Inspired by an encounter with Pasquale Natuzzi, Tim Hudson, UK representative for Italian furniture mechanism suppliers CIAR and Nisi Group, asks why more business leaders aren’t getting to grips with the products they sell …
Some decisions don't get made in boardrooms.
In June 2023, a prototype arrived at Natuzzi's headquarters in Santeramo in Colle. A unique concept, a micro-movement mechanism built into an armchair, designed to do something most furniture simply can't – move with the body, continuously, in ways that ease the physical cost of sitting still.
Pasquale Natuzzi Senior was in the meeting. Founder. Patriarch. A man who knows the difference between a product that works and a product that merely performs.
He didn't ask for a business case. He said: "Let me take it home for a couple of weeks."
He did. When he came back, the project had his personal backing. What followed commercially was significant. What stays with me is the decision itself.
A body in a chair. Two weeks. Trust your own experience.
The market we're in
Airsprung – 150 years of history, iconic brands in beds and mattresses – is in administration. Seventy-one jobs gone on day one.
Leggett & Platt – the world's largest furniture components supplier – reported Q1 2026 trade sales down 10%. When a business that sits upstream of almost every major furniture manufacturer reports falling demand, it's a reading of the whole market's direction of travel.
I was discussing the Airsprung news with a chief executive friend, who said: "There are a few historic manufacturers dying a slow, painful death. You have to keep moving … they didn't."
Blunt. Not without sadness. But the second part is worth dwelling on.
Owner in the building
The businesses holding ground share something. Call it the owner-in-the-building management style, visible in many of Italy's strongest furniture businesses, and in the better UK retailers too.
HSL have built their entire proposition around it – trained comfort consultants, product knowledge at the PoS, conviction embedded in the selling process. Poltronesofà run factory to showroom with short lead times. Someone at the top still has their hands on the decisions, and means them.
John Lewis is the counter-case. A furniture offer contracting for years, managed at increasing distance from the floor, from the factory, from the customer. Data in abundance. Conviction draining away.
‘Owner in the building’ matters. But Natuzzi went further.
Evaluation versus experience
There is a difference that is easy to overlook. Sitting in a chair at a showroom or factory is evaluation. Your critical mind is engaged. You are performing judgment. It will tell you some things.
Taking it home is experience. You forget you're assessing. You sit in it at 10 o'clock at night, when you're tired. Your body tells you things your critical mind would never catch.
Natuzzi didn't evaluate the mechanism and nod approvingly. He lived with it. That is the distinction.
Right now, businesses across this industry have products sitting in boardrooms and showrooms – evaluated, but never experienced. The commercial decision has been formed under artificial buying conditions. Nobody has taken it home.
Data matters. Process matters. But the businesses that will define the next chapter are combining both with something harder to systematise – emotional intelligence, firsthand experience, and the honesty to let the product speak on its own terms. Peters and Waterman called it ‘management by walking around’. Natuzzi called it taking it home for a fortnight.
The Monday morning question
Take one product home this week. Not to evaluate it. To live with it.
Pasquale Natuzzi built one of the great furniture businesses of the last century. When something new landed on his desk, he didn't send it to a committee. He took it home.
The businesses that define what comes next won't be the ones that waited for conditions to improve. They'll be the ones where someone at the top still trusts their own body over the spreadsheet.
