BackSaver Products is situated in a corrugated metal warehouse in a c.1960s industrial park in Holliston, Massachusetts, within Boston’s beltway. Inside are utilitarian trappings not uncommon for a small, 20-year-old company: a handful of plain offices sporting old wood paneling and worn desks, a small showroom, and a gray assembly and shipping floor. But in each room two or three beautiful leather chairs stand proudly against their drab backdrops like shiny new Cadillacs on a dusty used-car lot.
The company’s 55 employees busily hustle about. Orders for BackSaver chairs are increasing rapidly, despite their high cost—from $595 to more than $2,000. Why? Because BackSaver doesn’t make just any chair. It makes office chairs and recliners designed on medical principles that reduce back stress, straighten posture, improve blood circulation, and exude comfort. Just settle into one and you involuntarily sigh, “Aaah.”
With more people spending more hours seated at their desks and computer terminals, and more of them suffering from the back pain that prolonged sitting imposes, the time for BackSaver’s chairs has come. The company has grown 35 percent a year for the last three years, to $15 million. Sam Sheldon, 78, and his son Allen, 45, were keenly positioned to ride the wave, because they carefully designed BackSaver as the premier provider of products that reduce back stress. Their success story presents several lessons for any family business looking to beat competitors large and small: Define a new niche by adding a twist to an established idea; perform ongoing research to provide premium products; do what you do best, and farm out the rest; leverage the use of science and celebrities to create an image that’s bigger than your company is; and broaden your product line only within your specialty.
Once it achieves these goals, a company like BackSaver will begin to run on its own momentum. But then the leader must turn to a new challenge: Transferring the CEO’s creativity to the future leaders of the company. Sam is semi-retired and he has one foot in his Palm Beach home and the other in Holliston, where he works three full days a week. But he’s still president, and it remains to be seen whether he and Allen have the spine to confront this issue directly.
For much of his career, Sam Sheldon was a senior executive at Market Forge Co., which marketed hospital and kitchen equipment and auto accessories. In 1968 the company was purchased by Beatrice Foods. Five years later Sam retired because he didn’t like the way Beatrice’s managers ran the company. Sheldon was 54 and “too young to stop working,” he says. In 1976 he became a partner in Nepsco, a metal stamping company, where his primary role was to oversee new product development. Meanwhile, Allen Sheldon, who was getting his MBA, joined his father after he graduated. “I looked at other companies,” Allen says, “but things weren’t that glamorous out there.”
Sam loved to design, Allen loved to market. But “neither of us was in love with metal stamping,” Allen says. Their chance to change the course of Nepsco came in 1980. The upscale catalog company Hammacher Schlemmer contacted Sam about a product Market Forge once made—an adjustable back-support pillow that drivers could slip between them and their car seat. Sam had Nepsco’s employees make them, but a year later the cataloger switched to another supplier. Sam was angered, and decided Nepsco should start its own catalog, to sell directly to consumers. He and Allen started a division to make back-support products. It immediately made a profit because there was no middleman.
The first catalog, in 1982, had four pages promoting a few pillows and other items. Allen also tried to market them to auto resellers, but they were only interested in inexpensive items. “So we approached a few of the early stores that specialized in back products,” Allen says. By 1985 business had picked up enough that Sam sold off Nepsco’s metal-stamping equipment. He kept the corporate name, but BackSaver Products became the company’s working title.
BackSaver’s first chair was a recliner that provided lumbar and neck support, and tipped users back into a position that reduced stress on the spine. By the late 1980s the catalog, and sales, were growing smartly. The company had designed several office chairs that provided superior back support. Sam realized that “we were turning from an industrial society to an information society. That meant more sedentary work, longer hours at a desk. Sitting puts 50 percent more stress on the spine than standing. We tried to engage our potential customers with statistics about the increasing incidence of back pain, and we saw that no one else was addressing this as a market.”
