For the outsider they often are hard to tell apart. Two enterprises fall under the Vitra brand: a European-league manufacturer specializing in office furniture and an economically independent museum that devotes itself specifically to seating furniture. Under the management of Alexander von Vegesack, the museum component has made great contributions to the history of home design. Like no other company in the business, the German-Swiss enterprise maintains an intellectual relationship to its products. Rather than developing a monolithic corporate image, it has relied on a heterogeneous and multicultural approach. Vitra first took flight in the late 1950s with designs by Americans Charles and Ray Eames. A decade later, the Panton Chair by Verner Panton of Denmark caused a sensation and started a new trend. The designers who have worked for Vitra since the 1990s are among Europe’s design elite: from Italy, Mario Bellini and Antonio Citterio, from England, Jasper Morrison and Norman Foster, from France, Philippe Starck and the brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec and, recently, Werner Aisslinger from Germany. The company in addition manufactures important creations by the French modernist Jean Prouvet. Behind the firm’s design and corporate identity strategy is an unusual entrepreneur. Rolf Fehlbaum is a leading figure in the industry. His “edition” of experimental seating furniture at the end of the 1980s, issued in small series, put Vitra in the limelight. Included were “classics” such as Shiro Kuramata’s easychair made from metal netting and Frank Gehry’s glued cardboard Grandpa Chair. The American Gehry also designed the building for the Vitra Design Museum. The exalted architecture kicked off a program in which half a dozen prominent architects set various accents on the company grounds, among them the minimalist Tadao Ando and the deconstructivist Zaha Hadid, virtually unknown at the time, who designed the garage for the fire brigade. At the turn of the new century, Vitra built an administration building for tomorrow, incorporating the concept of open, flexible and completely networked offices.