realized it would be possible to mass-produce plastic chairs.He (this isn't a business with many
she
s) would employ the same injection-molding process that Panton had pioneered. But instead of using an expensive high-tech polymer as Panton had, he would deploy one of the lower-priced commodity plastics, like polypropylene. By this time, the patent on the polymer had expired, and the raw plastic could be had for less than twenty cents a pound.Instead of using an avant-garde design like the Panton chair's, he would revert to a conventional four-legged form, which manufacturers like Kartell finally mastered following Panton's breakthrough. And rather than produce just a few thousand chairs at a time, he would make hundreds of thousands, even millions, which would allow him to recoup the large initial capital costs. Though monobloc chairs are cheap, the equipment to make them is not. An injection-molding press can cost $1 million, while the cost of a new mold can run $250,000 or more.
Indeed, this is the strategy, more or less, that was followed by the French company Allibert in 1978 when it introduced the Dangari, a single-piece plastic garden chair designed by Pierre Paulin, one of France's top furniture designers. The chair was a bestseller. It was more elegant and weighty than today's monoblocs, and it sold for a much heftier price. But at least superficially, it may have served as a model for the lightweight, less thoughtfully designed chairs that soon began flooding the world's markets.
After seeing plastic chairs at a trade show in the early 1980s, Canadian businessman Stephen Greenberg became one of the first North Americans to jump into the monobloc business. It was clear to him that the chairs offered many advantages over the metal garden furniture he was then selling. Plastic chairs wouldn't rust. They stacked easily. The design was brilliantly functional. He began importing monoblocs from France. At the time, he said, there were only a handful of companies on the scene, mostly in Europe. But over the course of the 1980s, that changed, especially after cheaper, used chair-making molds became available. Instead of having to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars to get in on the monobloc boom, a processor could get himself set up for maybe fifty thousand dollars. Suddenly it seemed like every yahoo with an injection-molding press was producing chairs. Local manufacturers began popping up all over the worldâin Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand, Israel, New Zealand. Greenberg quit importing monoblocs and began manufacturing them himself. "At our height we were selling five million chairs a year. And we were just one of many. We knew guys in Italy who were producing fifty thousand a day," he told me.
With that kind of volume, the field became viciously cutthroat. Producers kept ratcheting down the price, creating impossibly thin profit margins. While the earliest monoblocs sold for fifty or sixty dollars, by the mid-1990s, they cost a tenth of that. "Eventually a lot of people just put themselves out of business," recalled Greenberg. It was a "sort of suicide." The same story played out in the United States, where intense competition eventually winnowed the number of manufacturers down from the dozen or so in the mid-1980s to the three still making monobloc chairs today.
If you walk into your local hardware store and buy a plastic chair, chances are it was made by Grosfillex, a French veteran of the plastic-furniture business that has a factory in Pennsylvania; U.S. Leisure, the American subsidiary of a huge Israeli plastics conglomerate; or Adams Manufacturing, a privately held company in Portersville, Pennsylvania, a tiny town north of Pittsburgh, with a population of 268. Bill Adams, the founder of Adams Manufacturing, was a relative latecomer to the plastic-chair business, diving into it in the late 1990s. Because of the brutal economics of plastic chairs, his family considered the decision so
she
s) would employ the same injection-molding process that Panton had pioneered. But instead of using an expensive high-tech polymer as Panton had, he would deploy one of the lower-priced commodity plastics, like polypropylene. By this time, the patent on the polymer had expired, and the raw plastic could be had for less than twenty cents a pound.Instead of using an avant-garde design like the Panton chair's, he would revert to a conventional four-legged form, which manufacturers like Kartell finally mastered following Panton's breakthrough. And rather than produce just a few thousand chairs at a time, he would make hundreds of thousands, even millions, which would allow him to recoup the large initial capital costs. Though monobloc chairs are cheap, the equipment to make them is not. An injection-molding press can cost $1 million, while the cost of a new mold can run $250,000 or more.
Indeed, this is the strategy, more or less, that was followed by the French company Allibert in 1978 when it introduced the Dangari, a single-piece plastic garden chair designed by Pierre Paulin, one of France's top furniture designers. The chair was a bestseller. It was more elegant and weighty than today's monoblocs, and it sold for a much heftier price. But at least superficially, it may have served as a model for the lightweight, less thoughtfully designed chairs that soon began flooding the world's markets.
After seeing plastic chairs at a trade show in the early 1980s, Canadian businessman Stephen Greenberg became one of the first North Americans to jump into the monobloc business. It was clear to him that the chairs offered many advantages over the metal garden furniture he was then selling. Plastic chairs wouldn't rust. They stacked easily. The design was brilliantly functional. He began importing monoblocs from France. At the time, he said, there were only a handful of companies on the scene, mostly in Europe. But over the course of the 1980s, that changed, especially after cheaper, used chair-making molds became available. Instead of having to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars to get in on the monobloc boom, a processor could get himself set up for maybe fifty thousand dollars. Suddenly it seemed like every yahoo with an injection-molding press was producing chairs. Local manufacturers began popping up all over the worldâin Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand, Israel, New Zealand. Greenberg quit importing monoblocs and began manufacturing them himself. "At our height we were selling five million chairs a year. And we were just one of many. We knew guys in Italy who were producing fifty thousand a day," he told me.
With that kind of volume, the field became viciously cutthroat. Producers kept ratcheting down the price, creating impossibly thin profit margins. While the earliest monoblocs sold for fifty or sixty dollars, by the mid-1990s, they cost a tenth of that. "Eventually a lot of people just put themselves out of business," recalled Greenberg. It was a "sort of suicide." The same story played out in the United States, where intense competition eventually winnowed the number of manufacturers down from the dozen or so in the mid-1980s to the three still making monobloc chairs today.
If you walk into your local hardware store and buy a plastic chair, chances are it was made by Grosfillex, a French veteran of the plastic-furniture business that has a factory in Pennsylvania; U.S. Leisure, the American subsidiary of a huge Israeli plastics conglomerate; or Adams Manufacturing, a privately held company in Portersville, Pennsylvania, a tiny town north of Pittsburgh, with a population of 268. Bill Adams, the founder of Adams Manufacturing, was a relative latecomer to the plastic-chair business, diving into it in the late 1990s. Because of the brutal economics of plastic chairs, his family considered the decision so
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