Sales grew to $10 million by the early 1990s. The company’s quick rise to $15 million since then has been driven by the fast growth in retail stores that specialize in back products. Allen estimates there were only 25 of them nationwide four years ago, but that now there are more than 150.
Sam positioned BackSaver as a company that serves a “benefit” niche rather than a “product” niche—as a back-stress reduction company, not a chair company. Chairs still constitute the majority of its products, like the Ultimate Chair, which includes adjustable lumbar, cervical, and neck support cushions, and a knee-tilt mechanism that keeps feet on the floor. But it also makes adjustable typing consoles, travel bags that properly distribute weight across the back, and other aids like foot rests and sleeping pillows. Its position as a medically wise provider allows BackSaver to charge a high premium: The Ultimate Chair is priced at $1,995; the bags from $165 to $295.
Concentrate on strengths
“We don’t compete with chair makers,” says Allen. “We couldn’t. So we set ourselves apart, instead, as a company that knows how to make products that are best for your back.” Allen admits BackSaver has luckily benefited from a growing social awareness about preventing back problems, but notes that it has been the company’s strict definition and adherence to its niche that has enabled it to capitalize on the trend.
Even with a smart niche and good timing, a small company can falter if it doesn’t function efficiently. Sam’s operational philosophy prevented that. It might be summed up in the phrase: Do what you do best, farm out the rest.
BackSaver doesn’t manufacture any of it products. It designs them, but sends the manufacturing of parts to outside companies. The finished parts return to BackSaver for assembly. There are three manufacturing plants that work only for BackSaver, and two more that do 70 percent of their work for BackSaver.
Another example of sticking to strengths is the catalog, which comes out five times a year and now has a cumulative annual print run of three million copies. Sam, Allen, and Ned Smith, their chief designer, determine which products they want in a given catalog, and the main selling points. They give these basics to an outside design firm, copy writer, and photographer. A freelance advertising executive oversees their work and brings it together with a freelance art director.
Although having so many outsiders may seem a bit awkward and costly, Allen says it’s better than the alternative. “At one time we used a local ad agency but they couldn’t pull it off. It ended up costing us more in our own time. And we couldn’t do it better than these specialists, anyway. We know what we’re best at, and we let the professionals do what they’re best at.”
BackSaver’s products have stood out largely because Sam and Allen pursue research that leads to superior results. “We spend a disproportionate amount of money on research for a company our size,” Sam says—about 3 percent of revenues. When Sam started BackSaver he paid ergonomics experts to help design chairs for maximum comfort and minimum stress on the back. The arrangement also meant the company could promote the fact that the chairs were designed by ergonomics engineers, who were then at the forefront of what has since become a widely recognized scientific discipline.
The research led to five design elements that go into each BackSaver chair: an adjustable lumbar support; a moveable cervical support pillow that keeps neck and shoulder muscles relaxed; a mechanism that lowers the seat slightly as you sit back, so you keep your feet on the floor; a seat tapered in front to relieve pressure points for better leg circulation; and a unique tilt-forward feature that supports the lower back when you are writing or typing at a desk.
To design a new recliner, Sam and Allen turned to the experts again in 1986. They visited orthopedists and chiropractors, and read medical books on the back. They learned that to relieve back stress, patients were being advised to lie on the floor, put their feet up on a couch or chair, and position their bodies so torso and thighs are angled at 90 degrees to each other—the so-called 90-90 position. “We figured, why not design a chair that puts people in that position?” Allen says. The new recliners did just that. Furthermore, they raised a person’s legs above the heart, which doctors said improves circulation and relieves heart stress. Sam and Ned later redesigned BackSaver’s upper line of office chairs to tip way back to this position, too.
In more recent years, Sam and Allen have occasionally used medical specialists to review products, but not to work on the designs directly. Indeed, BackSaver’s “research” often consists of smart observations by Sam or Ned. They then backtrack to find medical data to support their hunches. For example, many of their chairs can be ordered with cushions made from a special type of foam that provides firmer, customized support for anyone sitting in the chair. Sam discovered it when talking to a Canadian manufacturer that was making the foam for NASA. Sam drafted the company as a supplier, and took out the trademark WonderFoam for the material in the United States.
