We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Turner Osler. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Turner below.
Alright, Turner thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Some of the most interesting parts of our journey emerge from areas where we believe something that most people in our industry do not – do you have something like that?
Unexpectedly late in life I invented a novel chair that allows people to sit healthfully and with good posture because it allows them to move while they sit. As with most revolutionary designs, this brought me into conflict with the enormous, and enormously well funded, “ergonomic” chair industry that is deeply invested in their standard design: The 90/90/90 (ankles/knees/hips) degree angle of static sitting that has been built into office chairs for over 100 years. Unfortunately, 90/90/90 is by no means natural or the “best” posture; in fact, it may actually be the worst posture. And we know this because, despite a century of ergonomists telling us that sitting 90/90/90 with lumbar support is “correct”, 80% of Americans still seek medical attention for back pain. I pointed this out to a guy I met at an ergonomic furniture conference. He’s a legend in the world of office chair design, and we had an animated conversation in which he talked chair design and I talked anatomy and physiology and anthropology and epidemiology… all those “ologies”. We swapped email addresses, and I didn’t think much more about it, but a few days later I got an email from this guy in which he confessed: “I feel awful. I’ve spent my life trying to create chairs so comfortable that people would never want to get up, but it turns out that that sitting still all day is terrible for people’s posture and their health. But what am I supposed to do? We’ve convinced people that they need lumbar support, and now we can’t sell chairs unless they have lumbar support.” This guy, and really his entire industry, are trapped by their legacy, with no way forward. What the industry needs is an outsider to disrupt things, and it seems our little startup is exactly that.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My career was pretty typical for an academic trauma surgeon. I spent a dozen years learning the craft of surgery (medical school, residency, fellowship) and then 20 years in the operating room caring for patients; along the way I also published over 300 peer-reviewed medical papers and book chapters. I’m now an emeritus professor here at the University of Vermont, where I still do research and teach resident physicians.
In 2016, I left the operating room to do research full time. This required sitting at a desk far more than I was accustomed to. It soon became clear that I needed to create a better sitting solution to push back against the terrible chairs that Big Chair and ergonomists have sold us for decades. Working with a team of other doctors, designers and body work experts we created not just a new chair, but an entirely new way to sit, one that worked with the body rather than against it.
We know that your body’s perfect internal ergonomics, its skeleton, is a far better route to excellent posture than “ergonomic” chairs that try to shore up one’s body with external supports: head rests, foot rests, backrests, arm rests, and the coup de grace: lumbar support. These “supports” serve only to distort one’s naturally graceful posture, leading to a host of problems: poor posture, decreased core strength, and ultimately back pain. Worse yet, by suppressing natural movements such chairs reduce metabolic rate, leading to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and increased all cause mortality. Epidemiologists calculate that passive sitting shortens our lives by on average two years(!). By making sitting active we were able to solve these fundamental problems at a single stroke.
Of course, it’s not enough to create a solution. One must be able to manufacture and market it as well. I had no experience with any of this, but I was lucky to fall in with a group of entrepreneurial enthusiasts, graphic designers, and webmarketing folks here in Vermont who eagerly signed up to create a real startup that’s now sold over 13,000 chairs over the web. I think I’m most proud of our team, which with little real structure or direction from me is changing the way the world sits, and having fun doing it.
We find that the real juice that keeps us going are the many emails and videos that customers send us thanking us for our efforts to solve their sitting problems. It seems it really is possible to “do well by doing good”.
How’d you meet your business partner?
I didn’t actually meet my cofounder; rather I found I’d been living with him for decades. It happened like this. While our son, Lex, was off getting a degree in computational biology at Cornell, I began working in my spare time on designing and manufacturing a radically new sort of chair. When Lex returned home with his degree he shelter from the pandemic with his parents at home. To his surprise, Lex discovered that in his absence I’d poured much of his inheritance into a madcap chair company working out of our basement, a tiny startup with little structure and no profits…
Alarmed, Lex dove in and streamlined our operation (software! label printers!) and found a near by company to assemble, box, and ship our chairs. Against expectations, Lex found he quite liked the challenges of running a startup, and had a knack for finding talent in his demographic to do the real work of a business. It’s been a pleasure working together with our son to solve what I consider an epidemiological problem on a par with smoking: “sitting disease”. You may have heard that “sitting is the new smoking”, and it is.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
As a trauma surgeon one has to direct an entire team and often make quick decisions with incomplete information. Because I’d spent years practicing and teaching surgery I was comfortable in this role. But when I pivoted to running a startup I found that I often knew less about a problem than anyone else on the team. I knew nothing about social media, or web design, or what an affiliate program might be. But, it turned out I didn’t have to know everything; as long as someone on our team could handle a problem, well, it wasn’t a problem.
I love this aphorism: “If you’re the smartest guy in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” It’s been a delight to learn new stuff from kids a third my age. I’m flattered that they are willing to try to bring me into the 21st century.
Contact Info:
- Website: qor360.com
- Instagram: qor360
- Facebook: qor360
- Linkedin: qor360
- Twitter: qor360
- Youtube: qor360
- Other: I did a TEDx Talk: https://youtu.be/uqp9sAM3bYI and NPR (Here and Now) did a piece on our chair project. https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2022/05/24/active-chair-healthy-sitting
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