Neo Chair cements No. 1 spot as office chair brand on Amazon

Neo Chair, almost unheard of in its home country South Korea, is the top-selling office chair brand on Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce platform.

Established in 2017, the small, online-focused Korean company rose to first place in Amazon.com's office chair category at the end of last year and has since maintained its lead over foreign brands.

South Korea’s top chair brand Sidiz is not even among the top 100 office chair makers on the US retail platform.

Neo Chair specializes in office chairs with a management philosophy of manufacturing best-in-class quality products at reasonable prices, even sacrificing some profit margins, if necessary, to do so. 

“Unless the money is invested in employees or product development, we put our consumers first over profits,” Lee Sang-hoon, co-chief executive of Neo Chair, said on Thursday.

It directly ships the chairs manufactured in China and Vietnam under its brand to the US without depending on outside shipping companies. It does not charge for shipping, nor for returns.

“The prices of domestic [Korean] chair brand products are inflated to at least twice their appropriate prices,” Lee said.

He added that several domestic chair makers have neglected product development and have instead focused on selling replacement fabrics on the same mold frame for more than 10 years.

In addition to the high quality and modest prices, its big data analysis capabilities have sharpened its competitiveness.

It has analyzed some 100,000 customer reviews one by one in the early days of its business and reflected the feedback in the development of new products. It continues to communicate with customers through its website.

“We provide optimized information based on our analyses of consumers’ review patterns and update information on products of each category they are curious about,” said Kim Jae-min, chief financial officer and chief technology officer of Neo Chair.

“After we introduced those systems, our sales at Amazon began to go up sharply.”

To enhance its logistics system, it plans to build smart warehouses that maximize loading efficiency, as well as use its automated function. 

Last February, it finally entered the domestic online market, followed by its advance into Japan. Its sales in South Korea have shot up by an average of 46% per month since then.

Now it ranks first in the office chair category at Coupang Inc., South Korea’s leading e-commerce platform.

Next year, it is looking to venture into the UK, Germany, France, Canada and Italy.

In 2023, Neo Chair forecasts its sales at 70 billion won ($52 million), a 30% surge from last year. In 2024, the company predicts its sales will comfortably reach 100 billion won.

It is also looking to diversify into the market of home furniture such as desks, mattresses and sofas.

“Because we won the office chair competition, it will not be difficult for us to grow into a top-level company in the global online furniture market,” Kim said.

Write to Jeong-Seon Lee at leeway@hankyung.com
 


Yeonhee Kim edited this article.