Okinlab's EIC Accelerator Bet on Freeform Furniture, Revisited

Okinlab GmbH, a Saarbrücken company founded in 2013 by the architect Nikolas Feth and the business economist Alessandro Quaranta, sells furniture that customers shape themselves in a web configurator called form.bar and that a carpenter near them mills from wooden boards. In the EU's 9 January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, it was one of the winners named in the European Commission's list. The project, 3DConfigurator, received an EU contribution of €1,891,750 towards a total cost of €2,702,500 and ran from 1 May 2019 to 30 April 2021, according to CORDIS. Okinlab was its only beneficiary.

Its promise was blunt: "In this Phase 2 project FORMBAR will be 100% automated", from design to production, and automation would cut the cost of the furniture "by 50%", the grant description says. Seven years on, form.bar is still trading, still run by its two founders, and in February 2026 announced a successor project built on room scans and generative AI. The record also shows what has not happened: no venture round, a smaller network of partner workshops than the one the company described to the EU, and no public proof of the cost cut.

Where Okinlab Stands in 2026

Okinlab is an active company. The Saarbrücken register shows no insolvency, no liquidation and no change of name or management since incorporation; the two founders are still the managing directors, and the annual accounts for 2024 were published on 16 April 2026, according to North Data. The form.bar imprint names the same company, address and directors, and the shop still takes orders and lists phone service hours on every weekday.

On 20 February 2026 the company issued a press release under the headline "form.bar trotzt Marktdruck mit Innovation" (form.bar defies market pressure with innovation). It describes inflation, rising production costs and weak consumer demand in the furniture trade, and announces a research project, with the August-Wilhelm Scheer Institute among its partners, in which a phone app measures a room with LIDAR and generative AI proposes furniture to fit it. The rollout was planned for 2026. Whether it has launched could not be verified. The same release claims more than 50,000 registered users, "more than 20" employees, a licensing push with domestic retailers and work with partners "now also in Japan"; none of these figures or partners has been confirmed by a third party.

How form.bar Works

Custom furniture usually means a carpenter's quote and a drawing made by hand; flat-pack furniture means fixed sizes. Okinlab's configurator sits between the two. A customer pulls and pushes a shelf or table into shape in the browser, and an algorithm modelled on the swarming of birds and fish re-balances the whole piece after every change, so that proportions stay even and the piece still stands, according to the CORDIS results summary and an interview in Basic Thinking. The software prices the piece in real time, checks that it can be produced, turns it into a cutting pattern and sends the milling data to a workshop with a CNC router near the customer. The parts slot together without screws.

The difference from rival configurators, which mostly let customers change the width, height and colour of a fixed design, is the freeform geometry and the link to a distributed network of independent carpenters instead of a central factory. The company also claims that its shelves cause 55% less carbon dioxide than an equivalent shelf from a furniture store, a figure from form.bar's own research quoted by CORDIS that has not been independently reviewed.

What the EU Paid For, and What CORDIS Shows

The project's goals, set out on CORDIS, were full automation of form.bar, photo-realistic rendering, automatic conversion of each design into an optimised cutting pattern, an automatic producibility check and "series readiness" at project end. The final periodic report, covering May 2020 to April 2021, lists what was built: a mobile version of the configurator with step-by-step guidance and auto-suggestions, new templates that cut configuration to "well under 5 minutes", an augmented reality app, an input mask that converts designs to CNC data, a real-time producibility check, a real-time check of carpenter availability and a nesting algorithm that combines several pieces in one order to save material.

The report is also candid about the limits. Orders reach carpenters "partially automated", not fully. The patent strategy was dropped in favour of secrecy, because patenting "would have to reveal too much of the programming-code", although the results page still lists a deliverable titled "Worldwide patent filed". North Data lists patent filings for a "method for producing a three-dimensional object" in 2014, 2015 and 2016, all before the grant, and the form.bar site still calls the process "patent-pending". No patent filed during the project could be found. The report says a licence contract was signed with a Romanian natural stone maker for stone furniture; no product from it has been found online, and the company has not named the partner.

1. Freeform 3D configurator with rendering and live pricingDeliveredLive on form.bar; described in the final report.
2. Automatic CNC data and producibility checkDeliveredInput mask and real-time check reported in 2021.
3. 100% automation from design to productionPartialOrders to carpenters "partially automated" at project end.
4. Worldwide patentNot achievedReplaced by a secrecy strategy, per the final report.
5. Furniture costs cut by 50%UnverifiedNo before-and-after prices published.
6. Network of more than 100 carpentersPartial"More than 50" in February 2026.

The project ran its planned two years and closed on schedule; CORDIS shows no extension. The marketing results in the report are the company's own: visits to the site rose from 50,000 in 2018 to 76,000 a month in 2019 and 145,000 a month at the end of the project. The report does not state whether the 2018 figure is monthly or annual.

The Network and the Team Since 2021

The carpenters are the part of the model that the EU grant could not automate, and the company's own counts point downward. The 2019 grant description speaks of "more than 100 carpenters", a 2020 Basic Thinking article of about 100, undated company profiles on Route 2025 and Lifeverde of more than 80, and the February 2026 press release of "more than 50". The final EU report named new partner workshops in Great Britain, Romania, Slovakia, South Africa, Nigeria and Brazil; whether they still take orders is not public.

Staff numbers moved the other way, from twelve in 2016 to 16 in the grant description and "more than 20" in the 2026 press release and on Lifeverde. Okinlab files its annual accounts in Saarbrücken for every year from 2018 to 2024, but as a small company it files only a balance sheet, and its equity, results and headcount are not available free of charge; turnover is not disclosed at all. Customer satisfaction is visible: ProvenExpert shows 39 Google reviews averaging 4.80 out of 5.

The Money Behind form.bar

No venture capital round has ever been announced. The register shows share capital raised step by step from €25,000 at incorporation to €26,595 in January 2014, €31,288 in January 2016, €32,823 in July 2017, €41,029 in May 2018 and €43,630 in March 2022, with seven shareholders listed in 2022, according to North Data; the size of any premium paid on those shares is not public. The same source records two German public grants of €410,417 and €409,433 dated 1 September 2022 for "iperMö", an augmented reality app for freely shaped, generatively designed furniture. The 2019 SME Instrument Phase 2 awards were grants only, with no EIC equity on offer, and no source links Okinlab to the EIC Fund. Besides the EU grant, the Route 2025 project portrait names it the first company from Saarland to win an SME Instrument Phase 2 grant.

Why It Matters for Europe

Furniture is one of the first product groups the European Commission chose for binding design rules under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, alongside textiles, steel, aluminium, tyres and mattresses, according to ESG Today and FASI. A model that cuts parts only on order, from regional wood, close to the buyer, fits the durability and material-efficiency goals of that regulation and keeps value with small European workshops instead of distant factories, which is the case the company itself made to the EU. Its scale, a network of some 50 workshops and a team of about 20, is still small against an industry dominated by mass producers.

The Verdict

Okinlab has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.