To Sam, a little reverse engineering and negotiating for innovation is just as useful as coming up with an idea on his own. Chief designer Ned Smith agrees. “Sam has no qualms about spending money on other companies’ products, to see what they’re doing,” Ned says.
The tactic of finding innovations that heighten BackSaver’s claims is perhaps best exemplified by a more recent deal with a device maker in Vermont. Sam saw an article in The Boston Globe about a small company named Ergomedics in Winooski, Vermont, that had gotten funding from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research to develop devices that reduce back pain. The company had created a thin, portable unit called the BackCycler that rests against the seatback of a conventional chair or automobile seat. A slim airbag inside the unit slowly inflates and deflates, creating a rib of pressure that moves up and down against the person’s spine, massaging vertebrae and discs.
Ergomedics was advertising the BackCycler in magazines, but had no catalog of its own. The development cost and low sales volume made the unit pricey. Sam went to Winooski and suggested that sales would increase greatly if BackSaver offered the unit as an option built into its line of chairs. “I said, ‘Instead of people spending several hundred dollars for a separate unit, they’d be much more likely to spend an extra $200 on a new $1,500 chair.’ ” He also offered to sell the portable unit in BackSaver’s catalog, which reached a more targeted audience than Ergomedics ads. Sam ultimately negotiated exclusive rights to use the unit inside his chairs.
Raise your image
BackSaver’s search for research to back its designs is closely tied to its desire to promote a scientific image. When Sam and Allen found out that doctors tell patients to lie on the floor in the 90-90 position, they began saying in their catalog that their chairs put users in a “physician recommended” position. Father and son later noticed in some publications from NASA that astronauts are typically seated in a 90-90 position during liftoff. There are many reasons for this other than to relieve back stress: It’s a good crash position, it makes efficient use of precious cabin space. But it’s 90-90 just the same, and BackSaver’s catalog is littered with passages like, “This physician recommended position, used by NASA astronauts during liftoff, promotes…” and “…You will feel invigorated by [the chair’s] astronaut-like, stress-free position. This physician recommended position has been proven to…”
The same slick evocation of science is given to the chairs that can be ordered with the embedded BackCycler massage unit. There’s no mention anywhere of Ergomedics, the company that makes the unit, just a “TM” symbol after the BackCycler name. But there is a box with a picture of Dr. Rowland G. Hazard, an orthopedist at the University of Vermont who developed the unit with Ergomedics. The box says BackCycler was “developed, researched, and tested” by Hazard, and makes a long claim about Hazard’s expertise and the funding from the national disability institute.
Another expert promoted in the catalog is chiropractor Scott Donkin, a past president of the American Chiropractic Academy’s Council on Occupational Health. Sam and Allen brought Donkin to Holliston to give them feedback on several chair designs. He pointed out that the chairs improved people’s sitting posture, which in turn helps them take in more oxygen when they breathe. Sam and Allen had never heard this before.
“His comments didn’t change our designs,” Allen says, “but our marketing benefited. He let us use his name.” There is a big box in BackSaver’s latest catalog picturing Donkin, with a short “article” by him about the benefits of sitting in a BackSaver chair.
There’s nothing false about the medical research portrayed in the catalogs, no chink in the credentials of the experts, and no misrepresentation of the role of NASA or Ergomedics. There’s just a lot of clever omission that leads a potential customer to the impression that BackSaver is a big, medically oriented company.
Allen has added to BackSaver’s premium image by carefully choosing where he advertises. He runs print ads for the recliners and the executive line of office chairs in only a few high-class publications: Smithsonian, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. He began the ads to prompt readers to call for a catalog. But now he runs them regularly to build name recognition, because so many back stores are opening that carry BackSaver products.
