Making ourselves comfortable on Pledge’s vivacious office chairs, I got chatting with Mike Arding, Design and Development Manager and Colin Mc Nair, Sales Manager of Pledge Office Chairs. Most engaging about Mike and Colin is their sound knowledge of the manufacturing process in relation to his design role. Mike himself is based at the factory in Leighton Buzzard and invited Working Title to visit.
In his endearing Glaswegian accent, Colin discussed the sales of high quality office seating in relation to everyday use: ‘Employees sit on these chairs eight hours a day, for something that is used so much, why would you not spend the money on a high quality item?’
With this in mind, when arriving at the factory I was eager to see the type of chairs Pledge provided their employees with. When I ask Mike which brand of chair the employees sit on, he jokes “They get told off if they sit on anything else”. In response to this I ask which chair he sits on, and discover the designer is the exception to this Pledge rule. “I have a hybrid chair” Mike explains, the back is a Swedish design attached to a seat which contains a type of mechanism and memory foam, responding to and supporting your derrière.
Leaving the show rooms I adorned a high visibility vest for the factory tour where I saw a Pledge chair from start to finish. Pledge is an old fashioned company is the sense that every part of the manufacturing happens in the Leighton Buzzard site. The factory used to be a Bread factory, there is a history of manufacturing engrained into the building. The skilled staff of 150 range from sales to metal bending to upholstery. The engineering department deal with the metal work of the frames and as I watch the morning batch get blasted in the oven, Mille Small’s ‘My Boy Lolly Pop’ is chirping out of a nearby radio.
Pledge’s key item is the swivel chair, still in their range is a design known as Pro Activ from 1995, the ultimate “Forty Quid Chair In A Box”. At the other end of the spectrum is the Edge range where Mike is able to have the most fun. Less phone room, more foyer furniture. Clients come to Mike with colours in mind and other times Mike is allowed to add his tastes into the mix: “I get very excited about colours” he says in the chair showroom of apple green, royal purple and canary yellow. Describing office chairs as things “people get used to” we discussed the challenge of trying to inject excitement into the product just to have clients ask if it comes in grey.
If you go to Wimbledon this year you will be sitting on Pledge chairs, in a fetching shade of Wimbledon green. Not bad for a company that started back in 1970 with a team of seven, in a small two storey building in Leighton Buzzard.