Stillside is proud to announce that after a year-long journey to refine our design and prepare it for manufacturing, the Om Chair is now in production! Moreover, we are happy to report that the final product exceeds all of our goals and expectations in every area. Put simply, this chair is awesome.

Although Stillside is a new company, it was built by people with a long history in the product design and manufacturing space. We have experience, expertise, and relationships in the precision-manufacturing space, all of which are crucially-important to moving our products from the sketchbook to the assembly line.

However, despite our experience and manufacturing relationships, it was actually quite difficult to get Stillside off the ground. Because furniture is a different beast from precision machinery, we consulted with several dozen manufacturers and suppliers of traditional furniture in order to find the right partner to help us build the Om Chair. Yet each and every single one of the factories we contacted told us that our design was impossible to manufacture.

That’s right, several dozen factories told us that the Om Chair was impossible. They could make it, they said, but not in the easy-to-assemble form we had designed. And they were all certain that our design sketch was too big. “You want a smaller chair,” they would tell us. “This one is too big, and too deep. Chairs must be smaller.” That kind of objection would always bring a smile to my face. It just confirmed that our idea was a new one, not even familiar to factories who had been making furniture for half a century. It meant that when we finally brought the Om Chair to market, it would be like nothing else the world had ever seen.

• 

• 

• 

But the bigger hurdle was when the factories would insist that our simple, no-tool assembly method was not going to work. They weren’t familiar with the simple mechanism we had designed, nor our use of aerospace-grade aluminum alloys for the assembly hardware. Furniture shops are used to forged steel, welded parts, and generally heavy and low-quality hardware. They could neither conceive of the parts we had in mind, nor manufacture them.

So our solution was to bring in our existing precision hardware partners, and silo the various components of the chair. The furniture folks would focus on the wood shells, the custom-molded cushions, and the vegan leather upholstery. The hardware folks would make … the hardware, of course. Neither had to worry about what the other was doing, because we would coordinate that on our end. Finally, no one had any objections, and agreed to make what we had asked them to make. If anything didn’t work, each side would have plausible deniability of responsibility (something factories love to have with novel projects like this one). Each side got to work on the various parts. And just a short while ago, the first pre-production unit arrived at our front door.

• 

• 

For those who aren’t familiar, a “pre-production unit” isn’t a prototype. It is basically one of the very first units off the assembly line, part of a batch very low in size, made for evaluation of what will be the finished product. Its analogue in the software world is what you call a “release candidate.” So we took delivery of the first pre-production Om Chair, which is what you see in all the pictures above, and even what you see on the Om Chair’s purchase page. The seat is, in a word, fantastic.

The first Om Chair sample that arrived at Stillside headquarters was astounding, and exceeded expectations in every way. The fit and finish are excellent. The chair assembles precisely as designed, and the final result is durable and beautiful. It’s awesome! It assembled just as expected, with just a few threaded poles screwing into place. What’s more, we ended up with a small unexpected benefit. Because the backrest supports are significantly smaller in diameter than the main legs, they offer a small amount of flex. That is, the backrest gives a little bit in the way of bounce. It’s delightful. And again, everything you see above and on the purchase page is from that single early preproduction sample.

We can’t wait for you to get your own Om Chair. Head to the store and grab yours now, in the Stillside Shop!