He has also brought celebrity to the BackSaver chair by eliciting the endorsements of sports stars. One of the most novel traits of BackSaver’s chairs is that they are made to different dimensions depending on a person’s height. “We wanted to make this clear in our catalog,” Allen says. “So we thought, ‘Hey, let’s find a basketball player.’ “ Of course, any current pro star would cost too much. But Allen knew a person who knew the agent that represents former Celtic star John Havlicek. The agent said Havlicek would model the chair for a standard fee (on the order of $10,000). But when he showed up to be photographed and sat in the chair, he liked it so much because of its tall dimensions, he asked Allen for several, and took them in lieu of part of his fee.
Some time later the son of baseball great Ted Williams saw BackSaver’s catalog. He called Allen and said that his father, who is six-foot-three, had a back problem that was particularly painful when he sat for hours signing autographs. He then asked Allen, “What can you do for us?” Allen said he’d give the son a free chair for Ted if he could get his father to agree to be photographed in it signing autographs. The son agreed.
The photos of Havlicek and Williams have appeared in virtually every catalog since, usually on the spread showing the Executive chair. At first Allen was more explicit about the fact that these are tall people who use the “tall” or “extra tall” versions of the chair. But now each photo simply appears with a caption giving the star’s name and claims to fame, so it comes across as a general endorsement of BackSaver’s products. “We recognized the lack of chairs for tall people, so we exploited this to get a few high-profile personalities,” Allen says. “Now we just use them generally.”
Stay narrow, but go broad
Once Sam and Allen were comfortable that they had defined a true niche, set themselves apart from mass producers, defined the work they would do or farm out, done their research, and created an upscale image, they then felt they could broaden their product line beyond chairs. But they did it very carefully.
Expanding into other kinds of office equipment would have seemed natural. But once again the company would have been up against the giants. Sam and Allen knew they had to stick to their niche as a benefit provider, not a product provider. So they designed a few fixtures that were related to office work, but which still had the primary purpose of relieving back stress.
With that in mind, BackSaver designed a “Desk Mate”—essentially, a stand with two surfaces on which you can place a keyboard and typing stand. The keyboard surface can rotate up like a music stand, and both surfaces can be raised or lowered to match the user’s height. The stand also rolls, so it can be positioned at any angle to your seat.
Since office workers frequently travel, the next logical step was a line of light luggage for day-long business trips. “The strategy,” Allen says, “was that wherever people with back problems go, they need assistance.” In this case, a bag maker approached BackSaver about selling travel bags that distribute the weight of their contents more evenly. “We started to sell it,” Allen explains, “but it was too pricey to be carried in the back stores. So we decided to manufacture it ourselves.” Now BackSaver makes several travel bags and handbags. True to form, the manufacturing is farmed out. The bags’ main feature is an oddly contoured shoulder strap that distributes weight across the body better, reducing the load on the back by 30 percent.
The desire to expand to other products, and the sheer growth of the business, motivated Sam to hire a key nonfamily member eight years ago. Sam met Ned Smith at a furniture maker Sam was considering doing business with. Ned was designing furniture with curved wood surfaces. As Ned tells it, “Sam saw what I was doing and said, ‘Hey, can you make a tilted desktop, to hold a keyboard? I said, ‘Yeah.’ Sam later convinced me to come to BackSaver, and the Desk Mate was my first project.”
Ned says Sam hired him because Sam had so many ideas and not enough time or know-how to try to actually prototype them all. “A good idea is just a small part of the process of defining a new product,” Ned says. “It also has to be something that can be produced, that customers can afford, and that there is a need for. It has to come out the other end as a practical product.”
Sam also liked Ned’s background. Born in the United States, Ned went to the School for Applied Arts in Copenhagen. He got his degree in industrial design, specializing in furniture design. Furthermore, the school—and European industrial engineering in general—placed greater focus on ergonomics than in the United States. Indeed, the inspiration for the Desk Mate came from a design Ned saw in Denmark.
