Chair man took sitting down in a healthy direction

This year a small business in Vermont sold its 11,000th chair less than five years after starting the company in the family home.

“That number sounds crazy because it is, but it doesn’t feel as crazy as when we began. Starting in the basement of our home, I was assembling chairs by hand and then driving them to the post office. We have come a long way since then,” said Lex Osler, QOR360 chief operating officer and cofounder.

QOR360 makes revolutionary "active sitting" ergonomic chairs. Lex and his father, Dr. Turner Osler, cofounded QOR360 together and believe sedentary behavior is detrimental to one’s health, but by allowing you to move while you sit it offsets these negative health consequences.  Not to mention it eases and relieves back pain.

The idea for a chair started with Turner, who is a surgeon by trade and became a research epidemiologist with the University of Vermont later in life. Running statistical models all day, Turner sat in a chair constantly and that is when he started to experience back pain. He tried several different styles of chair, but each one had its own shortcomings. Then he thought to himself, “I’m a doctor. I’ll figure this out myself.”

While Turner was sketching models for chairs, Lex was a premedical student at Cornell University. Although he was not a business major, Lex was becoming more interested in entrepreneurship.  On a whim he entered a pitch contest.

Most of the students who entered the pitch contest were business majors or already had professional internships or ideas they had been working on for years, and then there was Lex with no business background whatsoever.

Lex’s pitch was an idea for an app for rheumatologists, where a user could tap on a human figure of the body and quickly enter notes faster than on a computer. The judges must have thought it was a good pitch because Lex won the competition. Then he started entering more pitch competitions and did well.  He even started taking some business classes at Cornell. He realized he could help his father get his idea from the drawing board to production.

“I think of entrepreneurship a little differently. I think lots of people want to be an entrepreneur just to be one, and so they will pick an idea and just try to make it work. I never thought I would be an entrepreneur, I just thought this idea was important enough it had to be done, and I became an entrepreneur as a result. If I didn't think our product was revolutionary, I would be doing something else,” said Lex.

After graduating from Cornell, Lex came back to Vermont and helped his father launch the company out of their home. One night he had to assemble, box and ship over 20 chairs and Lex knew it was getting out of hand and they needed a professional manufacturer. It was Lex who found a partner in Morrisville, Vt. that could assemble, box, and ship chairs economically, and then set about growing an international market.

The international market has been a game changer for QOR360. As of 2023, QOR360 has shipped chairs to more than 45 countries on six continents. The company is working with distributors in South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, New Zealand and Israel.

“We are proud to be a Vermont-based company, but we never intended to be an international company. I love that we are bringing money from overseas to our home state. Maybe one day we'll be the next Ben & Jerry's,” said Lex with a wink and a smile.

Lex Osler was named 2023 Vermont Young Entrepreneur of the Year.