About the Designer
My name is Kevin Barker. I started Flying Leap Furniture to pursue new directions in furniture design. As mobile technology has evolved over the last twenty years, new ways of living and working have evolved in response. Alternative offices, home offices, new ways and places to meet and a culture of "anytime, anywhere" work have become commonplace. My twenty-year career in corporate real estate involved designing and implementing a number of projects with these changes in the United States, Europe and Latin America. In the course of this work, it became clear to me that furniture, if designed in the right way, could be more responsive to how we use technology and to our new ways of living and working. I created Flying Leap Furniture in 2004 to pursue this goal.
About the Name
I chose the name Flying Leap Furniture to express two ideas about this company:
To leap implies risk. Exploring new directions is inherently risky. Some ideas work, some don't, but "taking the leap" is the first step in achieving any meaningful goal.
To leap implies stretching. To go beyond what was possible before requires "pushing the envelope". For me, that means looking at new shapes, new materials and new ways of doing things in order to achieve a better result.