The Stool 60 Giveaway. Sign up for our emails and a chance to win this ingenious stackable stool. on September 21, 2015 at 5:25 AM, updated They negatively impact the entire category by confusing and frustrating customers -- Brian Walker ZEELAND, MI -- Herman Miller's Aeron chair is one of several of the company's iconic designs sitting in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and other museums around the world. The Zeeland furniture-maker has a history of taking legal action against companies that copy those high-end designs and sell their knockoffs for less. Herman Miller is now going after a businesses it says confuses and misleads consumers in a different way. It is taking a New York firm, Madison Seating, to court for giving the impression that its refurbished Herman Miller furniture is new. For CEO Brian Walker, Madison Seating's actions fall into the same category as selling counterfeit products. Both hurt the brand's value.
Walker derided them as misleading business practices that are the "scourge of the industry" in a statement announcing the company's legal action against Madison Seating last month. "They negatively impact the entire category by confusing and frustrating customers and consumers, and damaging the brands and reputations of companies like Herman Miller and others that are committed to creating and selling authentic, innovative, high-quality products that last for generations," Walker said. Herman Miller filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of Illinois court in August against Madison Seating for unauthorized use of its trademarks, improper marketing and sales of its products, including its best-selling Aeron chair. The suit noted Madison Seating's promotional material promised customers "... the chance to own the chair everyone has been raving about at a fraction of the cost." That price is $599 compared to $1,003, the ad said. Herman Miller contends Cohen is violating a consent agreement with terms that explicitly prohibit Cohen from engaging in Madison Seating's current activities and imposes specific penalties for violating the judgment.
before the companies' own websites. Neither Madison Seating nor Cohen responded to MLive's requests for a comment. But Cohen did talk about his previous legal battle with Herman Miller. "We started to make a dent in this business and now these huge companies are coming after us," Cohen told The Grand Rapids Press in 2006. Cohen said his company was launched in a small New York warehouse not long after his father received 10 Aeron chairs from someone who owed him money, as a way of paying off the debt. and a business model was born. In that 2006 interview, Cohen said his company tried to work with manufacturers and listed all its products as "open box" returns, even though he says only about 10 percent fit the description. He added he believed his company was singled out from others that also sold the chairs at deep discounts because his customers included Microsoft. Cohen said he spent more than $500,000 defending himself in the Herman Miller case.
Two years after Cohen signed an agreement with Herman Miller, the furniture-maker agreed to a $750,000 settlement to end an antitrust lawsuit brought by New York State, and joined by Michigan and Illinois. That settlement said that retailers were legally allowed to advertise lower prices for Aeron chairs and other furniture, but noted that Herman Miller also had the legal right to stop doing business with the retailers. At the time, Herman Miller insisted that it could still require retailers not to advertise below a certain price but acknowledged it could no longer forge formal agreements to do so. The agreement also only applied to advertisements, allowing retailers the flexibility to cut their profits to sell the chairs for less. "They are really protective about how much their products can be sold for," said Rob Kirkbride, who writes about the industry for Monday Morning Quarterback, a Chicago-based trade publication. He remembers reporting on Herman Miller's fury over Costco buying its Aeron chairs from a distributor and then selling them $200 below "best price" in 2002, when he was a Grand Rapids Press reporter.
"Herman Miller became unglued," said Kirkbride. "They were not happy about it." One of the benefits of buying new is that the purchases comes with a 12-year warranty, says Thor Sorensen, whose family owns Design Quest. The modern and contemporary furniture store, at 4081 28th St. SE, is one of Herman Miller's longtime authorized retailers. Kentwood Office Furniture sells refurbished Aeron chairs with the blessing of Herman Miller, and frequently is called in to buy back products customers want to trade in when they are ready to buy new. The relationship works because Kentwood follows the manufacturer's rules, which cuts down on the firm competing with Herman Miller dealers, said Art Hasse, president of Kentwood Office Furniture and a former Herman Miller executive. "Because we have demonstrated that we will do what we say and pay what we say we will pay, Herman Miller trusts us to treat them and their customers with integrity," Hasse said. "Unfortunately, that has not been true for many other buyers of used office furniture on a national level."
