Team 7 furniture maker: “Everything was a little improvised”

For Georg Emprechtinger, wood has something in common with good wine or cheese: “Storage and aging determine the material’s later quality.” The Team 7 chief grew up surrounded by wood in Austria’s Innviertel region, but he did not initially plan to take over his father’s sawmill.

Instead, Emprechtinger studied in Canada and returned home because of love. He later met Erwin Berghammer, who founded Team 7. Berghammer registered the company name only a few years after opening the carpentry business in 1959, an unusually bold move at the time. As Emprechtinger tells it, Berghammer wanted the workshop to become a brand, even though people initially mocked the idea of an Innviertel carpenter thinking so ambitiously.

The decision proved decisive. “Without a strong brand, we probably wouldn’t still exist,” Emprechtinger says. He took over management shortly before the turn of the millennium and soon became Team 7’s owner.

“

Storage and aging determine the material’s later quality.

Team 7 became known in the 1980s for its bulky, chemical-free solid-alder furniture and gained a reputation as an early environmental pioneer. In the technology-driven early 2000s, however, the company had to move beyond the homemade image associated with its ecological roots. It did not abandon those principles. Instead, it made the brand lighter, more modern and more international.

A key part of that reinvention was Team 7’s own three-layer technology. Three thin layers of hardwood are glued together in alternating directions, allowing the company to make delicate furniture that remains dimensionally stable and precisely finished. Emprechtinger says that without the method, a slim wall shelf could warp in every direction. The technology has since become an innovation recognized beyond Austria and a defining part of Team 7’s expertise in wood processing.

“

Without a strong brand, we probably wouldn’t still exist.