It takes 77 steps to make an Emeco 1006 chair. It’s made from 12 different sections by 50 people and they need 8 hours to do it. At each step along the way, the chair is ground to smooth out the welds and create a seamless look. The end product is nearly indestructible and built to last for 150 years.
Once found on destroyers and submarines in the 1940s, this article in Metropolis talks about how the chair has become a favorite of designers. In fact, Philipe Starck agreed to offer updated designs for no fee.
“I was worried that Philippe would want a huge fee to design for us, but he didn’t even discuss money until I told him that I couldn’t afford to pay him anything. I offered him a stake in the company. He said he didn’t want one.” Instead Emeco will pay Starck an undisclosed royalty. “He could’ve taken his designs to Steelcase and made a big, fat fee.”
Starck chose to design for Emeco for a simple reason. “I have always admired the way the Emeco chair is put together,” he says. “I thought if I could design a line of furniture that becomes a classic like that chair, then I would be doing something great. I have designed a great number of things I am not proud of, and they are no longer around. I want to design things that are here forever. I think it’s time to stop wasting what’s on the planet.”
There’s more on the Starck collaboration at the Emeco site. He writes, “It is a chair you never own, you just use it for a while until it is the next person’s turn. A great chair never should have to be recycled. This is good consideration of nature and mankind.”
The site also offers a neat documentary on the company and its design process. It talks about the “ping ponging” between designers and manufacturers and how the company builds dozens of actual chairs as prototypes before finalizing a design. One designer says, “Sometimes you don’t get around to doing the final drawings. Sometimes the chair is the drawing.”
Also revealed in the doc (though perhaps just legend): The 1006’s seat was molded after Betty Grable’s bottom.
Going back to the Metropolis article, it mentions seven ads Emeco ran in Fortune back in the 1950s.
Each one depicted a different sculpture by Rodin; above the bronzes, in large letters, the ads read: “Sculpted Masterworks.” The name Emeco was in small letters at the bottom. “A lot of people called, asking, “What do you make?’” recalls Emeco’s chief operating officer at the time.
Sounds like a forerunner to Apple’s Think Different campaign.
Mike
on 25 Mar 11At $440-$1190 for a chair, I think they could have afforded to pay their designer a fee. My $20 Ikea dining room chairs function well enough, thank you.
Paul Thrasher
on 25 Mar 11@Mike: Our website designed by my 13 year old nephew functions well enough, thank you.
Avi Flombaum
on 25 Mar 11It’s a timeless design – they’ve actually started manufacturing these in plastic also, it’s cheaper and more sustainable, short video on the new version – http://vimeo.com/16535581
Simon
on 25 Mar 11The film is copyright 2000 at the end but hard to tell actual age (the feel is 50s-60s but obviously intentional).
Some of the workers are not wearing safety glasses and earmuffs and their are not shields over some of the tool. However a few workers are wearing both (along with logo-ed t-shirts)
I suspect most of it was shot around 2000 with a few earlier shots mixed in. The most recent shots are mainly towards the end.
Sarah T
on 25 Mar 11Terrible copy once again
David Andersen
on 26 Mar 11Good for you Paul, not everyone’s nephew is so talented.
Mike has a point. Not everyone wants, can afford, or needs a $400+ chair. Just because something is designed well doesn’t mean it axiomatically should cost a fortune. And even if you desire and appreciate good design, few people can afford expensive and well designed across the panoply of things they own. We must pick and choose.
Jake
on 26 Mar 11@ Paul
Well if your 13 year old nephew gets paid by multi-billion dollar corporations to design websites then yes, I would say your website probably functions well enough.
Ben Rogers
on 26 Mar 11Another blog post FAIL by 37signals.
Hope you guys break your funk from the past month on blog posts.
Peaches
on 26 Mar 11Another fart whiff post. Do you guys like to self gratify on the finer things in life? Acting cultured and being cultured are two different things. Next time, post the video but don’t tie it into some apple fan boy bs.
Donny
on 26 Mar 11What in the world is going on with the huge commenting FAIL !
Thank you Matt for this post. If anything, it teaches how to communicate the care and effort that goes into building your product.
Dave Winter
on 26 Mar 11Somehow I found it comforting to watch a video demonstrating quality US manufacturing. Now let’s find a way to develop more of it!
Jarrett
on 26 Mar 11It reminds me of the chairs from Battlestar Galactica (the new one). http://archive.propworx.com/1002/1474
Victor
on 26 Mar 11@Dave Winter
Doesn’t it seem odd to you to call the process of forging aluminum to make a cheap chair “quality manufacturing” a bit odd.
Marek Glowacki
on 27 Mar 11Every designer should learn about chairs. More general about “place to sit” (e.g. persian carpet) because chair is a western invention. “place to sit” idea is timeless… simple problem so many solutions, so many point of views (stackability, affordance, realiability, fun factor, ...) chair perspective on design is not armchair philosophy. Also it is interesting how other inventions influnced chair, for example electricity – electric chair.
Eliot
on 27 Mar 11I don’t understand why 37readers feel the right to complain about content like many have been. 37s can post whatever the hell they like and enjoy. Go away if you don’t like it, 37s doesn’t owe you anything on THEIR OWN blog.
Personally, I love these posts about people/companies doing amazing things. They are all interesting, random, and inspiring.
Nate W
on 27 Mar 11I find the price tag to be off-putting. I’ll buy a “put-it-together-yourself” chair from Ikea every 5 years, for $20 each, and only be paying $300, much less than the average ~$800 for these chairs! Hell, my awesome plastic office chair I got at office max for $200 goes up and down and forward and back, the arms adjust, but those really expensive chairs just sit there!
William Cox
on 28 Mar 11I have one of those chairs sitting next to me in my lab. It’s a fabulous chair – extremely lightweight and comfortable to sit in it. You wouldn’t know it to look at it though.
EH
on 28 Mar 11Nate: I try to shop smart, but if $500 makes that much of a difference over your lifetime I’d say you have the edge on me in the frugality department. Not having to shop for chairs ever again is worth something too, though. And “average price,” do you seriously base your decisions on average price? “Welp, the average price for a car is $22,000 and that’s just too much. Guess we’re walking from now on!” Props for living your truth, dude.
DB
on 29 Mar 11If it’s the look you want, there are probably a number of (mostly online) stores in your country that sell good quality replicas of the designer items for a fraction of the price of the original. I live in Australia; we’ve got great companies like Baobab, who have a good range of replica chairs and other items at really affordable prices. I’ve seen many such websites from the US and UK as well… sometimes, you just want to own the genuine article. But when the difference is $100 vs $500, it can be hard to justify!
ABasketOfPups
on 29 Mar 11After the third or fourth cheap ($100 or less) chair from the office store failed in one way or another after just over a year, I got a Steelcase Leap. Nice chair. It’s been about a year and it looks like it was brought in yesterday. Is it worth the $1400 this model cost? Was to me. $1400 is meaningless over a couple years. Having a bad chair is a blight on your whole workday. (You can get one a little cheaper if you skip the leather and the aluminum brace, but why?)
This discussion is closed.