Meet Sergei Hasegawa

Founder of Cory Manufacturing and Purekitchen Cabinets
President, Designer, Operations Manager and Outside Sales

Sergei Hasegawa is an industrial designer, cabinetmaker, architectural draftsman, and business owner. With over two decades of experience representing the best in high quality, custom kitchen cabinetry design, Sergei has dedicated his career in pursuit of innovative designs for clients seeking the most beautiful and environmentally sustainable solutions within a residential setting.

A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in industrial design, Sergei’s passion for fabrication and exploring the potential of various materials has guided an esteemed career, beginning in 1996 when he co-founded San Francisco custom cabinet and furniture studio, Semolina Design. Sergei went on to launch purekitchen in New York City in 2003, a kitchen design and sales company represented by its acclaimed catalog of modern, functional, and LEED-eligible kitchen solutions represented by a portfolio of over 750 single and multi-family kitchens across Brooklyn and Manhattan since 2004. Most recently, under the umbrella of Cory Manufacturing, Sergei has helped revive Imperia Cabinet Company, a Massachusetts cabinetry brand renowned for their heritage design and quality serving the New England market.

When not working as President and Designer at purekitchen and Imperia, Sergei enjoys time restoring bicycles and motorcycles, and spotting birds of prey across his neighborhood in North Brooklyn with his family.

We’ll add more of Sergei’s story, history, pictures, and artwork here. Stay tuned.

The Purekitchen Story

Purekitchen, Imperia, Cory, and how it all fits together

It all began with a conversation on the upper dock of my custom wood shop in West Oakland, California in 1999. My first business, Semolina Design had struggled along since starting it by myself with just a tablesaw in 1996. I had a shared warehouse space in “Dogpatch”, South of South of Market in San Francisco. I had started by trying to make a line of my own furniture, based on laser cut parts as I had a job in one of the two shops using laser cutters to make architectural models in the US at the time. We made models of buildings during the day and at night I designed furniture based on the technology and process but at a larger scale. 

At a point, the owner of the shop decided to close down so we were all deciding what to do. We joked one evening about “should we start an internet / tech company or a wood shop?” This was in 1994 or 1995 so looking back I obviously did the wrong thing. Using the connections I had with the architecture and design community in San Francisco, combined with the school friends I had in the technology sector, I quickly got busy making custom cabinets and furniture for dot.coms and ad firms as well as end users. 

Semolina Design became more of a custom shop as I did not know that even if you have a product, you need to have twice the capital to market and sell that product. Something they neglected to tell me in design school. My furniture line languished as I learned to make casework, furniture, and coordinate metal, glass, leather and wood into whatever came in the door. I got a business partner a couple years into it and the two of us did all the work. We priced, designed, sold, and made everything. I learned how to make things, mostly in wood, and even did the finishing myself for a while. 

We eventually found a finisher but in the process of designing a product line for a retailer in the city, I worked very hard to find good finishes that I could use in the shop and not have terrible solvents and exhaust emissions issues. Those early forays into using water based finishes were tough to say the least. One thing that was interesting was that in the Bay Area, there definitely was an appreciation for environmentally oriented products. Reuse, recycling, healthy materials and finishes were not out of the ordinary. I started using Plyboo bamboo sheets for kitchens and furniture very early on. I remember buying it directly from the owner out of a storage facility in South San Francisco. The very first kitchen we ever made was a bamboo kitchen.

We did our best to use interesting and “green” materials wherever we could and it was not too hard to find materials locally. In 2000, I read an article about a product called Richlite. We had just started focusing on kitchens as a “product” that was more systematized and could be repeated and a paper based countertop seemed to fit in with all of what we were doing. It also was being marketed local and had no real suppliers or fabricators. Latching on to my father’s advice to “just do something no one else does and you have no competition”, I reached out and became one of the first fabricators of the product in the Bay Area. 

