Join The Club
As I sit down in a studio made up to look like a swanky apartment, I have to come to an unfortunate realisation. Sitting across from me is someone who was, like me, born in 1992. His name is Ian Ang and he is the CEO of a very successful furniture business, while I just have the pleasure of asking him about it.
We're sat on some of the only chairs in the building not made by Ang's company, Secretlab. Secretlab was set up around 2014 by Ang and Alaric Choo. We're meeting for the first time in their company headquarters in Singapore. I'm here to see the company's new task chair, the Atlas, but our day is as much about meeting the people behind its products as it is the new gaming throne.
Secretlab rose to prominence with the Omega, which we rated as the best gaming chair from 2018 until 2021. The original Titan took its place, and shortly after that, the Titan Evo, which still holds the position today. That's a chair that's easy to spot behind any number of Twitch streamers. So, that's where I start. For the next hour, I'm free to chat with CEO Ang about anything and everything, so I ask how Secretlab managed to get behind so many big names.
"We don't actually have a Twitch strategy," Ang says. "For us, we started with esports."
Ang describes himself and Choo as ex-semi-professional esports players. Their game of choice: Starcraft II.
Ian Ang and Alaric Choo founded Secretlab around 2014. Both are former esports players. They still own the business today, with Ang acting as the company's CEO.
"When we started the chairs, chairs wasn't a category or product that people even thought about," Ang says. "Companies didn't think about it. People didn't think about it. So for me, back then, I had just basically put together my own gaming setup—that was in 2014 or 2013—and then I realized gaming monitor, gaming mouse, gaming keyboard. And to complete the setup, I wanted a chair that could fit it out with my entire setup and I just couldn't find one.
"Back then, I was young, I was naive, so the thinking was simply as stupid as, since it's not available out there, I'm going to make one."
If we want to be more of a sell-out cash grab, then we could do something.
Ian Ang, Secretlab CEO
We're talking at the end of my day at Secretlab's Singaporean office. I've been roaming between showrooms, product demonstrations, testing facilities, video studios filled with fake office set-ups that look better than my real one, and very real offices filled with hushed employees trying their best to ignore the gaggle of strangers in the corner. For the most part, I'm free to snap pictures of the place, with a few exceptions. That includes the labs. One of the reasons why is that Secretlab is wary of copycats and product clones.
"People copy us. Of course it bothers us. I would say decreasingly so over time," Ang admits.
"Think of Vincent [Sin] and his designers. Of course, it affects them. It's like their work is getting plagiarised."
Secretlab is looking to protect its designs more nowadays than it has in the past.
"I'm quite, I would say, a passionate and proud person," Ang says. "So of course, when you build something and then people start making lookalikes and such. And, I mean, we've been on this whole 10-year journey. So at the start, we were small. Of course, we just did what we thought was cool and good. And we didn't even think that we [would] become as big as we are today. We didn't think about people copying us and such.
"So, since five years ago, we realized that, okay, we should be proud of the work that we create. We should go and patent it. We should protect it."
The business has applied for patents for some of its core products and concepts. You can find them today, often filed around 2021 or later, including the design for the Titan Evo, or those filed under Vincent Sin's name, such as monitor arms and a chair-mounted footrest.
Vincent Sin is head of industrial design at Secretlab. He's the person that walks us through the features on the new Atlas and shows me around the labs. He's in his element talking about tools or how the team designed a footrest attachment for the Titan Evo. Perhaps even more than when he's showing us the finished product. He explains the team's struggle to design an armrest with infinite positions due to the availability of gas pistons of a suitable size and strength.
Secretlab eventually made that armrest and called it InfinitePrecision. Sin and his colleague tells us it was only made possible after the company convinced a manufacturer to make a gas piston to its exact specifications. While demonstrating the armrest in a different room, Ang tells us about that struggle and how Secretlab ended up in a position to make this sort of project happen.
"You have to go to the manufacturer and tell them, 'Okay, we will only make 1000'," Ang says as he adjusts the armrest. "They're gonna be like, 'we don't want to do it'."
"How about this?" He continues, as if talking to a unwavering supplier. "You do it for us. We'll pay for it. We pay for everything. All the capital expenditure."
The InfinitePrecision armrest is a passion project for Ang and Choo. They tend to think of famous esports players as the inspiration behind it. One being Starcraft legend Flash. Flash used to be known by 'God' and 'The Greatest Weapon', and, in other similarities to myself, was born in 1992. Coincidence? Totally. But he also used to bring a ruler to esports events to measure the exact distance between his keyboard and mouse. The same goes for Keria, from League of Legends team T1, who was spotted measuring their armrests while setting up for a tournament.
For these pro players, an infinitely adjustable armrest set with precision is actually useful. For everyone else, Ang admits, not so much. I'm grateful for this moment of honesty here, as when Secretlab sent us the armrests last year, we thought they were a bit over-engineered and expensive for the general public.
"We know that this is a loss making venture for us. The resources we call into this can be used by the esports teams, the esports tournaments, but the average consumer will probably not be using this," Ang says.
Ang says it's a good example of the clout that Secretlab can now wield to its competitive advantage.
"The gas piston was an example. But things like our foam, our upholsteries, for example, if we weren't producing millions of meters of upholstery every year, we wouldn't be able to create our own one, which, you know, we were kind of the ones pushing the envelope for this, along with automotive industry.
"It's like no other chair brand is able to have this kind of push when it comes to the supplier level," Ang says.
Secretlab's latest chair is the Atlas, which launches at $499. Unless you buy the NanoGen model that uses Secretlab's proprietary leatherette or foam, starting at $699. It's these sort of materials that sum up Secretlab's approach: proprietary and premium. We see it put to the test in the labs. The leatherette is prodded, pulled, and poked at repeatedly by specially designed machines. I still feel it's a lot of money for fancy leatherette and foam but Dave talked highly of it in our Titan Evo Nanogen review. Perhaps I'm just a cheapskate.
