity of well-made objects. That same respect for craftsmanship and longevity is why Jack Cartwright felt like the right business to bring into the group.”
— Brian Murray, Founder & CEO
Just like fine tailoring, each piece of material is cut and sewn considering the range of movement and flexibility required. “When you sit down and rest your back, it presses into the inside back of the chair. It stretches that panel of fabric putting pressure on the seams. Likewise, your weight exerts a downward force on the seat. It might ruffle, pool and puddle. You’ve got to get the tension just right so that the upholstery flexes and returns to normal after sitting for two hours,” says Steve.
We design for people. Research, conversations with customers, and close collaboration with the design community inform every brief. At the heart of each product is a working partnership between designers and makers, joiners, machinists, upholsterers and sewers, who ensure the concept is achievable, manufacturable and built to endure.
At our Dudley factory, “The Cage” is the crucible for development. Prototypes are built, frames refined, tooling proven, upholstery sculpted and covers stitched. Comfort, ergonomics and character are tested alongside sustainability, durability, supply chain and cost, so the final piece performs beautifully in the real world.
We invest in people and pass on craft through training. We choose responsible, long-lasting materials and processes. And we keep improving, iterating forms, testing new techniques and elevating the standard for comfort, quality and service. Beautiful, well-designed, comfortable, functional, sustainable and long-lasting: this is what we mean by human-centric furniture.
“We start together at the drawing board, debating, compromising, collaborating, so the result is both inspiring and workable.”
Steve Bloomer, Master Upholsterer & Lead Developer
Our design ethos is simple: make things beautifully and make them well. We start with people, the way they sit, move and gather, and shape calm, purposeful forms around those behaviors. Fine tailoring is our benchmark. The line of a seam, the tension of an edge, the sweep of a radius: these details are not decoration, they’re the difference between something that merely looks good and something that feels right every day.
Quality for us is the sum of thoughtful engineering and skilled craftsmanship. We work closely with our makers to tune comfort, refine proportions and perfect the touchpoints you notice subconsciously, how a stitch follows the form, how a timber arm warms to the hand, how a mechanism moves with quiet confidence. Honest materials and precise construction give each piece integrity from the inside out.
Enduring style matters. We design for long lives, not short cycles, calm silhouettes, balanced volumes and considered detail that carry across workplace, hospitality and home. Customization is built in so designers can tune character, performance and color without losing the clarity of the original idea. And because longevity is sustainability, our products are designed to be serviced, renewed and reupholstered, keeping them in use and out of waste.
In the end, everything we make should feel inevitable: comfortable, intelligent, and quietly elegant—pieces that earn their place and get better with time.
