A product designer’s job is equal parts scientist, engineer, archivist – their work, the result of years of research and tinkering, may start as one thing and turn into something completely different. No one knows this better than designers Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick, who put in years of combined research into the way people sit. Their most well-known joint production is the Aeron Chair, an ergonomic revolution when it first hit the market in 1994, and now the gold standard for office seating today. But Aeron wasn’t invented out of thin air – Chadwick and Stumpf worked on a number of predecessors that assayed their ideas of elemental chair design. Here’s the Aeron journey, from prototype to industry pioneer.

1976

The world’s first research-based ergonomic chair

Nearly 20 years before the launch of the Aeron Chair, Bill Stumpf designed Ergon, changing the world of office seating forever. Before Ergon’s launch, Stumpf laid out the criteria for comfort, which would influence Herman Miller’s definition of high-performance seating, with a balanced view of comfort, function and aesthetics.

1984

“Best of the Decade”

Bill Stumpf teamed up with Don Chadwick for their first seating collaboration: the Equa Chair, which was marketed as a “chair for people who can’t sit still” and landed in Time magazine’s “Best of the Decade” for design.

1987

Long-term sitting

Stumpf and Chadwick teamed up to research comfortable chairs for the elderly as part of a pilot programme. The result? The Sarah Chair, which experimented with advanced kinematics as well as a new type of interior suspension, using a woven elastic material.

2021

Making the best, better for Earth

The company’s first major foray into product development incorporating ocean-bound plastic – recycled material that's been incorporated into the supply chain, picked from the waste once headed into our ocean – focuses on our best-selling chair. More than 150 metric tons of plastic (that’s the equivalent of 15 million water bottles!)* will be diverted from the ocean every year with the ever-more-sustainable Aeron.

* based on annual sales forecast