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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
An Aeron chair is the kind of extravagance that most office dwellers, perched in their $100 Office Max specials, will probably never catch a glimpse of. The chairs, which retail for about $700 each, are as deluxe a rendition of an ordinary object as one can imagine. Aeron chairs belong to that small class of instruments for people who eschew the regular stuff for the expensive and exemplary -- Uni-ball pens for Mont Blancs, Hoover vacuums for Miele and Safeway beef for Niman Ranch. Aeron chair devotees, who recognize a Kinemat tilt mechanism when they see one, are evangelists on the subject. "I do believe it actually helped my bad posture, and made me look cool. I love you, Aeron chair!" wrote one former dot-com worker, who requested anonymity "to protect the chair" that he had stealthily wheeled out of his office the day his company laid off its staff.
Unlike Miele vacuums or Niman Ranch steaks, however, Aeron chairs enjoyed a special relationship with the Internet boom, riding the dot-com wave to near ubiquity. Aerons were the new economy and success rolled into a single object; they gave start-ups a tangible way to flaunt their investors' high hopes and reporters a shorthand to describe success.
"To get an indication of how well Salesforce.com is doing these days," wrote a Business Week reporter in a recent article, "stroll through its newly renovated offices -- [where] a young staff sits in ergonomic Aeron chairs and takes breaks at the circular coffee bar in the corner of the main floor."
As the dot-coms got richer, so did Herman Miller, the maker of Aeron chairs and inventor of that mainstay of the new-economy workplace: modular panels with integrated work systems, aka the cubicle. As the dot-com boom hit its peak in the last quarter of 2000, Herman Miller's net sales increased 27.7 percent. Among its bestselling products: the Aeron chair.
But just as the dot-coms had collected Aerons when they grew, so they shed them as they died, unleashing legions of briefly occupied luxury chairs into the world. When sports company Quokka shut its doors, it left behind hundreds of hastily abandoned Aeron chairs, clustered in the corners of the lifeless offices like refugees.
The auction circuit is now rife with Aerons. Stefanie Schwaderer, who runs auctions for Cowan Alexander, sold "50 or so" Aeron chairs from Hayward, Calif., company Cohera in late July. A week earlier, she sold another bunch for a company called Agillion in Austin, Texas, and before that, over 150 for Living.com, which folded in August 2000. Schwaderer says she sells Aerons at dead dot-com auctions about twice a month, but one Aeron-endowed company stands out in her memory. "They had [over 100] Herman Miller chairs, but no desks in the place. They had folding tables, set up end to end, and they made office cubes out of them. And this is where their money went ... their chairs."
How many Aerons ultimately were gobbled up by dot-coms is difficult to determine. Herman Miller spokesman Mark Sherman is unwilling to be specific about the numbers of chairs sold, other than to note that "we have multiplied production volume, doubled and doubled and doubled the production volume."
Herman Miller, says Sherman, is "astounded" by the success of its creation.
One wonders how the venture capitalists who provided the wherewithal for Aeron acquisition feel. Seeing the Quokka photos is like being let in on a dirty secret; for a company that blew through $200 million in four years, what else is a roomful of $700 chairs other than incriminating evidence?
