Framery began with a noisy boss. In 2010, Samu Hällfors, then in his early twenties, and a colleague were working in an open-plan office at a Finnish IT agency, trying to concentrate while their manager talked on the phone all day. When they asked him to take his calls somewhere else, he laughed and told them to buy him a phone booth. Nothing suitable existed, so they quit their jobs and built one themselves in a garage. That first prototype, nicknamed Pömpeli, the Finnish word for box, became the world's first commercial office pod, and Framery was born in Tampere.

The early prototypes were, in the company's own words, ambitious and underwhelming. Years of acoustic research, engineering and customer feedback followed, and the sixth generation of the booth, Framery O, launched in 2013. It was the first pod to achieve a 30 dB speech reduction and became one of the best-selling pods in the world, finding its way into offices at companies such as Microsoft, SAP and Deloitte. Larger meeting pods, Framery Q and 2Q, followed for small teams who needed privacy together.

As work changed, so did the pods. Framery One arrived in 2021 as the first of a new generation of smart pods, and in 2024 Framery One Compact, Framery Four and Framery Six completed the family. Built on more than 8,000 pieces of user feedback, they can be booked from a phone, adapt light and airflow to the person inside, and receive software updates over time. Framery describes this as its evolution from a furniture company to a technology brand, while keeping the quiet, calm interior that made its name.

Today Framery says it has delivered more than 110,000 pods to customers in over 100 countries, and that around 70 per cent of Forbes Top 100 companies use its products. Yet it remains firmly Finnish: around 90 per cent of its people work at the Tampere headquarters, and every pod is made there. What began as a fix for one distracting phone call has become a simple, well-engineered answer to one of the oldest problems of the open office, a place to think.