RELATED: Herman Miller sues Canadian company for selling iconic Eames 'knock-off' furnitureMy office-furniture nemesis, the famous Aeron chair from Herman Miller I hate my Aeron chair. In fact, I hate it so much that I don’t have it anymore. I wheeled it into a conference room a while back and abandoned it. In its place is a brand-free, standard uphostery seat orphaned from before our office redesign. My new-old chair has pokey wheels and mysterious stains and the faint whiff of other people’s butts.So long as it’s not an Aeron. The Aeron came with the aforementioned corporate redesign, which turned the gloomy, grotty corridors of TIME into a glaringly well-lighted, somehow soulless space. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t one of the many who squawked when they separated us from our tea-stained desks and paperclip sculptures. In general I prefer our newly poshified workspace, if only because we no longer need night goggles to find the bathroom. It’s true I desperately miss my tweedy old couch, but the new glass doors would have made naps tricky anyway.
The Aeron was the first thing I saw walking into my new office. At first, I was dazzled by the work of art that is this most famous of office chairs (seriously, how many can you name by brand?). Its design is smooth yet innovative, its materials practical yet handsome. Sure, the Aeron defined the ’90s, but newsrooms aren’t known for cutting-edge cool. By our standards, it bespoke hip. I sat down and took a spin. Seat: bouncy yet firm. Back: firm lumbar support. Mobility: wheels all move in same direction. I loved my Aeron. Office furniture is at its best when it doesn’t require much contemplation. You want a stapler that staples, not one that states by its color and shape the very essence of your personality (unless, of course, you do). But soon I was thinking way too much about my Aeron–or rather about the throbbing pain in the backs of my thighs. I’d heard the Aeron, or rather Herman Miller, its design company, prides itself on the chair’s easy adjustability.
But hours of twisting and pounding and kicking the various knobs and levers resulted in absolutely no adjustment–not in its tilt, its armrests, its now-annoying lumbar. It turns out the Aeron has a hate club. My colleague Unmesh had the same unprintable comments about the pain in his thighs, apparently caused by the hard frame with what’s called a waterfall edge. My brother George, a bond broker, says the mesh material I’d earlier thought so practical tears his pants. “The Aeron Chair Sucks” features hilarious videos of a worker’s battles with hers. To be fair, the dozens of heated comments on that site prove the Aeron still has a lot of defenders, too. It is at this point in my rant that I realize I am going to have to make like a reporter and actually do some reporting. Designers Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf first introduced the Aeron to the world in 1994. Dot-com bajillionaires stocked their new offices with the $600-$900 chairs. It was named design of the decade by the Industrial Designers Society of America, and remains Herman Miller’s best-selling chair.
Stumpf died in September. So I called Herman Miller to share my misgivings with the very patient company spokesperson, Mark Schurman. When I began my rant about my thighs, he immediately asked, “Do you think it’s properly sized?” The Aeron apparently comes in three sizes befitting various body types. As far as I know, my chair is the same as my sumo-size brother’s. When I mentioned that same brother and his complaint about the mesh material (which is called Pellicle) ripping his pants, Schurman was again a step ahead of me. Chuckling, he said, “Well, we hear that very occasionally–always from men of a certain size wearing chinos with large wallets in their pockets.” Okay, so he nailed George–but doesn’t that description also fit a lot of other men? True, says Schurman, adding that newer versions of the Pellicle weave are softer and more pliant. Then there’s the adjustability, or impossibility thereof. Here Schurman dances a bit. “I wouldn’t say we’ve ever promoted its ease of adjustability, but rather the ability to finely tune it to your individual need,” he says.