With a focus on Greater Philadelphia small businesses and entrepreneurs, "The Creators" is a weekly feature presented as a part of PHL Inno. Check back each Monday for a new profile on a local business. Have a story you think we should know about? Email associate editor Lisa Dukart at ldukart@bizjournals.com.
“It is not down in any map; true places never are.” That Herman Melville quote is one emblazoned on the True Places website and one from which the Philadelphia company’s founders drew inspiration for their portable chair.
But unlike the characters of “Moby Dick,” co-founders Ben Knepler and Nelson Warley didn’t require a trip aboard the Pequod to discover their own true places. They only had to venture into their neighborhoods.
It was there — at movies in the park, on the sidelines of their kids’ sports games, and at gatherings with friends — that they discovered such places. “All of these situations were actually a big part of our lives and time with family and with friends,” said Knepler, a London native who has lived in Philadelphia for over 13 years. But they soon discovered a void in the outdoor furniture market, stemming from a “literal pain point.”
“A lot of the things that we were using or taking with us in these situations weren't necessarily designed for those situations,” Knepler said, noting such chairs weren’t comfortable for lounging in for hours at a time and often sagged. Finding themselves drawn more and more to outdoor experiences, Knepler and Warley both separately came to the same conclusion: there had to be a better option.
But there wasn’t. So they decided to create one.
Knepler and Warley are no strangers to innovation. The pair first met about a decade ago when they were working together in the innovation group at Campbell Soup Co. in Camden. Knepler left the Fortune 500 company several years later to work in brand consulting, while Warley stayed on. The two reconnected in 2019.
Both eager to pursue a new venture, they got talking and discovered they’d been having similar thoughts. Soon the idea for an outdoor company started, but unlike other brands, theirs would be a departure from the many camping-focused brands in existence.
Forming a partnership felt right. “The fact that we'd already worked together and enjoyed that and did good work together was a huge factor for us,” said Knepler, noting neither had experience launching a business.
“Leaving a secure job and steady job can be a bit unnerving,” said Warley, a Virginia native who moved to the Philadelphia suburbs over 16 years ago to work at Campbell’s. Still, they felt strongly about their vision and decided to make the leap, formally launching True Places in fall 2019. In the ensuing year, they spent ample time researching, a familiar place for the marketers.
Honing in on what would become their first product, they brought on an industrial designer, testing out different designs and materials until they hit upon an ideal combination.
“Fundamentally the way that we approached designing the product was rather than having something that folds up that maybe you can sit on — which is generally how portable chairs have been approached in the past – we wanted to design a piece of furniture that could also fold up and you could take with you,” Knepler said.
Comfort was at the heart of the design, anticipating users sitting in the chair surrounded by friends and family for long stretches. “If it's not comfortable, you're not winning with a person in these moments,” Warley said.
They eventually landed on aerospace grade aluminum for the frame, which makes it lightweight and therefore more portable, and the TrueFlex fabric that “has that strength, but it's also easily able to fold and not wrinkle, [and] doesn't have the memory that you would have in a lot of the sling fabrics,” Warley explains.
The chair, which is manufactured in China, doesn’t sag the way many others on the market do. Both the folding aspect and fabric are patent pending.
Dubbed the Emmett Folding Chair — named for one of Warley’s dogs and a nod to the Hebrew meaning of the name, which is “truth” — it folds and comes in a carrying bag made of recycled plastic bottles. The chair weighs 11.5 pounds and has a weight capacity of 275 pounds.
The chair is currently available in four colors and retails for $189. Sales are strictly direct-to-consumer at present and are fulfilled from a West Coast distribution center.
The co-founders also sought to make their product stand apart by incorporating elements such as bottle openers under each arm, hooks on the back of the chair, and holders for a bottle and a mobile phone.
To fund True Places and the Emmett Folding Chair, Knepler and Warley launched a crowdfunding campaign in the fall of 2020 on both the Kickstarter and Indiegogo platforms. The vast majority of funding came from Kickstarter, where 876 backers pledged $160,209 to the company. They secured additional backers for a little over $8,000 on Indiegogo.
“That was a great experience and a lot of success for us to see the demand and to build a bit of a backer and a following,” Warley said.
The pair also received an undisclosed sum of angel investments to get the business off the ground.
Shipment of the first consumer orders began in October, and True Places fulfilled its backers’ orders first. The pandemic altered their launch schedule beyond the traditional outdoor seasons, but they’re planning advertising pushes around regional warm weather locales.
Wanting to give back to the places where they found inspiration, True Places is also donating 10% of its annual profit to charitable organizations.
An MBA graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Knepler reconnected with Penn, where the pair got a spot in the spring 2020 VIP-Xcelerate program. There, cohorts undergo an intense three-month accelerator program to build their businesses.
With the business just launched, the pair are now focused on ramping things up for 2022. “Really spring next year is going to be a big time for us,” said Warley, noting they don’t have solid projections yet for 2021, but noted that “things are off to a really good start.”
Their focus for the time being is on the U.S. and Canadian markets, though they hope to expand in future.
For now, they’re happy to see their chairs in the real world. “Just over the past month it's been incredibly gratifying to see the product that we created get into the hands of consumers and for them to love it… there's no feeling like it's. It's fantastic,” Knepler said.
How did the pandemic impact your business?
BK: It's been a huge challenge on everything related to the supply side, everything to do with production, materials, shipping. It almost feels miraculous that we got to this point with the help of so many of our partners from the logistics and manufacturing side. It's definitely put us back a little bit. In an ideal world we would be launching the business more in the springtime. It's been a challenge from that perspective.
Have you seen a demand shift as a result of the pandemic and people spending more time outdoors?
BK: In terms of the market and the need for what we're doing in people's lives, it's been really interesting to see how even more — we knew that there was this need before — but even more people have been placing even greater value on these moments with people who they're close with in these outdoor situations. We've been desperate to get into market because so many people have come to us and said, “That's exactly what I need. I wish we had that already.” It's made us even more passionate and committed to building a company that's really for this whole part of people's lives that was meaningful to them before, but during the pandemic has just become so crucial to their lives.
Where do you see True Places in the market?
BK: Longer term, we can see some kind of physical retail experience. In the shorter term, we're focused on direct to consumer. Part of that was also because we noticed that when we went to traditional retailers and looked for these kinds of products, you're either funneled into the camping section, even though that's not necessarily what you're planning on doing, or you find yourself in purely kind of a traditional home and garden section. We think that there's opportunity in the medium and longer term to kind of reimagine some of those spaces in some of these stores, to be more relevant to the aspects of people's lives that we're looking at. That's a much, much longer-term vision.
Are you working on any future products now?
NW: Nothing immediate. There are a lot of ideas and even ideas into products that we're sort of continuing to test and then thinking about when we would launch. I think we want to make sure that we ensure this chair is the most comfortable chair that you're going to sit in and so there's ongoing improvement of this, getting feedback from people that are sitting in it now. We definitely want to make sure that we don't just jump to the next thing, that we get this right.
