SOS Møbelfabrik  

@herringbone. There is always a simpler explanation... 😏 

With all the good design around it remains to be understood why to copy those Harlev chairs; either they were easier to make, or no one would go after them for copying the design. Save our souls ! 

Posted by: Herringbone

@kyle-barrett After taking a closer look I can say without sounding recalcitrant: No, it doesn’t look like a Harlev design. It’s a copy. And now we know something about the business model of SOS Møbelfabrik in the 60s. 😁

Great eye, because it really is only the side rail (as you'd said), otherwise it's identical. Down to the armrest detailing and the tapering of the top of the stile into the the arm/backrest.

I deduced with the other similarities I could see in the low res photo it was just a trick of the eye that made the side rail look wrong. But with the high res version it's quite obviously not the same.

I'm a little confused by that I have to admit. It's not a particularly lovely design to copy!

I‘ve never counted the Danish furniture factories in the early 60s but I really should. There must have been literally hundreds of them, and they all produced for a huge export market. Everybody wanted to sell chairs and participate from the 200 Million DKK that were made at that time every year in furniture revenue. So let’s say they only had 300 producers of chairs (although I think there were more) and every one of them had an average of seven models in their range, that would have been 2100 different chairs at one particular time. But how many different chair designs could you possibly come up with? And how difficult was it to get a proper furniture architect to design something original for you? Copying was an easy way to get around these problems and participate nonetheless. So smaller companies copied whatever they felt would suit them, ideally successful designs. And as far as I know, most producers got away with it. The thing only was that the copy’s usually were of lesser quality, and since Harlev’s designs were average industrial standard to begin with (and quite successfull), the SOS copies were probably rather poorly made. 

Hi All, given that I started the thread I thought I best send on a few pics of the SOS chairs I worked on. 

Thanks

Ed