Chicago based Lagomorph Design have managed to assemble quite an impressive portfolio, sticking their influence into everything from furniture to bicycles. Named after the taxonomy group in which rabbits are classified, Lagomorph products seem to just keep multiplying, with the quality of the work only getting better and better. We got to know founder Seth Deysach, a man who is brutally honest and undeniably passionate about his craft. He gave us some insight behind his impressive design chops, the inspiration for a wooden bicycle, and where he buys his Zebrawood. (Hint: it’s not in the Chicago area.)
How did you get started in design and what were you involved in before you founded Lagomorph design?
I went to college for ceramic sculpture and in 1994 graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and promptly went to work in a bicycle store. I worked in the bike store since I was 17 during the summers and school breaks so it was inevitable that I would be doing that for money for a while. I was living at home with my parents after graduation partly because it was free and they had good booze, but also because my father had a decent workshop in the basement and I had discovered while in college that I liked making furniture. I had used the school shop to make a couple of tables for an apartment that I was living in during the time and thought I might start trying to make furniture for money. I had never liked the dirty nature of clay and, still to this day, have NO problem being covered in wood dust, so woodworking was the new black for me and I was ‘gonna go for it.”
Problem was, less than a year later my father passed away and on top of the general upheaval of losing a parent we had to sell the family home. End stage one: furniture career. 2 years later I woke up one morning and decided that I was going to be a Chef and enrolled in cooking school (still managing a bike shop during the day) and 2 years after that landed my first (and last) job cooking in a high-end kitchen. Took all of 4 months to run screaming from that job! I’m not even CLOSE to being a big enough drug addict to run with those nut bags.
Reluctantly, I returned to the bike shop. During that year I decided that I was really going to try to be a furniture maker and had built a small shop in the basement of a friend’s apartment that I was living accompanied by my dads old tools. I met a couple of people through the bike shop and got a couple of commissions so I decided that on October 3, 2001, I was going to quit my day job and make furniture and that’s what happened! Now I have 7 employees and work out of a 30,000 square foot shop with 7 other guys with wood working tools made in Switzerland… pretty amazing by my standards.
