Flote, a lounge furniture collection from Hightower, beat out 315 new product entrants to win the Best of NeoCon overall winner at the show's 33rd annual awards presentation.

Of the wide-ranging entrants, the seating product took the prize after the list was reduced to 11 finalists. Five of the 11 were named as honorees and Hightower was selected as the overall winner. 

Inspired by the support, comfort, and ease of relaxing in a simple pool float, the award was accepted by Shawn Sowers, Design Director behind Hightower Studio, who said that the Flote design team "started off by failing." 

"We had started a chair and worked on it for maybe eight months and we decided to stop because we didn't know how it would resolveitself," he said in accepting the award. Sowers, who previously served as Concept and Product Designer for Ikea and Principal Design & Innovation Director for Sauder Woodworking, found his inspiration at his in-laws home during a moment of crisis.

"I was sitting there in a broken pool floatie trying to figure out what I was going to take back to work to solve this project and then it hit me, 'Isn't this the feeling that we're going for?'." [Pool floaties are) just weightless, not thinking about our bodies and that's really where it came from. So we went from floatie as the working name to float as the final project and but it's one of those things that this could have never happened alone. One person couldn't do this. So I'm just grateful for everyone at Hightower that did this. It was greater than what we could have all done alone."

A hallmark of NeoCon since 1990, Best of NeoCon is the official awards program honoring outstanding new products from exhibiting companies across a wide range of verticals. 

Best of NeoCon 2023 will feature entrants in 56 product categories evaluated onsite by a diverse jury of leading architects, designers, specifiers and facility managers with expertise spanning commercial, healthcare, education and hospitality sectors.