Unmarked Hans Olsen? Authentic?  

I'll add that I did read
the thread about the round Olsen dining set for which there are vintage Canadian and US replica's. It did not say whether this is the case for the 107 chair as well. Hence my question.

design seems to complex and...
design seems to complex and the model to 'unknown' to make a knock-off I would think?
I could be wrong of course.

The production of moulds for ...
The production of moulds for bent plywood is expensive, even more so then than it is now, it would not have been worth the investment.
The boom in nasty copies is mostly a recent thing, your chair is fine, don't be concerned about it.

Why?
Why are the production of moulds for bent plywood so expensive?
I would have thought it would have been a fairly straight-forward process?

In production work it is a 2 ...
In production work it is a 2 part mould, male and female, up to a point you can rely on pressure and the gap filling quality of adhesives to fudge things but thats about 1/2 a mm max unless you're using epoxy, which they wouldn't have. So for something of a reasonable size like that where the plies are bent vertically and horizontally you have to have exceptional accuracy over a large (2) surface areas. Think of it as being a c. 50cm x 50cm perfect curved mortise and tenon joint that changes direction 5 times and that must remain stable and that comes under huge amounts of force in a press.
Sometimes a mould set will just fail and they have to start again. With CNC they can now be cut faster and more accurately but its still not a walk in the park.
You're not thinking that one piece 1/2 inch ply is somehow steamed and bent into shape are you? That can be done for gentle curves but not for anything like the shells above. A sandwich of glue and veneers is held in the press until the adhesive has set, either cold cure or heated with RF or a heat conducting (aluminium) lining on the face of the moulds.

Thanks for the education, Heath
Yes, I was thinking that it could be steamed and bent, but I'm no woodwork expert (as you can tell!).

Thanks bj and Heath
For reassuring and educating me. Obviously, what I like about these chairs is the moulded plywood...
It still seems a bit strange that some chairs are signed (I have a photo of another one, marked 'Bramin'), others not. Was this, indeed, common at the time? Just wondering if anyone knows of other examples (not necessarily this model or designer, but in general).

Looking for any Hans Olsen experts out there. I've got a few questions:
1) Did he ever have an official relationship with Winchendon? The latter produced a very similar design of integrated table/chairs that Olsen did for Frem Rojle. I would think that a company of decent repute would not do a blatent ripoff, and perhaps it was more of a Finn Juhl / Baker relationship, of licensing the design with a few refinements to allow for more profitable mass production.
 
2) I have seen a few variations of his shell chair design. The lounge chair version is cited as model 107 by Jorgensens. There are many dining chair versions that pop up online, with the following different features:
     2a) Upholstered vs nonupholstered seat,
     2b) Upholstered vs nonupholstered back,
     2c) Double hump to the backrest vs single curve,
     2d) Integrated plywood armrest vs bolted wood armrest (which also has back upholstered all the way to the armrests),
     2e) Bowtie front/back recessed rails: without side stretchers vs with turned side stretchers vs with rectangular side stretchers
     2g) Rectangular stretchers on front and sides
The questions I have are:
- how many variations of this shell chair design did Olsen do?
- was it only Jorgensens that was licensed, or were there other Danish (or American) companies that also built a version of the original?
If the answers are only 1 for the above (not including upholstering options), then there are a lot of vintage knockoffs out there.
Thanks.

The chair in the fourth photo looks very American.

Here's a chair that I had that was marked Bramin.

Yeah, that version would seem to be the most obvious knockoff, due to the multiple differences from the others, including leg profiles. That was one of the reasons for asing if there was any American manufacturer connection with Olsen.
Sellers seem to have no problem attaching the Hans Olsen name to anything that resembles this chair design, but usually you see that more with better-known designers.
Edit: the above refers to post #10.
Also, I saw a couple of online references to Bramin, so maybe they did the larger production version for the export market.

Then again, it's hard for me to imagine an American knockoff would make its way to Sweden and get listed in a Lauritz auction, irrespective of how suspect Lauritz is for their descriptions:
 
http://www.lauritz.com/sv/auktion/erik-kirkegaard-hans-olsen-stole-i-tea...