It was the summer of 2002 — six years after IBM’s Simon Personal Communicator, the first smartphone, debuted — when Orangebox was born in the village of Hengoed, South Wales, U.K., far away from the disruption occurring in places like Silicon Valley where emerging ways of work were happening. It was the same year BlackBerrys were hitting the market but five years before the Apple iPhone ushered in new levels of mobility at work. Yet Orangebox, a new maker of furnishings for the workplace, began to see signals of a major shift in the office — as technology offered the promise of greater freedom, people wanted alternatives to working at their desk.
