Killer 3D Printing Applications: Office Chairs

In terms of seating, bicycle seats are a very successful 3D printing application. We also looked at the potential for car seats, which is present but would require that people adopt more proactive business practices. 3D printed aircraft seating would potentially be a good idea, but it would be even more difficult to accomplish. What about office chairs? If you ask people what the ultimate office chair is, then you’ll probably get either a “don’t know” or people saying it’s the Herman Miller Aeron.

The Aeron became the gold standard for high-end knowledge workers decades ago. It enjoyed a moment of pop-cultural recognition outside the designerati and still subsists on this. Now available at Walmart, the cheapest versions of the chair sell for around $700, while more expensive versions can be twice that. Steelcase, Vitra, and others still dominate a lot of the office market for offices, but there are a lot more places out there for office chairs at the moment.

Home Office

The home office furniture revolution has ushered in a new market with companies such as Branch springing up to offer less expensive chairs meant for home office use. IKEA offers a wide range of office chairs, priced from $100 to around $500. Meanwhile, the gaming chair category has exploded with many young people craving them. These are sometimes sold in consumer electronics stores, while Herman Miller and other staid brands are making these chairs as well. New brands such as Secretlab, Logitech, Razer, AndaSeat, and Corsair have joined the chair game as part of the gaming chair boom. Part cocoon and part statement, these are very different in design. Some of these can sell for up to $2,000. More worryingly, many consumer electronics firms flirting with gaming chairs now are aggressive, excellent at sourcing from China, and marketing to young people. For some of them, the chairs are probably their highest margin product. There are also companies such as MWE making space ship pods like worstations.

A Market in Turmoil

Design classics, sometimes slightly tweaked, by the Eames‘ or Jean Jean Prouvé still do well, also, for everyday use, to beautify a reception or as chairs. Vitra’s most expensive chair retails for $8,000. Whereas a clubby group of internationally known design-led firms dominated the office furniture space, it is under assault from many directions. Amazon, IKEA, and low-cost firms are sure to bring the heat, as office chairs are increasingly seen as a consumer product. What changes if you get to the device, which chair to buy? We can’t be sure of that now. Kids coveting gaming chairs may not want to work in a regular office chair, and may stay loyal to new brands. Companies operating in low-margin, highly competitive markets may decide that selling chairs is much easier and more profitable than selling headphones. At the same time, there has not been any fundamental innovation in office chairs for years.

(No) Technical Innovation

When Thonet first came out with its iconic French barstools and chairs, it was powered by a fundamental innovation. Steam and molds allowed Thonet to bend wood into elegant, strong shapes, enabling the production of long-lasting, lightweight, and comfortable chairs that used less material. Loved by restaurant owners and more so by staff, these were beautiful and functional. It is easy to see why Thonet first saw the potential in Marcel Breuer’s cantilevered steel chairs, made of bent metal tubes. That modernist innovation still reverberates with us today. Subsequently, Alvar Aalto designed a cantilevered wood-frame chair that suspended the person in laminated wood, and Werner Panton designed a chair molded entirely out of one material. Initially, it was fiberglass, then polyurethane rigid foam, then thermoplastic polystyrene, and now polypropylene. After these innovations, we ended up with the current suspended-cushion-on-a-metal-frame design. Since then, nothing really revolutionary has happened.

Enter the Fray

One problem with office chairs is the buildup of heat during prolonged periods of sitting. Another is comfort when sitting in the same position for many hours. Another issue is how to get people to adopt the right postures so they don’t develop long-term issues or aches. Pain or sore spots when sitting in one particular way is also an issue, as is people’s tendency to slouch. A seat with multiple optimal seating positions, greater comfort, reduced heat buildup, and better cushioning could displace the top-selling and most expensive chairs on the market. Through the situational placement of 3D printed cushions, such seats could be more comfortable than others.

OECHSLER has shown some work on chairs using MJF lattice cushions. For small inserts with a big impact, their solution could work well. The cost should be manageable for the most expensive chairs, provided the cushions can be sized appropriately while still making an impact. Optimized lattice structures could give access to optimal seating positions in a comfortable package. The 3D printed cushions would differentiate and provide a meaningful benefit. By positioning this as the new category-killing ultimate office chair, the real challenge would be to make it. But, given that the market is in turmoil, the lack of true functional additive expertise by chair companies and their lack of innovation, there is scope to do this. A staid company with real innovation, a direct-to-consumer high-end chair for home office use, or a new tech-type chair brand could all work. It’s remarkable that we have super premium tequila, Haestens beds, expensive shoes, but do not have a super premium leader for chairs that we spend many hours in each week. There is real opportunity here to create a killer application in 3D printed office chairs, is it your opportunity?