MillerKnoll has appointed Jeff Stutz as Chief Executive Officer, the furniture group said from its Zeeland, Michigan headquarters on 21 October 2026. He also joins the board of directors, and the appointment takes effect immediately.
Stutz had been serving as interim Chief Executive Officer since the end of June, so the decision converts a caretaker arrangement into a permanent one rather than bringing in an outsider. The board took almost four months over it.
His route to the job is unusually long and unusually internal. He joined Herman Miller at the start of the century and moved through a sequence of finance roles, serving as Vice President of Investor Relations, as Corporate Treasurer and as Chief Accounting Officer before becoming Chief Financial Officer, a post he held for more than a decade. In the autumn of the previous year he was made Chief Operating Officer, with responsibility for the International Contract segment, for global manufacturing and for the group's European brands. That final move is the one that matters most for reading this appointment, because it took a long serving finance chief and gave him the operating estate before the board asked him to run the company.
John R. Hoke III, Chairman of the Board, said that Stutz brings deep institutional knowledge, broad industry experience and a proven record of leadership at MillerKnoll.
Stutz said that this is a pivotal time for MillerKnoll and that he is energised by the opportunity.
The group describes itself as a growth oriented small cap value company and trades on Nasdaq. It carries fourteen brands, among them Herman Miller and Knoll, the two names whose combination created the present company and whose integration has defined much of the work since. A chief executive who spent a decade as its finance chief and then a spell running its manufacturing and international contract business has seen that integration from both the cost side and the operating side, which is a narrower but deeper preparation than a external hire would bring.
The commercial furniture market has been difficult for several years, squeezed between corporate real estate decisions that keep being deferred and a cost base that does not defer with them. In that setting a board has a genuine choice between buying a new strategic story from outside and backing someone who already knows which parts of the estate carry the margin. MillerKnoll has chosen the second, and the absence of any named predecessor in the announcement suggests a company that would rather talk about continuity than about change.
The appointment to the board alongside the executive role is worth noting in its own right. It gives Stutz a seat at the table where capital allocation is settled rather than only presented, which is the practical difference between a chief executive who executes a strategy and one who sets it.
