Borgo: forty years of seating, in a catalogue the team runs alone

Borgo has been making contract seating since 1984: Italian design, Canadian engineering, chairs that end up in hospitals, hotels, universities and offices. Five families, and in the lounge family alone there are around forty-eight models.

That number is the whole brief. Below a certain size a catalogue is a set of pages and a website is a design job. Above it, the design job is secondary and the real question is structural: how does a person find one chair among hundreds, and how does the company add the next one without calling anybody.

Everything below follows from those two questions.

The first decision was to stop thinking in pages. A chair is an object with a name, a family, a set of finishes, photographs, a spec sheet and the sectors it belongs to. Describe that shape once and every model becomes a row in a collection.

It sounds like an implementation detail and it is the opposite. A page has to be built, and whoever builds it decides how it looks, so a catalogue made of pages drifts: the chair added in March does not look like the chair added in September. A row cannot drift. It fills in the fields it has, and the layout is the same for the forty-eighth model as for the first.

It also changes who can add one. Building a page is a developer's job. Filling a row is not.

The part of this project I would defend hardest is that the catalogue is organised twice.

There is the product taxonomy, the one the manufacturer thinks in: lounge, multi-purpose, fixed, office and guest, beam. And there is the sector taxonomy, the one the buyer thinks in: healthcare, hospitality, commercial, and in the navigation workplace, learning, wellness and community.

They are not the same list said differently, and keeping both was a deliberate cost. A dealer who already knows Borgo arrives looking for a family. An architect furnishing a clinic does not care what the family is called; they have a floor plan and a sector, and they need to see what is appropriate for it. Offer only the manufacturer's taxonomy and you have asked the second person to learn your product line before you will help them.

Because the models are rows, both taxonomies are filters over the same structure. One chair, tagged once, appears correctly in both. If the catalogue had been pages, supporting the second way in would have meant maintaining a parallel set of them, which is exactly the kind of thing that gets built and then quietly abandoned a year later.

Nobody specifies forty lounge chairs the way they buy a sofa. The person on the other end is an architect, a designer or a dealer, working against a budget line and a deadline, and they are not there to be delighted. They need to narrow a family, compare models inside it, and leave with something they can drop into a document.

So the catalogue comes before the storytelling. The grid is what you meet on a family page, the sector tags stay reachable while you move through it, and the spec sheet is treated as a destination rather than something to be found at the bottom. The brand does its work around the catalogue instead of standing in front of it.

The rest of the site holds the parts that sell a manufacturer rather than a chair: craft, our story, sustainability, press, careers, and a page for finding a sales representative. Nine pages, and none of them competing with the grid for the visit.

Webflow was chosen for the editing experience, not the build experience. The people who know the products are in sales and marketing. They were never going to learn a deployment process, and any system that required one would have ended the same way every time: with someone emailing me a photograph and a paragraph.

In Webflow they open the site, click the field, type and publish. The collection fields carry written descriptions, so the person adding a chair next year knows what belongs in each box without asking anyone what the field was for. That documentation is the least visible work in the project and the piece that decides whether the catalogue is still accurate in three years.

The measure of this kind of site is not how it looks on launch day. It is whether the catalogue on the website is still the catalogue the company actually sells, long after the person who built it has gone.

• The full catalogue in one structure: five families, around forty-eight lounge models alone, all of them rows rather than hand-built pages.
• Two ways to find a chair, by product family and by sector, over that same structure.
• Nine supporting pages for the parts that sell a manufacturer rather than a model.
• A CMS the team edits and publishes themselves, with every field documented for whoever comes next.