A system she invented for building furniture out of packing crates represents one of the earliest to adopt a modular approach to the design of individual units.

[1] She also founded one of the earliest ready-to-assemble furniture companies, as well as the Home Thrift Organization (HTA) to teach woodworking to New York City boys.

Given that Brigham seems never to have had to work for a living and that for much of her adult life she was not supported by a husband (she did not marry until the age of 41), it seems reasonable to deduce that her family was relatively well-off for the time.

As she herself put it in a 1913 interview: "I spent the biggest part of five years in Europe, studying various kinds of handiwork with the peasants and the artists of nineteen different countries.

Highly influential for Brigham's later design work were two summers spent in a coal-mining camp on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, which sits well above the Arctic Circle in the Svalbard archipelago.

Under these difficult conditions, Brigham undertook to design what she called "box furniture" for the camp out of those cast-off packing crates, following up on some earlier experiments along the same lines.

Illustrated with line drawings by the interior designer Edward H. Aschermann (whom Brigham had met through their mutual friend, the Viennese Secessionist architect-designer Josef Hoffmann), [4] Box Furniture was a how-to manual for a target audience of modestly skilled working-class householders.

It offered dozens of different furniture plans, advice on how to select and break down crates, instruction in basic carpentry, and a list of necessary tools.

In addition to working exclusively with recycled materials of the cheapest kind, Brigham planned many of her designs to be multifunctional and space-saving (a drop-leaf table, a set of nesting stools, a desk with built-in bookcases) as they were aimed primarily at urban apartment dwellers.

It aimed to capture the low-cost end of the emerging market in factory-made furniture while providing jobs for modestly skilled workers.

This short-lived business was decades ahead of what are usually taken to the starting points of commercial RTA furniture, which include efforts by Australian designer Frederick Charles Ward (late 1940s), American cabinetmaker Erie J. Sauder (1953), and IKEA (1956).

[2] In part due to Brigham's teaching at the HTA and associated publicity, box furniture had something of a vogue in the years leading up to World War I.