I start to understand the cost when speaking to Ang about it: "We want this exact leatherette and it's not available on market, so we will invest $2 million to set up the manufacturing lines in our factories to get it done," he says.
When I ask Ang whether the company has considered a budget option—beyond the Secretlab Titan Evo Lite that, in my opinion, isn't cheap enough at $449—I'm told it's not built for that.
"We're built for innovation and making great quality products," Ang says.
"If we want to be more of a sell-out cash grab, then we could do something. We could take something a bit more off the shelf and sell it. But that's that's not really playing to Secretlab's strengths as well. We have all these awesome designers and engineers, [we] should let them do great work."
That's a no, then. But Ang does end on a more hopeful note regarding affordable and high-end options:
"To answer your question, we have looked at exploring multiple categories as well. There's always an exploration… we are actively exploring different categories, but we only want to do it when we have something good enough."
But when I'm introduced to the new Atlas chair, I'm left thinking of the NeueChair. This being a task chair created by Secretlab but marketed under a different name. The NeueChair is pretty hard to find nowadays, and when I bring it up, I have to keep repeating the name with both Ang and the director of operations, Ronald Loh. Though that's not just because they've forgotten about it, it's also because I'm saying it wrong. You should say it like a third-wave emo singer. It's not 'New-Chair'.
"Honestly, we haven't heard it mentioned for quite a long time," Ang says, "think it was a bit of experiment for that one."
This is an example of the company trying something different. Built from mesh, the NeueChair seems to go against everything that the company is espousing today. Early in my visit to Secretlab, we were shown a demonstration on the benefits of foam over mesh, using heavy weights and machines to measure the distribution of weight over both materials. It not only took aim at Secretlab's competitors, but the NeueChair, too. The newer task chair from the company, the Atlas, uses foam.
But Ang doesn't seem to mind talking of change. He seems pretty clued up on how ergonomics have changed over the past decade or so, reiterating the advice of experts, including one we spoke to earlier in the day, Dr. Lindsey Migliore.
Migliore, known as Dr. Lindsey to Secretlab employees, is an esports medicine expert and physician. They offered me some scathing but fair judgements of my posture (I asked for it) and are part of the company's Ergonomics Advisory Board. Ang also cites a quote from a Dr. Stuart McGill, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo in spine biomechanics, who suggests "the best posture is your next posture."
"So that's something that we firmly believe," Ang says.
"Why is the prevailing wisdom sit upright in the 90-90-90 kind of position? I think that this is an area that, right now we are kind of the expert in terms of the making furnitures for. [That] might change with time."
I ask Ang if sitting habits or science were to change, what would they do in response? He says they'd be the first to change things up if it did, but it's impossible to tell the future. That said, he does use this opportunity to unexpectedly rally against the metaverse, which seems partially due to a proposed change in sitting habits that never came, and because, as a gamer, Ang thought the metaverse wasn't very good.
"The metaverse didn't make sense to me at all. It's like, there's already MMOs out there. People go to the virtual world for a purpose. You're in the World of Warcraft town for a reason. You don't go into the virtual world to look at your land or whatnot. Back then, people were saying, 'Oh yeah, it's going to be the next big thing' and whatnot. And then, as a result, maybe the sitting habits, they might change. Yeah, but of course, it didn't."
...right now, we just don't think it's applicable.
Ian Ang, Secretlab CEO
By this point, I've spent a full day at Secretlab's offices. I've chatted to founders, department heads, designers, testers, and product managers. Until this moment, when I'm chatting with Ang, no one has uttered these two letters together: AI. I get it, we're chatting chairs, but few companies of Secretlab's size and success can escape the pressure to put AI into their product, even if doing so is about as graceful as an elephant on ice skates. So I break the silence.
"If we were owned by outside investors, you can bet that AI will be somehow jammed down our throats," Ang says, citing the fact that he and Choo still own the company they founded 12 years ago.
"Even today, we could probably put some sort of AI inside. But whether it's really beneficial or is it something very marginal that zero, only 0.1% of users, might even use… that's a different question. For us, of course, we have thought about it from a product perspective, but right now, we just don't think it's applicable."
That's two for two: a CEO that doesn't spout the benefits of AI or the metaverse. That's genuinely quite a rare thing to witness these days and I find myself warming to Ang a little more as a result. Ang goes on to further explain how the company not seeking large amounts of outside investment allows it to stick to its guns.
"We are adopting it, of course. But, once again, because we don't have the pressure of outside investments—because outside investments, you always need to sell the company somehow to another buyer—then we are not under pressure to force AI down their throat."
There's another thing that Ang admits he gets asked a lot by prospective investors, and that's how likely people are to become repeat customers when the product, say a gaming chair, lasts a long time.
"You've seen our Atlas, our idea is that people naturally upgrade themselves, when features are good enough to justify, when they trust and love the brand enough. I'm sure you guys have some brands of your own where you love it so much that whenever they release new things, you can't wait to use it. So that's how we kind of approach it."
I suppose it's a good problem to have, even if I'm personally not going to impulse buy a gaming chair on brand recognition alone. And from my time at Secretlab and speaking with Ang and his colleagues, I can see why its products have stayed in our recommendations for so many years. It's playing its own game. Not often looking to competitors for instruction or inspiration, and only more recently with newfound zeal to catch copycats and clones. Moreover, I can see how Ang has ended up running a successful business after the same 30-odd years on this Earth as me.
"In my opinion, the product is the most important thing," Ang says, and despite my usual pessimism to CEO's saying this sorta stuff, I do get the impression he actually means it.
