The Emeco 1006 (pronounced ten-oh-six), also known as the Navy chair, is an aluminum chair manufactured by Emeco.[2] The 1006 was originally built for Navy warships during World War II, but later became a designer chair used in high-end restaurants and by interior designers. In the 1990s, the company began creating designer versions of the 1006 chair, such as the stackable Hudson chair and the 111 Navy Chair made from recycled plastic. Emeco also makes stools, tables, and other furniture. As of 2012, more than one million Emeco 1006 chairs have been produced. Emeco founder Wilton C. Dinges developed the Emeco 1006 chair in 1944 in collaboration with the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA).[6] It was originally designed for the US Navy, which needed a chair for the deck of battleships that could survive sea air and a torpedo blast to the side of the ship.[5] The chairs had eye bolts under the seat, so they could be attached to a ship-deck using cables. After the war, Emeco started selling 1006 chairs to prisons, hospitals and government offices.
[8] The chair was sold to restaurants in the 1980s and 1990s, under Jay Buchbinder's leadership,[7][9] then as a designer chair in the 2000s after Emeco was acquired by his son, Gregg.[9] French designer Philippe Starck designed a total of 14 chairs and 4 tables for Emeco. In 2006 Coca-Cola began a collaboration with Emeco to create a 1006-based chair[10] made out of recycled Coca-Cola bottles,[11] which was released in 2010.[13] Metropolis Magazine said it was a public relations effort by Coke to make a durable product out of their bottles; they also hoped to encourage other manufacturers to do the same. In 2005, Target started selling an Emeco 1006 imitation product supplied by Euro Style. The supplier said it planned to modify the chair's style to avoid a legal dispute over alleged trademark infringement.[14] In October 2012, Emeco filed a lawsuit against Restoration Hardware for allegedly making unauthorized reproductions of the 1006 Navy chair.[15] Restoration Hardware removed the chair from its website, stopped selling the chair, and reached an undisclosed settlement with Emeco.
The Emeco 1006 chair is featured regularly in design magazines and movies, such as The Matrix,[1][6][17] Law & Order and CSI.[14] In Europe the original 1006 chair is sometimes referred to as "the prison chair" due to its use in government prisons and in prison-related movie scenes. The original Emeco 1006 chair has a curved back with three vertical struts[15] and a slight curve on the back legs.[5] It weighs about seven pounds[7][8] and is guaranteed to last 150 years.[15] Most of the original chairs from the 1940s are still in use.[1] The traditional aluminum chairs are made mostly out of recycled aluminum, but also silicon, iron, copper, magnesium, chromium, titanium and zinc.[2] Emeco 111 chairs are made out of 60 percent recycled plastic and 30 percent glass fiber. The Emeco 111 chair was named based on it being made of at least 111 recycled Coca Cola bottles. As of 2014, there are approximately 88 Emeco chair models.[18] The first designer version of the 1006 chair in the "Emeco by Starck" line[7][8] was the Hudson chair,[11] named after the Hudson Hotel that put a Hudson chair in every room.
[5] It has a similar silhouette as the original 1006, but has a reflective or brushed aluminum surface, a solid backrest and is stackable.[8] It also came in swivel and upholstered versions.[2] The reflective glossy versions of the 1006 chair are polished for eight hours, substantially increasing their cost.[7] There are also Emeco-brand barstools, swivel chairs, rocking chairs and armchairs. Emeco's chairs are manufactured by hand in Hanover, Pennsylvania[7][8] through a two-week, 77-step process.[7] Eames Demetrios, the grandson of designer Charles Eames, published a documentary film on the manufacturing process called "77 Steps."[14] Many believe the chair is cast from a single form, but it is actually welded together from 12 pieces.[7] Sheets of aluminum are rolled into tubes, cut to length, and bent into shapes on large hydraulic machines. Various notches and punchouts are made so pieces can fit together before welding.[19] Workers grind down the welding joints to give it a smooth finish, creating the appearance of being cast from a single piece.
[19] The chair goes through a repeated heating and cooling cycle that increases the strength of the aluminum.[1] The chairs are also anodized.[19] Originally swivel chair bases and other parts were purchased from a supplier, but in the 1950s, Emeco began purchasing manufacturing equipment to manufacture them in-house. ^ a b c d e f g ^ a b c d ^ a b c d e ^ a b c d e f g h i j ^ a b c d e f ^ a b c ^ a b c dProduct images by Emeco and Restoration Hardware. The Emeco 1006, also called the “Navy chair,” is an aluminum side chair produced by the Electric Machine and Equipment Company (Emeco) in Hanover, Pa. The chair was commissioned by the U.S. Navy in World War II for use on warships: The procurement contract specified that the chair had to be able to withstand torpedo blasts to the side of a destroyer. After the war, Emeco began selling its Navy chair to the public. The original design never sold particularly well, but over the years Emeco’s chair carved out a small niche as a piece of high-end (that is, expensive) design of the sort you’ll see featured in Dwell magazine.
That is until Restoration Hardware got into the act. Recently the big furniture retailer began selling a look-alike Navy chair, which it refers to as the “standard aluminum side chair.” (It previously referred to it as the “naval chair.”) The Emeco original is $455. The Restoration knockoff is $129. At that lower price—and given Restoration Hardware’s ubiquity and marketing muscle—the Navy chair was poised to go mainstream. That was something Emeco was not going to take sitting down. The company has now filed suit, accusing Restoration Hardware of violating its trademarks. Restoration Hardware has apparently responded by taking the chair off its website. The lawsuit is very likely meritless. And it points to the problem in granting overly broad rights in names and designs via the trademark system—especially since trademarks, unlike copyrights or patents, can last forever. Let’s turn to the dispute itself. First, Emeco’s claim to a trademark on the term “Navy chair” is weak.
