Grey won the assigment in a multi-agency shootout, which followed Haworth relocating its regional headquarters from Hong Kong to Shanghai last year.
The brief covers India, Southeast Asia, Greater China and the Australasian markets. Grey has started work on a campaign for a product launch. No details were released.
"This account will involve a lot of business-to-business communication," said Grey Global's China chairman Viveca Chan. "It's very targeted. The challenge is how to use the money effectively and how to drive the business effectively. It is all about targeted business and how we communicate to the trade will determine how successful we are.
"This is not a mass advertising account. It is more of what can we do to create awareness for the brand," she said. "It will involve direct mailing, interactive and a lot of advertising in various trade publications."
Haworth Inc, the world's second-largest office furniture manufacturer, has a regional presence dating back to the late 1980s. It first opened joint-ventures in Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore in 1987 and has since expanded its operations to include manufacturing plants in Kuala Lumpur and Shanghai and showrooms and offices throughout the region.
The privately-held company had reported sales of US$1.32 billion in 2002.
It is best known for having created the pre-wired partition cubicle workplace in 1954, the predecessor of today's panel system much lampooned in the cartoon series Dilbert.