Jeffrey Braun is a furniture executive, design director, and furniture designer with extensive experience managing manufacturing and vendor relationships. With over 20 years of design experience, his career history includes furniture design, interior design, freelance art direction, and set design.
After receiving his B.A. in communications/ film from the University of Wisconsin in 1989, Jeffrey worked on sets for television ads, talk shows, and feature films. Eventually, the transient and impersonal nature of set design inspired his pursuit of more intimate, permanent art forms. He enrolled in the Harrington College of Design and later moved to Seattle to complete his studies.
Jeffrey graduated from Cornish College of the Arts with an interior design degree in 2000. Shortly thereafter, he collaborated with two colleagues to form an interior design company, Trio Design, where he spent most of his time designing furniture for his clients.
In December of 2001, Jeffrey launched his own furniture line, Jeffrey Braun Furniture (JBF), at the San Francisco Furniture Market. His initial twenty introductions featured Art Deco details. Represented by showrooms in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle, the line was well-received and Jeffrey continued to take on custom furniture work as well as larger hospitality furniture projects. In 2008, Jeffrey transitioned the company to focus on custom furniture design for commercial and hospitality clients, eventually working on projects across various disciplines.
In 2017, Jeffrey took on an executive leadership position at Unisource Solutions where he pioneered an in-house custom commercial furniture division. Within an 12-month time frame, Jeffrey designed a unique line of 120 SKUs, managed several large custom commercial projects, and drove profits from an average of 10-20% per project, to over 40% per project in his division.
Currently, Jeffrey is the design director at Emblem, where he is designing and developing new standard products while also working on challenging large-scale custom furniture projects with dealerships, designers, and architects. Jeffrey and his wife, Lindsay Braun, are also furniture consultants, providing design and manufacturing guidance to other furniture companies and designers in commercial and residential markets.
Throughout this career, Jeffrey has maintained close strategic relationships with multiple factories along the West Coast, from Canada to Southern California. He has mastered manufacturing challenges in multiple modalities including upholstery, metal, wood, and solid surfacing. He often remarks that one of his favorite places to be is in a factory, brainstorming new ideas and helping engineer solutions to complex design problems. His current factory relationships are the result of a career-long mission to find the best talent to build furniture.
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