Chris Brigham / Partner, Designer, Builder

Chris spent the first part of his adult life working as a Graphic Designer, all along wishing he was making more with his hands. Chris always imagined he would be an architect when he was younger because he was nerdy enough to enjoy the math and science portion of school while also being really interested in art. When college came around, Chris decided instead to get a degree in Fine Art, with an emphasis in Photography from the University of California, Santa Barbara. After graduation, Chris and his wife ended up moving up to the Bay Area and Chris landed a job as a Graphic Designer for one of the many doomed dot-coms of the time.

Many years later, after working for a start-up or two, the amazing yet ill-fated Design Magazine-ONE, a small web company named Google, and with an extremely talented group of people at Factor Design, Chris found himself still yearning to make more tangible objects. As a result, Chris decided to turn his garage into a wood shop and start building. With that, his furniture company Knife & Saw was born.
 
After some time designing and building on his own, Chris decided he could benefit from finding someone to apprentice under and learn, both from a design and business perspective. Chris was lucky enough to find this person in Derek Chen of Council Design. While apprenticing for Derek, Chris designed The Bike Shelf. Chris was very fortunate to have it gain a large amount of attention around the world and he started receiving orders. With this, Chris needed to officially branch out on his own, find a space and try to figure out how to make a living doing this. Not having a formal education in furniture design, Chris found himself learning a lot along the way, but almost always figuring it out in the end. Chris has a knack for reverse engineering and willingness to fail miserably, both of which he thinks help a lot.

See Chris' other work at www.theknifeandsaw.com.