OM’s Latest Chair Collection Is Made To Move
What’s in a name? Names are hardly accidental. Often hours are spent laboring over the perfect one to bestow on a person, pet, or creation. What someone or something is called carries a sense of permanence. For designers, a name also is a vital tool – offering a window into the evolution and purpose of a product. OM, a long-time pioneer of innovative seating, accomplishes this with its latest collection, called Werksy, which combines the words “work” and “easy.” Herein lies the company’s mission.
The Werksy® collection, introduced at NeoCon and designed by Henner Jahns of Gecco Vision, marks a welcome shift toward more fluid office seating. Each chair adapts to and works with the motion and position of its user, rather than against it.
It’s fitting that OM, a company known for its playful approach to chair design since 1986, developed the Werksy collection to facilitate collaboration in modern work spaces. “Today’s work environment values—more than ever before—the ability to work in teams, even as the realization is setting in that open plan work spaces are perhaps too distracting for necessary focus time,” says Wilson Chow, president of OM. “As a result, work seating has become more of a broad spectrum of different chairs for different areas or spaces; task chairs, collaboration chairs, productive lounge or other forms of seating nowadays all play a part in the modern worker’s productive work day.”
The collection includes three styles reminiscent of the classic shell chair: the Visitor, which is stackable and has a unique armrest ledge across the back that enables users to perch comfortably during conversations; the Hoteling Tasker, which includes a tilting seat that intuitively adjusts as the user sways back-and-forth; and the Rocker, which is a height-adjustable, swivel-chair that builds on the actions of the previous models, complete with a sleek auto-return rocking cylinder at the base. “The Werksy Rocker allows users to freely move and use up nervous energy even as they focus in with productive energy,” says Chow.
Ahead of Werksy’s September launch, OM created an advertising campaign that embodies the collection’s ethos. The campaign video shows massive workplace disruptions, such as doughnuts and coffee flying through the air, while employees remain acutely focused on the task at hand – bending and stretching in all directions to catch a paper airplane from the comfort of their Werksy chairs.
