Herman Miller Launches New Aeron Chair(hermanmiller.com)

  "In late 1993, as they prepared to launch the chair, Herman Miller 
  put together a series of focus groups around the country. They wanted 
  to get some ideas about pricing and marketing and make sure there was 
  general support for the concept. They started with panels of architects 
  and designers, and they were generally receptive. “They understood 
  how radical the chair was,” Dowell said. “Even if they didn’t see it 
  as a thing of beauty, they understood that it had to look the way it 
  did.” Then they presented the chair to groups of facility managers 
  and ergonomic experts—the kinds of people who would ultimately be 
  responsible for making the chair a commercial success. This time the 
  reception was downright chilly.
  [...]
  Before long, however, the chair started to attract the attention of 
  some of the very cutting-edge elements of the design community. It 
  won a design of the decade award from the Industrial Designers Society 
  of America. In California and New York, in the advertising world and in
  Silicon Valley, it became a kind of cult object that matched the 
  stripped-down aesthetic of the new economy. It began to appear in 
  films and television commercials, and from there its profile built 
  and grew and blossomed. By the end of the 1990s, sales were growing 
  50 to 70 percent annually, and the people at Herman Miller suddenly 
  realized that what they had on their hands was the best-selling chair 
  in the history of the company."