Puffee - Corrugated Plastic Cardboard Chair for Your Café

Hi! I'm Yanuardi

I'm an 8th-semester Product Design student at the Faculty of Design and Creative Arts, Universitas Mercu Buana. I'm passionate about visual aesthetics and technology, especially photography and industrial product design.

I've worked on various projects involving Autodesk Fusion 360, 3D printing, and scale modeling. I enjoy turning digital concepts into physical mock-ups and miniatures, and often explore hands-on prototyping alongside CAD. Photography has always been one of my biggest passions. But honestly, anything related to visual art and product design truly excites me.

As a product design enthusiast and future professional industrial designer, I’m excited to share one of my projects developed during the Covid-19 pandemic, precisely around mid 2022. The concept was simple: to create a chair that’s affordable, easy to build at home, and still aesthetically pleasing—all made from 3mm plastic cardboard. It was designed with small businesses and cafés in mind, offering a practical, DIY-friendly solution during hard times.

This Instructable walks through the full design process from start to finish. It covers the key steps: research, brainstorming, 3D modeling, visual presentation, and finally, building the physical prototype. My goal is to make this process easy to follow so anyone can build the chair on their own—whether you're a design student, a maker, or just someone who loves creating.

Software:

1. Autodesk Fusion 360
2. Affinity Designer

Materials:

1. Large 3mm Corrugated Plastic Cardboard (Recommended if you want better colour and more durable than paper cardboard)
2. Or any 3 milimetres Conventional Cardboard

Tools

1. Sharp Cutter
2. Scissor
3. Marker
4. Straight Edge Ruler

Before jumping into the design process, I started with some simple research. I looked into common types of stools and chairs often used in cafés to understand what styles were popular and what made them practical. Here's what I found.

After finishing my initial research, I started sketching the chair design.

The shape was inspired by pudding with soft, layered, and playful concept. I wanted the form to feel simple yet unique, with a friendly look that fits well in a cozy café setting.

Now let's jump to 3D modeling, I used Fusion 360 to create a 3D model of the cardboard chair. This software really helped me to get accurate measurements and made it easier to adjust the size. The chair uses a unique stacking slot system to make the structure stronger than regular folding methods. Check the 3D file below

After finishing the 3D model, I rendered it using Fusion 360 and other software to see what the chair would look like with different colors. This step helps us make sure the final chair looks nice and well-designed.

Next, I created 2D technical drawings from the 3D model in Fusion 360. These drawings are very important because they become the templates we’ll use to cut and build the real chair later.

After making the technical drawings, I arranged the parts on a layout using Affinity Designer to make sure nothing overlaps—especially the stacking slots. This way, we can check that everything fits correctly before cutting.

Before building the full-size version, I needed to test the structure to make sure it could handle more than just its own weight.

So, I created a 1:3 scale mock-up of the chair. The results were promising, it was able to support the weight of around 10x 500ml water bottles, proving the design was strong and stable even at a smaller scale.

Once the mock-up test was completed, it was time to move on to printing the template.

I recommend printing the full template on A3 paper for the best accuracy. However, if you want to save paper, you can print just half of the template and mirror it during the tracing process to get the full shape.

Here’s the file ready for you to print and use!

Place the printed template onto your corrugated plastic cardboard. Carefully trace the shape as accurately as you can—this will help everything fit together properly during assembly.

Now cut the shapes you traced on the cardboard. These will be the final pieces for building the chair. Make sure the cuts are clean and follow the lines closely.

Once you have all the pieces, start assembling! Begin from the lowest layer and stack up according to the slot system in the middle. Then, lock the layers with the outer cover pieces. You can watch the assembly video for help if needed.

Finally, sit on your new chair and test it! I asked a friend who weighs 90 kg to try it, and the chair held up just fine. I believe this design can safely hold up to 100 kg.