Thonet's No. 14 chair shipped flat, 36 per crate, and sold 50 million

Michael Thonet, a German cabinetmaker working in Vienna, spent decades perfecting steam-bent beechwood. Bending let him make a strong chair from thin, curved parts, and a rounded seat needed less material — the No. 14 became his cheapest model, introduced around 1859.

The chair was sold as a flat pack decades before that word existed: 36 disassembled chairs fitted into a one-cubic-metre crate and were screwed together on arrival. In 1905 alone more than 4,000 crates were shipped, carrying over 144,000 chairs.

Cafés, restaurants and households bought it worldwide, and the V&A estimates some 50 million were manufactured between the 1860s and the 1930s, making it one of the most-produced chairs ever. Its catalogue of 14 designs became the model for selling furniture by catalogue.

Design the product to travel disassembled

Flat packing cut each chair's freight cost and damage in transit.

Buyers assembled it with a few screws, so no dealer stock was needed.

Steam bending made the chair strong, light and cheap to produce.

The catalogue let customers order the design from anywhere.

Freight cost is a design variable: a product built to knock down and reassemble can win a market simply by being dramatically cheaper to ship.

The No. 14 became the archetypal coffeehouse chair and was copied worldwide. Thonet remained in production into the 20th century, and the chair is still manufactured; designers and museums cite it as the original flat-pack furniture.