Colebrook Bosson Saunders began with research rather than a product. Peter Bosson and Brenda Saunders met at the Royal College of Art and formed a practice together, and between 1984 and 1990 they carried out a series of ergonomic studies in Italy inside Ettore Sottsass' department at Olivetti. The company describes these as the first workplace ergonomics studies of their kind. They were prompted by a real problem: the video display unit had arrived on office desks, and the first generation of them inherited the rigid geometry of the typewriter. By 1985 that research had produced Gemini, which the company records as the world's first articulating monitor support, lifting the screen off the desk to reduce neck strain and give the worker their surface back. After the property crash of the late 1980s the architect Martyn Colebrook joined Peter and Brenda, and in 1990 the three founded Colebrook Bosson Saunders in London.

The studio's position has not moved since. Technology should be made to fit the person rather than the person adapting to the technology, and healthy ergonomics means encouraging movement rather than fixing somebody in one correct posture. The visual result is deliberately quiet. The company describes its work as minimalist solutions that are sympathetic to their environment, which in practice means an arm you stop noticing about a week after it is installed.

That approach has produced a run of firsts. Early monitor arms, CPU cradles and footrests went into Citibank, Lloyds, Nationwide, KPMG and American Express. In 1996 the flat panel screen arrived, and at Orgatec that year Peter and Martyn began working on an arm for it. The answer came from windsurfing: Peter noticed that a sailboard mast is carried by a rubber O ring where the mast meets the board, and adapted the idea into Wishbone, the first monitor arm designed for flat screens. Ollin followed as the first dynamic arm to carry anything between 0 and 9 kg on a single mechanism. Flo became the arm most specifiers know by name, and was rebuilt and relaunched in 2025. Flo X, released in 2023, uses a dual spring and a D ring tilt to hold screens up to 18 kg.

What separates the company from the accessory market it sits in is the combination of that research lineage with ordinary durability. Design and engineering are done in house in London, the monitor arms carry a twelve year warranty, and the environmental management system is certified to ISO 14001:2015. The reimagined Flo is built with 49 per cent recycled content, is fully recyclable and ships in plastic free packaging. For an Australian workplace that is the practical argument: the arm outlasts two or three generations of the screen hanging off it.