Recliners: They only begin with Bubba
By Gary Evans, Upholstery editor -- Furniture Today, December 24, 2001
The recliner industry is really interesting. It's full of names, concepts and inconsistencies. Take the recliner that forms the basis for all that comes after, the "Bubba" chair. A big, fat, comfy chair with a velour cover, it's a classification so well recognized that manufacturers peg parts of their lines by saying simply, "These are our Bubba chairs."
Picture Paul Bunyan in a flannel shirt. Or Archie Bunker. Or just a big, fat couch potato — something that takes up a lot of space. Picture the little woman saying, "I ain't puttin' that ugly old thing in my house."
Well, things are changing. For the past few years, manufacturers actually have been designing recliners for ... women! They're smaller, prettier, more delicate, and with things that appeal to the softer side of the family.
Faith Popcorn's recliners for La-Z-Boy include a tray table for crafts and snacks, with a built-in bud vase. The chairs also have mechanisms that require just a gentle push to operate.
Perhaps Popcorn, the famed futurist, could have gone a step or two further. How about a release button for a spritz of aromatheraphy, and a built-in player for New Age music? How about a hair drier? A built-in telephone? A secret sound-proof compartment to hold noisy kids? I could go on.
Producers already include some of those amenities, like telephones. Some have little coolers to store beer. Some are computer-ready.
But how about recliners with a built-in universal remote that can't get lost? What could be more useful than a chair with a built-in vacuum to clean up errant chips and that yellow-orange dust from those cheese crunchies? How about a screen to make men invisible when they're reclining?
My co-worker, Susan Andrews, says that not being seen would correspond to the fact that men in recliners can't hear, especially things like, "Honey, take out the trash," "Honey, the house is on fire," etc.
Obviously, this is an interesting category. It's also a category that has great aspirations.
Recliners are always pretending to be something else. Or at least manufacturers want them to be. The No. 1 observation — also heard in sales pitches — is that this recliner looks like an ordinary chair. Time after time, it's, "Well, we didn't want this to look like a recliner."
This goes back to "I ain't puttin' that ugly thing in my house." Producers have been working to overcome this prevailing feeling among women for many years, since women make 80% of the buying decisions about consumer products and are traditionally the furniture buyers.
We're talking real money here, so producers are doing their best to hide handles, knobs and pulls, to use better fabrics, and to take some of the bulk out of designs.
Either that, or put bulk back in, as in the chair-and-a-half manufacturers came up with a while back, a chair, in fact, that's even bigger than the Bubba chair. It's for curling, for cuddling, for getting cozy. And with it, manufacturers clearly have made a recliner that doesn't look like a recliner.
It looks like a sofa.