Because over the years that has become a generic label for this type of all-metal, 1940s-style chair, rather than a name that immediately conjures up a Pennsylvania company named Emeco. And in American law, if a product’s name becomes generic—such as aspirin, linoleum, thermos, or zipper—it can no longer be trademarked. Lawyers call this “genericide,” and the fear of becoming generic is one reason Kleenex is always reminding you that they sell “Kleenex-brand tissues.” The makers of Kleenex are trying to save their brand from genericide by reminding you that Kleenex is a particular brand of tissues, not a generic name for tissues. In any event, Restoration Hardware isn’t using the name “Navy chair” anymore, so even if Emeco wins on this claim, it’s a pyrrhic victory—Restoration Hardware will be entitled to go on selling the chair under the unexciting but perfectly serviceable “standard aluminum side chair” label. But Emeco has a second claim. It argues that it has a trademark on the chair’s design as well as its name.
This claim is also a stretch. The Supreme Court has been very skeptical of such “trade dress” claims in which a firm asserts ownership over how a product looks. The court has said that firms can claim trademark rights on the design of products only if they have achieved what lawyers refer to as “secondary meaning”—that is, if the design is recognized by a substantial number of consumers as synonymous with the product itself. This is possible but very rare. The sinuous design of a Coca-Cola bottle is protected, for example, because people widely recognize a bottle of that shape as synonymous with Coke. Is Emeco’s Navy chair the home furnishing equivalent of a Coke bottle? It may be that a small number of industrial-design fans believe that chairs that look like the Navy chair come from a single source (such as Emeco). But actually they don’t—the Navy chair has been knocked off for years by a number of firms. Here’s a knockoff version by Advanced Interior Designs. Here’s another by Interiortrade.
And here are knockoff Navy chairs in various colors by Globe West. Matt Blatt has done Navy chair knockoffs as well. Heck, at one point, even mega-retailer Target was doing a knockoff. For the same reason that the Navy chair name is probably generic (a lot of firms have produced very similar chairs under that name), the design almost certainly doesn’t indicate any single source of the product (because consumers have been getting their Navy chairs from a variety of sources for years). The bottom line is that Emeco can’t stop Restoration Hardware from knocking off the Navy chair. Now, your first instinct may be to condemn Restoration Hardware as a copycat. You may worry that if Restoration Hardware can get away with copying Emeco’s original design, that’s bound to discourage others from coming up with new furniture designs in the future. But that first instinct can mislead. In our book, The Knockoff Economy, we look at industries like fashion, cuisine, financial innovations, fonts, databases, and open-source software in which there are lots of copying and knockoffs (often perfectly legal) but also lots of creativity.
In all these industries, copying and creativity coexist. In fact, copying often leads to more creativity, not less. Consider the fashion industry. Anyone who has spent time in a Forever 21 store knows that fashion is full of knockoffs. And all this copying is completely legal because copyright law doesn't cover apparel design. Yet far from killing creativity and destroying the market, the industry is prospering. How is that possible? Because of something we all know instinctively about fashion. People typically buy new clothes not because they need them, but because they want to keep up with the latest style. Without copyright restrictions, fashion designers are free to rework a design and jump on board what they hope will be a money-making style. The result is the industry’s most sacred concept: the trend. Copying creates trends, and trends are what sell fashion. Every season we see designers “take inspiration” from others. Trends catch on, become overexposed, and die.
Then new designs take their place. This cycle is familiar. But what is rarely recognized is that the cycle is accelerated by the freedom to copy. So copying is a central, and beneficial, element of the fashion cycle. But that’s not the only way in which copying sparks creativity. Copying can also serve as advertising. When a popular fashion design is imitated, more people see it and experience it, which helps to create buzz and allure. Copies can also serve as trial versions of the original. A 2009 Harvard Business School study found that many women who buy knockoff handbags soon move up to the real thing. Copies act as a kind of gateway drug to the more expensive genuine article. Which brings us back to the Navy chair. What are the effects of cheaper knockoffs on Emeco’s $455 original? We don’t know for sure how many buyers of Restoration Hardware’s $129 version would have bought the Emeco original if the cheaper knockoff didn’t exist. But we suspect the answer is not many.
Emeco’s chair is handmade in the United States using high-grade recycled aluminum and a painstaking 77-step manufacturing process. The much cheaper Restoration Hardware knockoff is made in China and is of palpably lower quality. It may well be that, just as with knockoff handbags, the main effect of the Restoration Hardware knockoff chair is to signal to the Emeco chair’s real audience—the fortunate few wealthy enough to spend $3,000 for a set of 6 dining chairs—that the design remains relevant and desirable. Along the way, the Restoration Hardware version—appearing in malls and mailboxes everywhere—will educate a much wider swath of furniture buyers about the real thing. If that’s true, then the Emeco chair isn’t going to be hurt by knockoffs. Indeed, Emeco might well prosper. More broadly, why should only the wealthy be entitled to have good design in their houses? No one really needs a chair in his dining room built to withstand a torpedo hit. Perhaps if Emeco was concerned about knockoffs it could have made a less expensive version before Restoration Hardware did.