The Battle to Unseat the Aeron, the World’s Most Coveted Office Chair

It didn’t take long for this new breed of office-ing to become, at $1,100 a pop, the must-have workplace accessory. The Aeron got celebrity-level treatment on the cover of I.D. magazine, the bible of industrial design. Will, from the hit TV show Will & Grace, spent an entire episode trying to get an Aeron, while God sat in one on The Simpsons. The Museum of Modern Art put an Aeron in its permanent collection alongside Tupperware and the Macintosh computer, the chair becoming not only a totem of any respectable startup but also a flex for stodgier corporations trying to keep up with their hipper counterparts. “When it came out, it looked crazy to people,” says Amy Auscherman, head of archives and brand heritage at Herman Miller, now MillerKnoll Inc. “They said, ‘There’s no leather. How will I signal my status?’ But it was the next new thing, so you had techie people saying, ‘This is what we want.’ ”