One of the most popular chairs ever manufactured’ is vanishing from the American landscape
Across the nation, barbecues blaze, mosquitoes bite, sprinklers and swimming pools twinkle invitingly, and ice cream melts in the glare of the sun.
But with summer in full swing, a venerable symbol of the season is missing in action.
Where are the web chairs?
A mainstay of outdoor life since the 1950s, when men in Hawaiian shirts and women in bouffants embraced their folding aluminum frames and seats woven from wide strips of glossy plastic, web chairs are rapidly losing ground to newer, more convenient outdoor options.
Among the greatest threats: the ultra-portable chair-in-a-bag, which folds up so snuggly it can fit in a tube-shaped shoulder pouch.
“The new high-tech lawn chair threatens to make [the web chair] go the route of the horse and buggy and the Betamax,” says Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University.
Introduced in its current low-priced incarnation in the mid-1990s by California entrepreneur Edward Zheng, the chair-in-a-bag took off about 1999 and is now carried in major discount stores. Across the country, at parades, beaches, outdoor concerts and sporting events, chairs-in-a-bag are replacing web chairs.
The switch signals broad changes in American tastes, from wide-eyed enthusiasm for space-age materials such as plastic and aluminum to nostalgic longing for authenticity and the outdoors, from a Cold War romance with conformity to the Baby Boomer’s insistence on the needs of the individual.
While the web chair comes in one basic design, the chairs-in-a-bag come with options such as footrests and headrests, loveseats and cup holders. While the web chair had a modern outline and unabashedly synthetic colors and materials, the chair-in-a-bag started as a camping chair and looks like one, with a simple metal frame and polyester fabric in subdued outdoor shades: navy, hunter green, gray, black and red.
While the web chair was suited to lawn and beach use, the chair-in-a-bag is designed to be toted anywhere with a minimum of hassle.
“It’s the SUV syndrome,” says Bobby Calder, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. “You never go off-road, but increasingly with our hectic, complex, busy lifestyle, the idea of being able to get away is really appealing.”
Born into the optimism, patriotism and newfound prosperity that followed World War II, the web chair was very much a child of its time.
The war created a major increase in aluminum production, and when it ended manufacturers sought peacetime uses for the strong, lightweight metal, according to Sarah Nichols, chief curator at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Thus we have the brightly colored anodized aluminum drinking cup, the aluminum sherbet dish, the spread of aluminum siding and, of course, the aluminum folding web chair.
It started during World War II
In the case of the chair, there was even a link between wartime technology and peacetime consumer product.
The chair “basically had its origins in the aluminum tubing used as structural framing in aircraft during the war,” Nichols says.
And the story grows stranger still. Now widely regarded as a cheesy retro cousin to the pink flamingo, the web chair had its aesthetic roots in the lofty high modernism of the Bauhaus school of design. Modernist tubular steel furniture was considered very radical in the 1920s, according to Richard Wright, owner of Chicago’s Wright auction house.
But by the 1950s, metal tubes and a stripped-down functional design had finally become “palatable to the masses.”
The reasons, Wright says, included cost. With the rapid suburban expansion of the postwar era, people needed cheap furniture. But there was also a change in attitude, which some observers have noted was marked by interest in space travel and a fascination with new appliances and new cars.
“There was a . . . feeling it was a new world, and breaking away from the past was an exciting thing to do,” Wright says.
An instant success, the web chair — also known as the lawn chair or beach chair — reigned for decades at beaches and back-yard barbecues. The book “Aluminum by Design” says it was “one of the most popular chairs ever manufactured.” But not everyone was satisfied. By the early 1990s, some lawn chair buyers were opting for stackable one-piece plastic models that didn’t rust or blow away like web chairs.
Then came the chair-in-a-bag.
The chair had been around in various forms in the U.S. since at least the 1980s, but for the most part it was marketed as a relatively expensive hardcore camping item. Its potential as a mass market product wasn’t tapped until Zheng, then a Los Angeles garden supply importer, spotted several of the chairs lined up against a wall in a friend’s warehouse.
“Wow!” thought Zheng, 38, who grew up in China and came to the U.S. in 1992. “This is such beauty.” Other characteristics of the chairs impressed him too: their portability, ease of use and compact structure. They “fit the American lifestyle perfectly,” Zheng says.
