Moving a chair company in new directions
Our client, Varier, designs chairs that move with the body, encouraging active sitting by engaging the core muscles.
To help users improve their sitting habits on Varier's iconic Move chair, we designed Glow.
Glow is a bluetooth tracker attached to the underside of the chair, tracking your every movement. The tracker then sends this data to an app.
Now you can see how much you sit each day, the length of each sitting period, and how many calories you burn, while sitting.
Varier didn’t come to us with the idea for Glow. We went to them. Look, you’ve got a moving chair. Why not show this movement to your users? Truly visualise it. They liked the idea, and agree how Glow actually completes the chair. It adds another dimension to it, and in a way, humanises it.
How does Glow shake the ground?
Glow is intelligent furniture, motivating you to a better, more active lifestyle.
Most chairs have focus on design or comfort, but Varier chairs and Glow is about movement.
Simplicity and ease-of-use
The interface consists of seven clock dials – one for each day of the week, and a detailed screen of your sitting time + calorie burn. The app design is clean, and visual first of all. Glowing dots make you happy, because it means that you’ve been using your muscles a lot. It’s an emotional trigger.
The motivational messages support this warm and positive style, to make this app your friend, and not just a scientific tool. But it does connect to your iOS Health, if you want to use your personal data more seriously.
Your chair is talking to you
Take a break. Go for a walk. Burn calories. Move around while sitting. This is what Glow is asking you to do, kindly and nicely. It will give you more energy during the day.
It's not good for people to sit 8 hours straight, every day, and this is basically the problem that Glow is trying to solve.
We’ve made a product for a chair, to get you off your chair.
It’s simple, really. But it’s a pretty nice thing.
Varier CCO, Anders Stampe:
“I’m truly impressed about the way Hello has combined hard-core data and algorithms with an aesthetic emotional user interface. The design in Glow is very much aligned with the stylistic design of all our Varier chairs.
Since we started working with Hello, we are no longer just a furniture company, but are converting ourselves to become a modern health brand, adding value to our customers with digital products as well.”
There are no numbers yet, as Glow was launched in the app store as recently as the 18th of January.
The goal is to sell 8,000 trackers over the next couple of months via 800 retailers throughout Europe.
Glow was presented in January 2016 at IMM in Cologne, Europe’s biggest furniture conference, with 150,000 visitors, and was very well received.