Dot-Com Throne in 2014: The Best Office Chair Yet

It was a different world back then, when the most prized ergonomic chair of the world first made its appearance at the furniture stores. Internet was booming and the possibilities were seemingly endless. Growing share of internet media and companies competing to give advertisements to websites paved the way for overly optimistic predictions. Working from an office with a T1 line was seen a business that would grow forever and investing generously in gadgets and office furniture was a small price paid for inventing the future. At this era, Aeron Chair became more than a vehicle for enhanced office productivity and improved bodily health. It became a status symbol and an embodiment of the confidence in the boom that would later be called the Dot-Com Bubble.

The internet bubble collapsed starting with 1999. As a result, offices of many internet based companies went empty and the great ergonomic office chairs purchased for those offices became useless. A sad memory from those days is about Aeron Chairs dumped in one corner of an abandoned office. It was this scene, that twisted the reputation of Aeron Chair for some time and made it into a symbol of the bust. As a result, the best ergonomic office chair of the world was crowned as the Dot-Com Throne by New York Magazine in a not so complimentary manner.

Despite the setback of the Dot-Com bust, Aeron Chair recovered its status as the market leader in the ergonomic chair business. The reasons that allowed it to prevail are many. First, it was the first truely ergonomic chair in the world and all other that came after it are inevitably imitations to a certain extent. Next, it was made perfect with all the necessary features such that anything that was made with the intention to supercede it turned out to be an overkill. Yet, no factor contributed to Aeron retaining its best chair title more than the reputation of Herman Miller.

With all the great features it has, by far the greatest factor that makes and keeps Aeron Chair as the market leader is the reputation of Herman Miller Company as one of the most reliable chair manufacturers in the world. There are many new chairs out there in 2014 and they are all claimed to incorporate some new ergonomic design tweak that makes them equally good or better than Aeron. Perhaps, they are actually on a par with the ageless ergonomic chair that everyone knows about but they have not established themselves as firmly. When you buy a Herman Miller chair, you expect to use it for the rest of your life and you are confident that if anything goes wrong, you will get help and there will be no red tape. This does not mean other chair manufacturers are not reliable. It simply means they have yet to build the immense customer confidence Herman Miller already has.

There is much to say about Aeron Chair being the best and delving further into it is beyond what this brief article is capable of. What we know for sure is it has survived so far. In fact, Aeron Chair has been named 2014’s best office chair, a position it has held for the last twenty years. Two decades after its birth, Aeron is still the safest choice if you want a chair that will not let you down.