Design Icons - Herman Miller Aeron Office Chair

 

Born out of a shelved idea to build a product to replace La-Z-Boy recliners in retirement homes across America, the Herman Miller Aeron is the definitive office chair, having become the poster child for the Dotcom boom and bust, Web 2.0 and onwards to Web 3.0.

Realising that the existing recliners were impacting patient's lives, especially during dialysis or for those spending long periods sitting. They looked for ways to better support bodies, make it easier to find comfortable positions and to move between different levels of recline. This made the chair expensive and concerned that there was no market for premium retirement home furniture, Herman Miller cancelled the project.

The chair's designers, Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick, took some of the innovations which were considered to be too avant-garde - and too expensive - for retirement homes and used them to build the last word in office chairs. Primarily, ditching the foam seat cushion and squab and replacing them with a plastic suspension mesh. This allowed for better weight distribution and heat dissipation, providing better comfort for the user.

Despite concerns that the new design would be too expensive, look too different and be too futuristic for the corporations of the nineties. Instead, the unique nature of its new product helped the Aeron become an absolute hit, selling in record numbers and gaining the sort of public recognition which no piece of office furniture achieved before or since.

In 2017 Herman Miller turned to Stumpf and Chadwick to redesign the Aeron, and in remastering the design the pair added a new lumber pad design to provide support for both the sacral and lordosis areas of the spine, new versions of the plastic mesh provide different levels of support to suit specific contact points.

Herman Miller provides and end to end twelve year warranty, which more than justifies the entry price - seven million customers have bought into the Aeron thus far and with the chair flying off production lines in the US, China and the UK that's a number that's only going to increase.

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