Dynamic is bringing a 1966 Routemaster bus to Shoreditch Design Week this September, but the vehicle, called the Dynamibus, will serve as a mobile showroom for the company’s furniture, including soft seating and acoustic panels, while illustrating how products should be designed.
The bus will be parked outside House of ICON, 380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT, from September 15–17. Visitors can climb aboard without an appointment and test the furniture in person.
Based in Northampton, the firm has operated exclusively through trade channels for two decades. Its furniture—soft seating and acoustic solutions—is designed and built in-house, yet customers are scattered across the UK. Founder Carl Verlander says photographs and renderings cannot convey how a product feels or performs.
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“You can photograph a sofa beautifully, but it won’t tell you how it feels,” he explains. “Designers want to sit on the product and push at the foam, look at the stitching. Nearly every conversation gets easier once the product is in the room with you.”
The Dynamibus turns mobility into an advantage. A traditional showroom ties customers to a fixed location, while a bus can travel, parked outside a designer’s office one day and at a festival the next. Verlander adds that a Routemaster is hard to ignore.
The bus isn’t just a gimmick; it’s a statement on design
The exterior remains unchanged, featuring the iconic open platform at the back. Inside, everything was stripped and rebuilt. The lower deck now holds soft seating and adjustable-height desks, and the upper deck displays task and operator chairs. Wheel arches, which intrude into the seating area, prompted the company to design custom units that curve over the arches, integrating them into the layout.
“You can’t move a wall and you can’t move an arch,” Verlander notes. “Whatever you put in has to survive being driven up the M1 afterwards. It taught us more about planning a space than any showroom has.”
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The 1966 vehicle, still running in 2026, has had nearly every major component replaced at least once, including its engine twice. It was built to be dismantled and repaired without disrupting the rest of the system. The firm’s furniture follows the same logic: modular units that can be reconfigured, covers that can be recovered instead of discarded, and soft seating backed by a 10-year guarantee.
The most common question Verlander hears concerns maintenance rather than durability. He says, “The question I get asked is how long something will last. The more useful one is what happens when a single part of it needs replacing. If you can put that right on site in an afternoon, you’ve got something a client keeps for many, many years.”
A mobile showroom with a purpose
For three days in September the bus becomes Dynamic’s London address, with visitors invited to climb aboard and take a seat.