Sam hired Ned as a consultant for a year to see if he would work out, then put him on the payroll. He did “a bit of everything” for the first few years, but now spends his time tinkering with designs. He works in two modest-sized rooms in the warehouse that are strewn with tools, furniture parts, wood, leather, and foam. This is design the old-fashioned way: Draw it, make it by hand, and try it again until it works. It’s only been in the last year that Ned has purchased a computerized design station. Sam has also allowed Ned to hire a consulting engineer to help him with the mechanics of new products.
Today Ned is really the guy who develops the new products, although most of the ideas still come from Sam. “Sam sees a need and comes to me,” Ned says. “I make it work. Then he and I and Allen sit in Sam’s office and decide if we’re really going to pursue it.
“If we disagree—and I’m usually the one who disagrees—Sam says, ‘Okay, prove your position.’ So I go back and build two versions of the design, and have employees try them and rate them. If the outcome is 50-50, I break the tie. Sam is happy to give me that authority. But in the end, he’s still the guy who says, ‘Yeah, let’s make it.’ ”
Ned helped design the travel bags, including an executive bag that accommodates file folders, a laptop, and cell phone. He is now extending the Desk Mate idea into a full-blown computer console. The keyboard shelf can swing inward and out. Along with the monitor stand, it can be raised and lowered so you can actually work at the computer standing up. “Standing is a terrific way to take pressure off your spine and improve circulation,” Ned says. The contraption can even be contorted so you can type while reclining—a nice complement to the Executive chair.
Ned’s latest project is a chair that uses some New Age medical techniques to relax the back and body: music and sound vibrations. The music chair is a BackSaver Ultra Recliner with a thin, 12-inch woofer embedded in the leg rest, another in the seat back, and tweeters in the headrest. Music piped into the chair from any stereo or boom box pulses through your bones and muscles. Indeed, if you place your hand on your heart, you can feel the beat coming through your chest. Ned says the chair, which will function as a regular recliner when it’s not rocking and rolling, should be finished in several months. Sam says the price should be around $1,500.
Can creativity be transferred?
Giving Ned more say in design is a big step for Sam, who clearly relishes his control of the company’s innovation, indeed of everything going on at BackSaver. Ned’s rise, and Sam’s continuing involvement despite his age, puts Allen in more of a partnering position than his father ever was.
Allen is not bothered by this, however. “Sam has the final say on new products,” he says. “Ned has a lot of input. I have some. Sam loves developing new products, and he and Ned work closely together. And they’re happy to leave the business work to me, especially the catalog and marketing. They do what they do best. On major decisions, the three of us usually reach consensus.”
As for his own desire to take over what his father has long controlled, Allen says, “I don’t have a large ego problem. I recognize Sam has a lot of knowledge that I don’t. I’m willing to subjugate my own ego for the good of the company. We’re growing. My main concern is to make sure we make enough money to secure the jobs of our employees and our family. It’s working, so I see no great need to change it.”
Allen, Sam, and Ned seem to have found a symbiotic relationship. But that’s not enough to ensure a smooth transfer of Sam’s entrepreneurial and innovative genius, the real key to the company’s success. Ned and Allen readily admit that Sam’s the guy who still comes up with most of the ideas for new products. Sam has not created any formal grooming process, either. His approach is to let Allen and Ned see how he operates. He puts his faith in their somehow “getting it” by observation.
“I’ve handled a lot of executives in my time,” Sam says. “With them, I can hand down a decision. But as a parent, you can’t tell a child what to do. They have to make their own mistakes. When it comes to smaller decisions, I let Allen, and Ned, try things. But when it comes to money, I say, ‘Stop.’ ”
Sam feels his absences from Holliston twice a week, and his trips to Florida, slowly give Allen and Ned more chances to exert control. “Over the years,” he says, “the experience will build up.” He also points out that the company is now approached with a new product idea from outsiders about once every two weeks. He goes over the proposals with Allen and Ned. “It gives them the opportunity to discuss and learn the feel of what I do.” Allen adds that BackSaver is now in a position to test prototype products and prices directly on customers in the back stores. This may give the company a more deliberate process for innovation, rather than relying on his father’s seat-of-the pants approach.
