When moving, renters have to frequently disassemble furniture or bear increased costs for transporting larger furniture. Otherwise, they can only resign to using landlord furniture that does not fit their needs. Seeing these plights, three millennial women graduated from the College of Design, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology (YunTech)—Pei-Yi Sung, Tzu-Ting Chen, and Ching-Ping Huang—decided to participate in the 2016 U-start Plan for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (U-start Plan) organized by the Youth Development Administration, Ministry of Education (YDA). Under concurrent assistance by YunTech's Incubation Center for Academia-Industry Collaboration and Intellectual Property, they founded the brand GOGO Furniture to start a minimalist trend in Taiwan's furniture industry and spark brighter ideas of what "home" can be.
Furniture refers to large objects indispensable in every household that additionally symbolize one's personal taste and values. Based on the tenet that "Everyone deserves to have a comfy home", GOGO Furniture attaches great importance to combining aesthetic and practical purposes. Pei-Yi Sung and her other two classmates from the College of Design leveraged their professional skills in conjunction with their women's intuition for coziness and expectations of a dwelling place to create an innovative brand of furniture that is practical, aesthetically-pleasing, and easy to move. Their products are distinguished by 5 characteristics: "taste, craftsmanship, simplicity, compact design, and eco-friendliness". Moreover, since they've made it their mission to continue development of Taiwan's traditional furniture manufacturing sector while upholding sustainability values of a circular economy, their application for the 2016 U-start Plan for Innovation and Entrepreneurship earned them the highest prize money of NT$1 million as well as the title of "Outstanding Team". Afterward, they continued trailblazing and were awarded the Sprouting Business award in the Startup Category by the Small and Medium Enterprise Administration, Ministry of Economic Affairs in 2018.
GOGO Furniture's products are made with premium-quality birch plywood imported from Europe and processed locally in Taiwan. The patented special mortise and tenon design developed by the brand can reduce the use of screws, simplify the assembly process, and facilitate disassembly. One minibus can carry the entire set of 8 furniture pieces. This innovative design concept not only counts with multiple novel structure and design patents at home and abroad, but it has also garnered three international awards: Red Dot Award, IF Design Talent Award, and the Taipei Invention Award at the 2017 Taipei Int'l Invention Show & Technomart.
Previously, GOGO Furniture launched a height-adjustable desk and chair set for children aged 3 to 18 on the zeczec platform, thereby promoting the idea of investment in kids' furniture and earning the support of 577 parents. A total of 380 sets were sold, gathering NT$7,290,000 in funds—the highest amount of funding raised on this platform by kids' furniture. Easy-to-assemble, sustainable furniture is on the rise as times change, and the Taiwanese furniture brand GOGO Furniture is tirelessly devoted to innovation, prompting its entry to foreign markets and promising dazzling success in the international scene.
In order to foster a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship amongst higher education institutions, the YDA continues to implement the U-start Plan for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which provides subsidies and prize money for teams of young entrepreneurs in two stages. Teams who pass the first-stage review can obtain NT$350,000