BUSINESS
THE ENTREPRENEURS
ENGINEERING PLAY
The Nugget team has honed its brand down to the minute
E
BY MICHAEL MCELROY | PHOTOGRAPHY BY BETH MANN
very two minutes of each workday in Hillsborough, on a street nearly as old as the town itself, 10 adults make a fort that can serve as a rocket, or if it must, as a couch. The team makes furniture, sure. But they’re also working toward something bigger than a comfortable place to sit or a soft place to lay your head. They gather each day in
a warehouse on Nash Street to build, box and ship the Nugget, a colorful, “infinitely configurable play couch” whose mission, the founders say, is to “encourage imagination” and “embolden play.” The Nugget is more than a couch. It’s also a purpose, a successful startup, a model of efficiency. And it all began in the trash. When they first had their big idea in 2012, the Nugget co-founders David Baron and Ryan Cocca were undergraduates at UNC and they’d had enough of the cheap big-box
58 • chapelhillmagazine.com • March 2019
store furniture common to college life. “It was uncomfortable,” David, now the CEO, says. “It was difficult to put together and you couldn’t take it from one place to another because it didn’t come apart. So it ended up in a trash can. We thought that was a scheme, that it was unethical.” We can do better than this, they said.
The current Nugget contains four soft, open-cell polyurethane foam pieces and weighs about 20 pounds. The cover is microsuede, and friction keeps the pieces together in whatever combination a child may dream. But the 2013 prototype contained 11 pieces and weighed some 75 pounds. It wasn’t quite right, but it was a revelation. “This is what we would have wanted as kids,” David says.