At the time, the chairs were selling for as much as $60, but Zheng envisioned a high-volume product costing as little as $10 or $20.
A breakthrough came in 1995, when a friend of a friend of Zheng’s was helping him pitch the chairs-in-a-bag to Sam’s Club discount warehouse. Sam’s kept saying no, so Zheng’s friend made the buyer an unusual offer: Give me a minute during your lunch break and I’ll show you just how sturdy the chairs really are.
At the appointed time, the friend took the chairs out to the parking lot and started jumping on them.
“OK, OK,” said the buyer, and Sam’s ordered 30,000 chairs-in-a-bag.
“It’s funny,” says Zheng, recalling what a novice he was at the time. “We don’t know who is Sam’s. We don’t know who is Wal-Mart.”
Wide distribution
It didn’t take long to learn. Today, Zheng is president of chair-in-a-bag importer Tofasco, which reports 50 domestic employees and 4,000 overseas and supplies chairs imported from China to Coleman, Target, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Costco, Eddie Bauer and Walgreens. The annual sales revenue for Tofasco and related entities is $150 million, according to vice president of business operations Andy Frankel.
In addition, outdoor recreation company NorthPole USA has been selling the chairs since about 1997, and its chair-in-a-bag sales are “very close” to Tofasco’s, according to NorthPole product manager Brian Maley.
Manufacturers are reluctant to offer precise sales figures, but Zheng estimates that 20 to 25 million of the chairs are sold annually in the U.S. About 60 to 70 percent of web chairs have already been replaced by chairs-in-a-bag, he says.
Like the web chair before it, the chair-in-a-bag is a product of a particular time and place. If the web chair represented the consumer patriotism of the postwar economy, the chair-in-a-bag represents the global reach and lightning response times of business in the 1990s.
Zheng, the chair’s first major champion in the U.S., is an engineer by training and a digital-age entrepreneur by temperament.
“It’s funny,” Frankel says. “A lot of people end up coming to the same nickname for Eddie without ever being told about it: Fast Eddie. He’s a very, very bright guy, [and] when he focuses on something, the focus is incredibly deep, but incredibly brief. . . . He’s notorious for his short attention span.”
If the web chair was a product that celebrated a new age of manufacturing in America, the chair-in-a-bag is essentially a marketing coup, the skillful repositioning of an existing product.
The Hula-Hoop of chairs
Zheng “got in on the Hula-Hoop, so to speak,” Frankel says. “But you know there were other people who had a chance to get in on the Hula-Hoop who didn’t do it, so you still need to give him credit for that.”
At Millennium, a web chair maker in Ft. Myers, Fla., president Bob Nellis acknowledges that web chairs lost some sales to the chair-in-a-bag this year, but he says the old standard isn’t going anywhere.
Chairs-in-a-bag are “initial purchases [by] people who want to try something new, the Yuppie syndrome kind of thing,” Nellis says. “They’re a fad item.”
Still, some observers do see a threat to the older chairs.
“You know the stereotype of the guy, stomach sticking out, a beer in one hand, two lawn chairs folded up in the other, a bad Hawaiian shirt?” says Thompson. “This is kind of an image of 1956 to about 1969, and I think those type of people no longer want to carry those big chairs. They’d like something they can stuff in their back pocket.”
Not quite an American icon, like the Coke bottle or Marilyn Monroe, the web chair rarely makes its way into museum exhibits or coffee table books. Pop culture encyclopedias and “Populuxe,” a well-regarded book on 1950s aesthetics, largely ignore it.
What’s in a name?
Thompson points out that we really don’t even have a widely recognized name for the chairs, which are sometimes called lawn chairs, folding chairs, tubular aluminum folding chairs or beach chairs.
Would we miss the web chair if it were gone? Perhaps.
“People, when they remember the summer, they remember the smell of an ocean or a lake breeze, they remember that first moment when you go into the cold water . . . they remember the birds in the morning, and not going to school. And they also remember these chairs,” Thompson says.
But today’s consumers are shedding few tears for the lawn chair of the 1950s. Frank Bogatitus, 40, says he felt no emotional attachment to the old web chairs. The new chairs are more stylish and more comfortable, says Crystal Gordon, 34.
****** Bring back the WEB LAWN CHAIR they are a part of American History ******
