fiVO Design Rebrands, Pivots During Covid

Andover, MA — The Junges are no stranger to adaptation.

With twenty years in business as Landmark Finish, the small business — which started out as a high-end residential cabinetry company — weathered the recession of 2008, and for the last year-and-a-half, have been continuously finding creative ways to weather the ongoing pandemic.

In March of 2020, Landmark Finish came out with a line of clear, plastic barriers dubbed “Safe-Guards,” which became instrumental for the safer openings of a multitude of local businesses and schools.

More recently, they rebranded the entire company, christening it “fiVO Design” — a nod to Fibonacci’s Golden Rule of Proportion and Stewart Junge’s Navy Veteran status — and launched a brand new line of furniture which uses hooking systems to easily fit together, extend, and come apart — a design which has been made necessary by such a majority of people being forced to work from home.

“Stewart wanted to design a desk, and he was kind of struggling with the design of that desk. We wanted to create something that could flat-pack and be stowed away. What we were hearing from people was parents were working from home and some families had two, three, four kids that were remote-learning from home,” Deanna Junge, director of FiVO Design said. “We really wanted to design a desk that your kids or you could use for work that could easily be taken apart and stowed away during the weekends so that people could regain their home.”

A breakthrough in the desk’s design came when they had the idea to take the same simple joinery system that makes the Safe-Guards so easy to assemble and disassemble, and apply it to wood.

“What we came up with was this five-piece, modular desk or table,” Deanna Junge said. “Within a matter of a few weeks, we had gone through several renditions of this desk and came up with something that we felt was a viable product.”

And though the product was inspired by an attempt to fill a pandemic-incited need, they quickly realized that what they had created was a multi-purpose, space-saving piece of furniture, something that could make city-living much more manageable.

“It’s quickly developed into an entire line of furniture,” Deanna Junge said. “We’ve come up with a coffee table, console tables; we have a dining table, a bed frame with a desk attached to the end of it. Every time we talk to people, Stewart tweaks the design and comes up with something different. It’s really been a fun process because we’re constantly coming up with different fresh ideas on it.”

And after a year-and-a-half where the name of the game has been “pivot,” fiVO Design is returning to a new normal.

“We’re operating pretty much business as usual,” Deanna Junge said. “We’ve all been vaccinated; everybody who’s here at the shop was vaccinated pretty much as soon as we were able to be. It is nice to be able to not be working with masks on right now.”

In conjunction with the rebrand, the Junges have built out their on-location showroom into a newly-designed space to showcase their new lines of furniture, and are planning a ribbon-cutting ceremony with the Merrimack Valley Chamber sometime next month.

“We’ve been through so much change over the last twenty years,” Deanna Junge said, “it seemed like it was time to freshen things up and really have a name that represents who we are today.”