Goodbye Junior

The J & R Factory in Homerton was possibly one of the last representatives of the handbag making industry that had employed so many people in the east end of London. Alfred Persaud, Junior’s dad originally came from Guyana to the UK in 1958 and his wife followed a few years later. He seems to have been an amazing engineer as he built the machinery that would bend the raw metal into the frames which became quite a signature for us. 

I challenged Junior often with new ideas and he would never say no. He always tried to do what I was asking for. That included making a set of chairs for Design Week in 2013. We took some old metal PEL chairs and Junior stripped them down to the steel frames and made custom leather seats to some designs which I had come up with. “Bums on Seats” was the name for the series of eight different chairs with padded bottoms, showing eight different ways to sit e.g. left-leaning, legs apart or legs together. They were exhibited during design week at the V&A and are something that I'm still pretty proud of. Underneath each seat is embossed the name and details of the project.