Haddy, the world’s first company to digitally manufacture furniture at scale while achieving full recyclability, announced it has opened its headquarters and first distributed microfactory in St. Petersburg, Florida. Haddy’s 3D furniture printing leverages unique machine learning and artificial intelligence to get smarter as they build more. The founding team is a group with extensive experience in the furniture, performance materials, and robotics industries with meaningful intellectual property.
Haddy’s first customer is a top 10 U.S. retailer with collections coming soon in 2023. The company has raised equity from an elite group of private investors, including Steve Case’s Revolution Rise of the Rest Capital. Haddy’s headquarters and new factory is located at 1921 5th Avenue South in St. Pete’s Warehouse Arts District, near Brick Street Farms and the Morean Arts Center. There they are building their first set of 10,000 pieces of furniture across many designs, sizes, and colors. The St. Pete microfactory will serve as a blueprint for the type of facility the company intends to place close to customers all over the world.
Haddy Grew from the World’s First 3D Printed Car
Haddy’s manufacturing process evolved from an innovative project where the Haddy team developed and introduced the world’s first 3D printed car in 2013. The new process they had built had ultimately gave them a way to print furniture from a digital file. The pandemic increased customers’ desire for unique sustainable furniture at the right price. In order to have all this, there was a need for a disruptive sustainable production footprint. With this in mind, the team founded Haddy (short for Heroic Agile Design Durable and Yours) in 2021 to make furniture out of recycled material in the simplest, most elegant digital factory, for a lower cost, close to their customers.
Reshoring STEAM Jobs Locally
New methods of manufacturing are changing the way people work in the 21st century, allowing companies to reshore good paying job to local towns and cities. “Haddy, and robotic manufacturers like us, create a sustainable job ecosystem with diversity, inclusion, and environmental justice that exceeds almost any domestic industry that has come before it,” says Haddy CEO & co-founder John B. (“Jay”) Rogers. “Our 3D manufacturing process is giving a meaningful pathway to high-school, trade school, and college grads to reinforce and growing gap in the middle class. We offer opportunities in product design, digital media, robotics, factory logistics, enterprise resource planning, logistics, engineering, data science, operations and more.”
The company currently has four employees, is hiring, and plans to add up to 25 more people. Rogers told the St. Pete Catalyst that he “wanted to come back to Florida. I lived in San Francisco and Boston and felt that I needed to bring this innovation here and the opportunity for these advanced manufacturing jobs. We have a lot of jobs in tourism and agriculture, but this space is growing, and I want to be part of this new economy.” He added that the Haddy jobs “will have a multiplier effect, spurring the creation of other related businesses and jobs.”
“Haddy, and robotic manufacturers like us, create a sustainable job ecosystem with diversity, inclusion, and environmental justice that exceeds almost any domestic industry that has come before it.”
“Haddy embodies St. Pete,” says J.P. DuBuque, President & CEO of the St. Petersburg Economic Development Corporation. “They have a cool product that’s sustainable and produced using innovative technology at a company eager to be part of and give back to our community. This is exactly the type of specialized manufacturing company we want to attract.” Specialized manufacturing is one of St. Petersburg’s target “Grow Smarter” industries.
Pinellas County has the largest manufacturing base among eight Tampa Bay counties and employs the third highest number of manufacturing employees in the state of Florida, primarily in electronics and medical device manufacturing.