We had made custom work for years but never made any money. We purchased some kitchen design software, an edgebander, made a small display cabinet and we started selling kitchens and making money. We also did countertops in Richlite and could turn those in a couple weeks so our cash flow improved vastly. I had now spent 9 years learning how to make things, and run a small business of fabrication. Design usually took the back seat as we ended up making more that we designed ourselves. 

The one design project that did have some success was the partnership with a retailer in San Francisco, called the Big Pagoda. Kurt Silver was the owner and he had lived in Asia and was bringing in really nice antiques and some reproduction Chinese furniture. He had a great sense of contemporary design and we partnered to design a line of furniture to be made in the United States. We would design and source / manufacture it and he was going to market it, both locally and nationally. 

We ended up making hundreds of this contemporary storage box line, called the Zen Box, and even getting some good press on it. They were sold mostly in SF but we did have a buyer put them in Harrods in London for one season. In the end, the retail store did not have the volume or experience to get us to a national level and he ended up closing his store. It was a frustrating but very educationnal experience. Back to kitchens. 

While talking about our business and what to do, the word “purekitchen” just popped in my head. The idea of a green kitchen just made so much sense. The kitchen is the last place you want to have any harmful chemicals. People were spending a lot of time at home and nesting was a term being batted around. When 9-11 happened, that doubled down and there was a lot of talk of real estate and home improvement being a very strong trend. The word itself kind of brought an idea all together at once. Green kitchens, locally manufactured, healthy for the users as well and the world. Unlike furniture that can be copied and shipped, kitchens are custom made to order and fit a unique space so overseas competition would be easy to fend off. It just fit all I had been working on and believed in for so long, and brought it together in one concept and company. I ran up and registered the domain name and started thinking about building that company. 

Around the same time I started to really want to grow the business but also felt the need to move back east to be closer to my family. I ended up deciding to move to New York and separate from my business partner. He agreed to buy my half and continue the business as a custom fabricator / Semolina Design. It took three years but I finally moved to NYC in 2003. I had set up purekitchen but now I had to really do it and start a company. I decided to outsource my cabinets and focus on design and sales. Marketing. No manufacturing at all. I designed an identity with a friend, built a website by hand, set up a small office space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and signed up for the annual International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Javits Center in Manhattan. I partnered with Richlite to also introduce the countertop product at the same show on top of my cabinets. 

Both were very well received and business boomed. I struggled to find shops that would make my cabinets to my specifications but only grudgingly got a few to help me. Most of them laughed at me and said, “ok, if I have to…” A few years later when the green building boom hit the East Coast, suddenly they all had this great idea to do green products…Starting with just a small space, I sold cabinets and countertops in Brooklyn and slowly through Manhattan and the Northeast. There were no other companies doing in at the time. Neill Kelly in Vancouver Canada was pretty much the only company focused on it. We were way ahead of our time.

We had to find products that were just not available locally. We had to hunt down sources, buy at premium prices, trouble shoot new and untested materials and finishes. We used wheatboard panels, products that were often tested and then discontinued, and dealt with lots of quality issues as they were doing field testing of products. We tried one after another finish product as they were the most problematic and underperformed compared to solvent based finishes. 

It was exhausting and difficult but we figured it out and were the first to do it. As I sold green purekitchens, I also had other cabinet lines that requested my help in selling. We sold cabinets for Evans, Apple Valley and Berloni. From those lines I learned to sell HUD/Affordable, Mid range Multi-family, and Italian cabinetry. All that knowledge and experience filtered down into the purekitchen product line to make it the best it could be. We worked on making a contemporary line of kitchens and cabinets that also happened to be very green and healthy for you. We did kitchens for the super-rich, the super-green and even a number of chemically sensitive people that could not find a product that met their requirements anywhere. We did all of it with the goal of a product that could be reasonably affordable and still made locally. 

With this came lots of “partnerships”. Often more one sided than not, with my experience in materials, design, and manufacturing, it was tough to get what I really wanted. We had a small shop in Brooklyn make a number of kitchens for us. We then found a larger company in Connecticut that made our products. Apple Valley/Lescare made a lot of the early purekitchen product. We started to sour on the quality of the Apple Valley product and were hunting around for a new supplier when a rep for Imperia came into our showroom. 

