A brand refresh and shop for a maker who builds every chair to order

The brief

Kolm is eleven people in a workshop on an industrial estate in Tilburg. They make tables, chairs, benches and shelving in solid oak and ash, all to order, with a lead time of six to ten weeks depending on the finish. About half their sales come through interior architects; the other half came through a web shop built in 2018 that showed every product with an “add to basket” button and no mention of when it would arrive.

Anouk Verhaar and her brother Daan asked us for three things: a brand that looked as careful as the furniture, product photography that showed the wood honestly, and a shop that stopped generating complaints.

What we did

We looked at the brand first and decided against a new identity. The wordmark was good and well known among architects. We redrew its spacing, chose a quieter text face for everything around it and replaced a palette of five greys and a mustard with two neutrals and the colour of the timber itself.

Photography took longer than expected. The old pictures were shot on a white sweep under flash, which turned oak yellow and ash grey. We moved the shoot into the workshop by the north-facing windows, shot over three days in February and kept the light consistent by only shooting between ten and two.

The shop is where most of the work went:

• every product page shows an estimated delivery week for the chosen timber and finish, calculated from the workshop’s current queue
• a free sample pack of six finishes can be ordered from any product page
• orders are split into a deposit and a final payment, which is how Kolm already invoiced architects
• a short page explains why there is a wait, with photos of a chair at each stage

The queue figure comes from a spreadsheet the workshop already kept. A small script reads it each night and updates the estimates, so nobody has to remember to change the site.

What changed

Online revenue rose 27% in the six months after launch. Emails asking about delivery dates fell by about a third, which Anouk measured by counting them in the shared inbox before and after.

The sample pack has turned out to be the most useful addition. One in five orders now starts with a sample, and returns because a finish “looked different on screen” have stopped.