By Nelson Warley and Ben Knepler, True Places founders
Like most people we've met who spend hours and hours each week in the modern outdoors (whether in the backyard, sidelines of kids sports games or hundreds of other places), we were fed up with sitting on uncomfortable, low quality camping chairs.
It's one thing to decide to create a new, better, modern portable chair but it's another to actually do it. We often get asked how we approached designing the Emmett, so here you go!
Together with our design and engineering team led by Bart, our incredible industrial designer, and JD and Breanna, amazing mechanical engineers, we spent thousands of hours researching, testing and experimenting. And yes, sitting in chairs (and watching others fold, and sit in, chairs) in local parks, beer gardens and block parties. In addition to figuring out what we wanted to create, we also discovered that people really like talking about how crappy their current seating is!
It turns out that traditional camping chairs were designed by starting with something that can fold easily and figuring out how to enable it to form some kind of perch so that it can be sat on. They weren't designed to be sat in for very long (hence the poor ergonomics) or to be particularly comfortable, or for use anywhere other than a temporary campsite. They were, of course, designed to be highly portable. And over time the design was optimized to be as cheap to produce and disposable as possible.
In order to create the Emmett we started from the opposite design approach: how do we create a real, sturdy, comfortable outdoor chair, and then figure out how to enable it to fold and be portable? We envisioned the quality and comfort of a patio chair, but one that could be taken with you to all your own true places.
We started by taking inspiration from the ergonomics of classic furniture design, such as the iconic Rietveld Red and Blue chair (designed by the Dutch master Gerrit Rietveld in 1917). Key elements of the design include optimal seat angles and rigid, horizontal armrests, driving both comfort and sturdiness as well as benefits like making it easy to get in and out of the chair.
Rietveld Red and Blue Chair, photo credit Museum of Modern Art
The biggest breakthrough in the design process was developing our patented folding arm design which enables the entire chair to fold compactly across multiple dimensions in one movement. The mechanical engineering and complex geometry that makes this happen almost feels like magic!
Of course, any conceptual design is only as good as the quality of materials and construction. As we began prototyping and testing to bring the design into reality, we sourced or developed the highest quality materials possible. This included aerospace-grade aluminum and the creation of a new outdoor fabric (we called it TrueFlex) that combined weather-resistant properties as well as the strength and flexibility (and breathability) we needed.
For the final design, we tried to think of everything that we would want in the perfect outdoor chair, and added those details. These included large feet to prevent sinking in soggy ground, hooks on the back for the carrying bag, a custom high quality carrying bag, bottle openers under the arms, and attachments on both sides and the back for accessories like cup holders and phone holders.
We're so glad we took the design approach of starting by designing a great chair and then figuring out how to fold it. We think we ended up with an amazing piece of furniture that you can also take with you, as well as a patented design that we know will become a modern classic. And we hope you agree that the years of design and development were worth it!