After pricing and learning more about the company, I realized I had found what I needed. More expensive that Apple Valley, but way higher quality. They agreed to make us a private label line and we started selling those kitchens. About six months into it, the owner told me he was shutting down. In the mean time, Apple Valley had gone out of business. In 2008, the economy had tanked in most of the country but NYC was still chugging along with development. We had put in 600 or so kitchens into multi family and that went down to close to nothing in 2009. 

So faced with the choice to close my business or slog through it, I decided to see if we could purchase the Imperia company. I had been through the bubble economy of Japan in the 80’s, the dot com in the 90’s and now had seen the real estate / sub-prime thing blow up as well. I knew it would come around and when it did, if we had a factory and product, we could do very well. Needless to say, investors and banks would not touch us as we were entering the construction and real estate segment via cabinet and casework manufacturing. It was like radiation at the time. I managed to pull together a small group of investors and we purchased the old Imperia Cabinet company’s assets and a long term lease of  the building. 

With a single company and identity on my mind, I went to a trade show in Boston with Purekitchen in late 2010. We had planned on killing the Imperia name and just running under the purekitchen brand but at the show we found that basically everyone knew of Imperia and it had a long history of quality products in the Boston area. With that in mind, we made the decision to maintain Purekitchen and Imperia and run them as brands manufactured by the new entity, Cory Manufacturing Inc. 

We still had a showroom in Brooklyn and had a very good sales person. She was able to run the showroom and sell retail while we all worked on the factory project and got it back up and running. We were lucky enough to re-employ five key employees that were critical in making the company up and running right away. In the summer of 2013, we lost our lease on our Brooklyn Purekitchen showroom. At around the same time, Abigail Umstead decided to move to LA to start a new career and for personal reasons. 

Lessons learned. After we started to make our own Purekitchens, we found out that Apple Valley never used the water borne product that we specified. CARB 2 (California Air Resources Board. Responsible for Catalytic converters and many environmental laws and products.) was implemented in 2009 and 2012 and basically changed the way panel products were made in the US. These certifications and requirements meant that our unique sourced low emitting materials were now the norm in the market. We learned that some people want a “green” product because they don’t want chemicals in their house but could not care less that the veneer is from a clear cut tropical rainforest. Some customers would smell the raw veneers and ask be about it only to be told that is “just the smell of Walnut” in a specific case. We always attempted to integrate all of these parameters into a good looking and contemporary solution. 

Green came and went as a fad. “Greenwashing” became a common term as companies jumped on the bandwagon. Backlash to it happened but it also became “normal” as the entire industry came up to speed and it was not so special. FSC Certification was key at a point but then products at Home Depot were all certified. Green retailers went away and mainstream companies offered low voc and certified wood products. Certifications have lost their tooth as much of it is now marketing. Due to environmental laws, CARB and general awareness, many products have come closer to the vision we had for cabinets in 1999. While we no longer stand out as much as we did, we still strive to make products as clean as possible, with as much information about them as possible so the customer knows exactly what they are getting. We still do kitchens for chemically sensitive customers and not one has ever failed the “sniff test” that it is as clean as it can be on the chemical level. We will provide SDS (Safety Data Sheets) on all of the products that go into our kitchens. We source as much as possible from North American species and suppliers of raw materials. 

We fully control our manufacturing and make one of the highest quality cabinets in the United States and are one of the few mid-sized manufacturers in the North East. Our cabinets are made like a traditional American custom cabinet, but with a door selection that is heavily influenced by European style and design. We stay current on trends for interior accessories and lean heavily on the higher quality, more durable hardware and specialized units. I have always been fascinated by materials and how they become products. We spend a lot of time selecting, testing, and finding the best most unique products that can become a new and interesting element in our cabinet products. This sharp eye has proven to be a valuable asset as we have, for more than 20 years, been on the forefront of applying materials, research, environmental ethics, and design to develop our product lines and offer this to the general public. 

—Sergei Hasegawa