Haworth celebrates the grand opening of its new corporate headquarters, One Haworth Center. With sustainability, design, and adaptability as the drivers, it becomes a great space to work…and a great space to share our lessons learned from around the world.

Haworth’s Chicago showroom was stripped down to its shell and rebuilt using Haworth’s full range of interior solutions, resulting in the IIDA 2004 NeoCon Best Large Showroom Award. (The showroom would go on to win the Best Large Showroom award two more times in the next four years.) Our Chicago showroom also achieved LEED?-CI Gold-Level Certification in 2004.

Haworth acquires architectural interior companies to expand beyond furniture into adaptable interiors in order to respond to customers’ need for a better way to build interiors.

The Ideation Group — a specialized team of workplace scientists, designers, and analysts — applies user-based research to create breakthrough concepts and products like Crossings, Irrigator, Flo, Drift, Wake, and Eddy. These concepts deepen the company’s thinking about how the work environment can support measurable increases in productivity.

Haworth undertakes a strategic, global expansion plan. Haworth acquires 25 companies in Europe, North America and Asia over ten years in order to build a complete portfolio of product lines. Haworth also expands its sales and dealer network, beginning its evolution toward becoming a truly global organization.

A pivotal year for the business, the company transitioned from Modern Partitions to Haworth, Inc. With G.W.’s blessing, Dick Haworth takes the helm and drives for growth, increasing the company’s size by 400 percent over the next 20 years. The company introduces a new pre-wired panel design, sells its partition business, pioneers strategic planning, and introduces the Haworth Values.

A stranger strides into G.W.’s office, drops a set of drawings on his desk and asks, “Can you build these?” The plans detail an innovative office partition system designed for the United Auto Workers headquarters in Detroit.? G.W. agrees, wins the business, and the huge order catapults his company forward in both partitions and moveable wall products.? He thinks, “I could build a business around this type of product” - and does.

Driven by his dream to start a business, school teacher Gerrard Wendell (G.W.) Haworth borrows $10,000 of his parents’ life savings to expand a woodworking operation in his family’s garage. A skilled craftsman, he builds a variety of products, hoping to earn enough money to put his children through college. Modern Products is born.