Let’s face it, when it comes to task seating, very little has changed since Herman Miller launched its Aeron chair in 1994. In fact, other than the introduction of mesh office chairs, little has changed in the last 50 years. The shape, style and function of the task chair has remained the same.
When we were invited to experience the Anthros chair at a pop-up showroom during Design Days in Fulton Market, we were dubious. The chair looked quirky with an oversized foam seat pan cushion and a back split into two independent sections for support.
It doesn’t hide the mechanicals and mechanisms designed to make it comfortable, which gives it a technical look. It was clear on first sight (and sit) that this chair was not designed by someone tied to the conventions of the office furniture industry.
Instead, Anthros is the brainchild of Steven Dufresne, founder and CEO of a company and product based first and foremost on medical research. Dufresne designed custom wheelchairs and took his knowledge about long term comfort and safety and applied it to an office chair. The result is Anthros.
“We are a group of medical professionals that believed we could design the world’s most comfortable office chair, backed by science,” he said. “Existing chair manufacturers weren’t required to design products for people in which sitting is a life-or-death issue. We are offering improved health and performance, disguised as an office chair.”
Anthros is a science-backed ergonomic chair designed to be “the most comfortable chair on the planet.” After sitting in Anthros during Design Days and testing it for the last month, it is clear that the company succeeded in making an extraordinarily comfortable chair. Whether it is the most comfortable chair on the planet is in the eye (and butt) of the beholder. When properly dialed it, it is near the top of our list.
It is important to restate this caveat: When it is dialed in. That’s because Anthros isn’t the kind of task chair that you just grab to use in an office hoteling situation or borrow from your neighbor’s workstation. It takes work to get it just right (and sometimes the help of an ergonomist), but when it is tuned perfectly, it is an amazing chair for long spells of work.
If you use Anthros, the company says you will see improved posture, pain prevention and elimination, and maximized productivity. It is the company’s initial product offering and was designed from the ground up. Anthros partnered with Leggett & Platt, to source and build a chair in the U.S.
Its design and aesthetic is polarizing. It is a different looking chair, unlike anything else on the market. It is bulkier than a typical office chair and its adjustment knobs are large and stand out. It is aesthetically “heavy” for a reason — the chair was designed for long-term sitting comfort. Form follows function.
Visually, it is the two-part back system (patent-pending) that makes Anthros look so unique. The back system adapts to the user’s body shape. The lower back is not a lumbar support. Instead, it supports the pelvis to prevent slouching. The upper back allows for shoulder retraction to prevent neck and shoulder pain. And the seat has patented pressure-relief cutouts.
Again, the design followed the desire to create a comfortable chair first and foremost. Core members of Anthros spent decades working with wheelchair users, arguably the most complex sitters on the planet, who either thrive or suffer according to the slightest modifications in their seating. While the seating Dufresne designed was for wheelchair users, others began asking if he could make comfortable office seating for them.
“My office chair sucks. That’s what I heard. That’s the truth of the story. It was a thousand different people telling me over a decade of making wheelchair seating that their office chair sucks and they wanted one of my cushions to sit on,” he said.
Leveraging this rich experience, Dufresne and his team developed a science-backed, evidence-based, research-focused design for an office chair. Four years of collaboration with world class designers and engineers brought their concepts into reality.
The result is a chair designed to improve users’ overall health and wellbeing. It is highly adjustable and comfortable. It was built from the ground up with a focus on biomechanics, pain receptors, pressure points, and anthropometrics.
And while we haven’t used it long enough to know if our health is improving, Anthros is one of the most comfortable chairs we’ve ever sat in for long-term sessions in front of a computer screen. It is difficult to get it “just right,” but when you do, Anthros sits nearly perfectly.
That being said, we are split about how the chair looks. It is big on the bottom and small on the top, which gives it a distinctive look that some on the OI team liked and some didn’t. Whether that leads to more or fewer designers specifying the chair depends on if they care more about the look of the office or the long-term comfort of the occupants.
In addition to making chairs, Anthros also has a foundation. The foundation was founded with an commitment to give back to the disabled community around the world. 100% of every dollar raised will be used to host fundraising events and/or give to organizations that serve the global wheelchair community. To learn more about the foundation and their initiatives, visit https://anthrosfoundation.org.