Designing the ultimate product
“Watching” Sam is an indirect way to transfer the creative drive of a company. Even less direct is the plan for transferring control. If there’s a weak link in the backbone of this strong company it’s the lack of a succession plan. There’s no denying Sam’s age. He still makes or must approve the decisions at many levels of the company. There is an estate plan; Sam is a minority owner, with Allen and his only sibling—his brother, Jonathan, who is a lawyer—owning the rest. Sam’s shares will pass to his sons when he’s gone. But neither Sam nor Allen had an answer for what would happen, functionally, if Sam was not there.
Indeed, father and son both quickly changed the subject when it was brought up. Ironically, both immediately began discussing products. Allen noted that Ned has increasing input into new products, and reiterated BackSaver’s ability to test them in stores. Sam’s answer was equally off the point. “We haven’t discussed what we would do. God willing, I’ll be around for a long while. We’re developing a new massage chair that should give us enough business for the next five years. We won’t have anything to worry about.”
When Ned was asked what would happen when Sam was gone, he just looked back in silence for awhile, a bit stunned, as if the suggestion had never been made to him before. After thinking, he said, “I won’t stop designing. And Allen would be the guy making the decisions. We can’t rest on our laurels. We’re always designing the next product.”
Yes, yes. But perhaps the three should meet in a quiet office, lean back in nice comfortable chairs, pull up a few conveniently contorted writing tables, and draft a plan. For future stability, a succession plan could be BackSaver’s most important new product.A serendipitous boost from a celebrity judge
Back in March 1995, as the O.J. Simpson trial settled in for the long haul, the football star’s lawyer, Robert Shapiro, began to realize he’d be sitting in court a long time. He went into a Relax the Back store in Los Angeles (one of a chain) and bought a comfy chair made by Bodybilt that provided good back support. The following morning, before the day’s proceedings began, store owner Dairl Johnson wheeled the chair into the courtroom. Judge Lance Ito walked in, and asked Shapiro what was going on. Ito ended up complaining to Johnson about his own back and standard court-issue chair.
Seizing the moment, Johnson told Ito he happened to have a different back chair out in his van, which also looked more appropriate for a judge than Shapiro’s modern-looking model. It was an Executive BackChair 7500 from BackSaver. He wheeled it in and loaned it to Ito. The day was long and tense. Ito felt comfortable through it all, and, afterward, even received a few compliments on how distinguished he looked in his new chair.
On March 17 The Boston Globe ran a short piece about the chance event, since BackSaver is close to Boston. The national media, scrounging each day for something different to write about the trial, subsequently ran wild with the story. Over the next two weeks Tom Brokaw mentioned it on the NBC Nightly News, Associated Press carried a full story on BackSaver’s chairs on its TV wires, and executive vice president Allen Sheldon was interviewed on the cable television show “America’s Talking.”
Allen got even more mileage from the coverage. He copied the best clips and sent them as a publicity package to every back store in the country that carried Back Saver’s chairs. In a letter to the owners, he wrote, “As we all know, good press is worth more than all the advertising in the world. You just can’t buy this kind of marketing. Leave this press packet on your floor sample of the 7500— ”The Judge Ito Chair.” Or leave it on your counter for customers to peruse. Let customers see for themselves the kind of press attention this chair has been receiving.”
Since then, general sales of the Executive series of chairs have increased significantly. In addition, Allen says a number of law firms and court districts have purchased the chair by the dozen for their attorneys and judges. This, in turn, has spread the word to even more lawyers and judges—just the kind of people who can afford the $1,000 to $1,300 price tag. —M.F.