factory, and still more making sure that, say, the mesh on the
Aeron doesn’t pinch the behinds of people who sit in it. But now
you find out that people don’t like the mesh. In fact, they think
the whole chair is ugly, and if there is one thing you know from
years and years in the business, it is that people don’t buy
chairs they think are ugly. So what do you do? You could scrap
the chair entirely. You could go back and cover it in a nice
familiar layer of foam. Or you could trust your instincts and
dive ahead.
Herman Miller took the third course. They went ahead, and
what happened? In the beginning, not much. The Aeron, after
all, was ugly. Before long, however, the chair started to attract
the attention of some of the very cutting-edge elements of the
design community. It won a design of the decade award from
the Industrial Designers Society of America. In California and
New York, in the advertising world and in Silicon Valley, it
became a kind of cult object that matched the stripped-down
aesthetic of the new economy. It began to appear in films and
television commercials, and from there its profile built and
grew and blossomed. By the end of the 1990s, sales were
growing 50 to 70 percent annually, and the people at Herman
Miller suddenly realized that what they had on their hands was