This chair costs $10,000—but it's life-changing for people who need it

Fast Company

3 days ago

Janet Feldman spent 20 years working in footwear. As VP of her family's business, she flew to Asia, supervised factory operations, and negotiated with suppliers. Then her father had a stroke, and her life took a twist.
All of his life, Feldman's father had been staunchly independent. Now, he struggled to get get up from a chair without a helping hand. Feldman bought all of the lift recliners she could find on the market. These chairs were designed to help people transition between sitting and standing by tilting their entire bodies forward, but none of them fit the bill. Some were monstrously big. Others were plain ugly. Every single one of them reclined in such a way that her father slid out of it when he reclined. Then Feldman came to a resolve. 'Finally, I said, you know what? I'll make my own chair,' she recalls.
Feldman saw a gap in the market for a chair that performs better than any other lift chair—and looks good while doing it. 'I wanted to have a beautiful chair that anybody would be proud to have in the living room. She left her family business, and in 2014, started her own company, called Assistance With Elegance.
Ten years, eight patents, and a pandemic later, she is now launching her company's first product: the Awe chair. While other lift chairs push up from the floor, the Awe chair never leaves the ground. The only thing that lifts is the seat itself, which makes for a much more elegant experience. To prevent anyone from sliding out, the chair comes with an ingenious footrest that glides out as the chair reclines and scoops up your feet into place. It took 10 years to make, and two years to figure out the footrest alone. Its cost is $10,000.
A chair for the 'silver tsunami'
When Feldman became her father's caregiver, she noticed that people, including doctors, started to look at her instead of him. 'Old people, they're invisible,' she told me. 'Nobody wants to look at old people because nobody wants to be old, and it's sad to look at what we're all going to be.'
It's high time we started looking, because 73 million Americans, or one-quarter of the U.S. population today, is between 60 and 78 years old. By 2035, the Census Bureau estimates that older adults will outnumber American minors. The so-called 'silver tsunami' is projected to fuel an economic boom: By 2050, people over 50 are projected to generate more than $28 trillion globally.
And yet, the elderly are still largely left out of design meetings. They're seldom the target audience for new product launches.
Over the past few years, the tide has been turning, albeit slowly. Independent designers like Sarah Hossli and Lanzavecchia + Wai have each designed their own version of a chair that helps the elderly get up with dignity and grace. More broadly, Remsen makes pill containers that look like jewelry boxes. Boom Home Medical makes pastel-colored bedside urinals that look like flower vases. Can Go specializes in high-tech smart canes with GPS and activity tracking, an integrated flashlight, and cellular data for emergency phone calls.
The Awe chair sits within this ecosystem, and Feldman hopes to keep expanding the offerings. 'We do realize that not everybody's going to like a club chair. Some people might want much more modern designs,' she says. 'It was so hard to do just this, that we figured we'd start really small and focused.'
From the dreamworld to reality
The look and feel of the Awe chair quite literally came to Feldman in a dream: 'I wanted an old-style club chair that your grandfather would sit in,' she remembers. Brown, crinkly, straight from 1929, but with a modern take—and, of course, the technology to go with it.
The chair comes in two sizes and seven colors, including midnight blue, crimson red, and emerald green. For now, it is available directly to customers via the company's website; the team is also hoping to partner with high-end assisted living facilities, airport lounges, and even golf clubs.
Feldman isn't a designer, so she surrounded herself well. The chair was designed in collaboration with Jessica Banks, a robotics expert who runs a studio in Brooklyn, New York, that focuses on robotics and furniture design. It was engineered in Germany, with motors from China, and handcrafted in North Carolina, with leathers from Italy. Feldman declined to share how much it cost her to bring it to market, in part 'because it's still so shocking to me,' she says, noting she is now selling her house in West Hampton to replenish the coffers.
Earlier this month, I went out to the company's offices in SoHo to try it out. As the seat gently lifted me, I thought of my grandfather, whose weakened arms could no longer push him up from his old armchair. As the chair gently lowered me back down, I thought of the thud he would make when he sat back down, letting gravity do the work his knees no longer could.
Of the four people who were at the office that day, three of them had experienced a similar moment with their parents or grandparents. 'It's such a common experience,' Feldman said.
Every other touchpoint was carefully thought through. The edges of the front of the armrests are slightly recessed, which provides an extra handgrip when getting up. A cupholder is built straight into the armrest. A side pocket lets you store glasses or a book. Of the chairs Feldman's father tried, all had pockets that were too far down to reach. 'We just raised the pocket,' she says. 'All you have to do is look at how people use things.'
One of Feldman's biggest pet peeves with other chairs was the lack of a footrest to stop people from sliding out—but adding one turned out to be more challenging than expected. Her team cycled through factories in Michigan and Florida that make airline chairs or theater chairs, but they couldn't build the right mechanism. The German factory she ended up partnering with went bankrupt twice before resuming business. Finally, they found a way to coordinate the reclining flap and the footrest so that the footrest slides out until the two meet to form a 'T.' A safety curtain at the bottom prevents small pets or children from crawling under.
These features are almost enough to make you forget about the sticker shock. At $10,000, the Awe chair is almost 10 times more expensive than the average lift recliner in the U.S., which is between $700 and $1,500. Feldman is sensitive to the price tag and hopes to follow through with a more affordable line that's 'maybe not made in Germany, maybe not using Italian leathers.'
She also knows that her target audience—retired boomers—has a lot more disposable income than the average working American. 'I know it's a very high price. But for now, we feel like it's such a beautiful, special chair.'