If you sit at a desk all day, Austin entrepreneur Liz Mercer made a chair for you.
By Andrea Tinning
Liz Mercer traveled the world for three years as she and her husband developed a tech company called Jungle Scout. While Mercer was successful in finding a global team of developers to help spearhead the company, one thing she could not find was a comfortable chair.
“For three-plus years of sitting in really bad chairs, my back started to hurt. That’s when the idea came forward,” Mercer says. “When you don’t have to think about how you’re sitting or your tailbone or your seat bones or the way your back hurts, you can just get so much more done.”
Once Mercer settled in Austin, she created the company Sleekform to help others stay productive without compromising posture, spinal health or budget. Sleekform specializes in kneeling chairs, and Mercer wanted to bring a design she encountered in Europe to the United States.
“I wanted to make it more affordable and have a good chair that everyone could have in their house or in their home office,” Mercer says.
In Austin, where tech jobs and creative writers are aplenty, so are sedentary workspaces and people who suffer from chronic back pain. Kevin Kanz has more than 30 years of experience as a chiropractor in Austin and says many of his clients suffer from back pain related to sitting in an office-type environment for prolonged periods of time. Ultimately, he says, a sedentary lifestyle and neglecting one’s posture can lead to the development of osteoarthritis or degenerative joint disease.
“The best way [to prevent chronic back pain and spinal conditions] is to get a variable environment, one where you sit, stand or somewhere in between, where you can get up periodically and change positions,” Kanz says. “It’s that chronic posture that you’re in for four or five, six hours at a time during it, [using]a computer program or a phone or a laptop that it makes you kind of hunch over, and over time, it degrades the joints.”
Kanz says he sees young people in their teens and 20s suffering from similar conditions to people in their 60s and 70s
Kanz says he applauds Mercer’s efforts to create furniture pieces that allow for this variability. Increasingly, Kanz says he sees young people in their teens and 20s suffering from similar conditions to people in their 60s and 70s, illustrating an integral need for furniture that promotes spinal health.
Sleekform offers designs and styles for every type of workspace. Mercer makes a special effort to accommodate as many people as possible, young and old, from stationary workers to those of us who have a hard time staying still.
“My older clientele, they love the original, the Atlanta models…with the wheels, and my younger demographic tends to love the rocking one because I think we have a little bit more of a tendency to fidget, and so everyone really loves those,” Mercer says.
Mercer hopes to expand her company by working with a local designer to create even more purposeful kneeling chairs for specific working environments. Currently, Sleekform products are available on the company’s website and Amazon. At the end of the day, Mercer hopes her chairs will make life easier for hardworking people with desk jobs.
