Lowie Vermeersch is the product of a very creative and art-minded family. His passion for design saw to it that he studied industrial design at the Delft University of Technology. After having graduated, he started working at Pininfarina in 1998. There he collaborated in the design of various successful cars and prototypes such as the Nido and the Sintesi. In August 2007 he was promoted to Head of Design at Pininfarina.
His collaboration with Durlet began as the result of a project the company had initiated following an order from the Belgian magazine Weekend Knack. On the occasion of the start of the new Millennium, it had asked ten companies who were trendsetters in their sector, how their sector would evolve during the next Millennium.
Durlet partnered up with the Design Agency KVD in combination with Lowie Vermeersch –the two had ties with each since their education in Delft – to formulate an answer to this short but difficult question. Completely new concepts that answered to the function of “sitting” were invented. Out of these concepts three new products were distilled each of which, depending on the context, addressed the function “sitting” in a different way. One of those prototypes resulted in the Link model, which addresses the social aspects of sitting and was actually subsequently taken into production. The other two products of the “how to sit” collection, as it was named, were Grip and Tween, which both answered to the cocooning and meditating aspects of the seating function.