#eric trine

Summer Cooler

Rod+Weave Chair, Eric Trine Design,

Solid steel hex rod frame, electroplated in Copper, Brass, or Chrome.

Natural vegetable oil tanned leather, woven seat and back.

Eric Trine on Sight Unseen

So far, he’s been able to build his brand mostly through shows and social media; on average, he does 20 chairs a month and anywhere from 20 to 100 side tables and smaller products available on his site. “Every day we’re putting together some kind of order for some project. And the commercial interior design thing has been a growing part of my business.”

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Trine has a metal shop and a wood shop as part of his studio. The entire space, where he’s been for the past two years, is just under 4,000 sq. feet.

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In terms of his design process, Trine typically doesn’t sketch or do dimensions. “I just kind of have a scrap and then I put it together. Now, because I know my manufacturer so well and I have an assistant who has an industrial design degree and can draw things on the computer, I can actually just have an idea and he can draw it. But my mind doesn’t work that way. And I’ll shut down an idea pretty quickly if I don’t think we can make it at an affordable price. The idea of the market and commercial viability comes in really early in the design process for me.”

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He doesn’t manufacture products in the studio, but he does do all of the leather work in-house. “We cut it into strips, we weave the chairs ourselves, all of the product comes through here.” Wanting to keep his business local is a personal choice, he says. “Not so much from an ethics point of view, it’s more of a lifestyle thing. I don’t want to travel overseas all the time. And I don’t want to have to hire someone to do that for me overseas. I want to be able to have a beer with my vendors at end of a work day.”

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Perforated side tables by Eric Trine.