Herman Miller's Red line of office furniture systems is designed for young businesses. Red Orbiter, by Toren Orzeck of Portland, Oregon's Fuse Design, will debut next month. Courtesy Herman Miller. Offsite: For more information on Herman Miller Red, see the Herman Miller Store and Hermanmiller.com.

Herman Miller's first ever television commercial goes like this: A group of twenty-somethings is hanging around in a loft, empty save for computers on the floor. "It's on its way," says one employee to another. To the sounds of a chirpy Brazilian tune, they wait, pacing and checking their watches. Meanwhile a delivery man loaded down with boxes ascends via elevator. He arrives, the boxes are unpacked, and within moments furniture is being assembled. Next another man is riding the elevator, presumably a venture capitalist. As he enters the loft, he looks at the instantly erected office and deadpans, "Cool space."

Welcome to the world of Red, Herman Miller's headfirst foray into the new economy, a line of lower-priced, instantly shipped, quickly assembled furniture that is taking dead aim at the unsexy, unbranded end of the market represented by simulated wood-grain redoubts such as OfficeMax and (more sexily, more branded) IKEA. This is new territory for the $2 billion giant known better for high-end corporate systems furniture, which explains why Herman Miller now feels the need for a television commercial. Rather than work exclusively through their traditional network of more than 400 North American Herman Miller dealer-distributors, the company is trying to directly reach viewers who wouldn't know a Noguchi from a Tamagotchi.

If the spot seems a bit rosily anachronistic--hearkening back to a time when nonhierarchical companies run by buoyant postgrads commanded scads of seed money and well-scrubbed lofts sprouting with Aeron chairs--don't think Red president Greg Parsons hasn't already thought through the implications of launching a line of starter furniture for starter companies in an era of pink-slip parties and sock-puppet firesales. It's a time when, as the Wall Street Journal reports, those same Aeron chairs--often with tags still attached--are items at equipment auctions of busted dot-coms. "The whole economy fell into the stereotype," says Parsons, a 35-year-old with a shaved head who fits that stereotype well. But if the stereotype has died, the reality in the end might prove more interesting for Herman Miller. "More than half the GDP comes from small businesses," Parsons says. "There was still more venture capital last year than any year prior to it. Now we're getting start-ups that are going to be around." Pamela Singleton, a financial analyst who covers interior furnishings for Merrill Lynch Capital Markets, concurs: "You're always going to have small businesses starting up. Maybe that pace is dependent upon the economy, but clearly it's not going away."

Central to Red's success will be the realization of Parsons's claim that there is more to the new economy than the heralded dot-coms and that while there are companies moving into "incubation spaces" in San Francisco who need a complete office in two weeks, there are myriad other small businesses quietly reinventing the workplace. This idea, cultivated in Herman Miller's in-house research department, led to Red, which eventually burst into being on the strength of several overheated meetings. "The company realized it was only reaching half the market," Parsons says. A typical customer--such as IBM--is, he says, "very happy with systems furniture. It organizes things." But what about the small business of 12 people, where one person is dubbed de facto office manager and asked to outfit the office on the basis of a trip to Staples?

Code-named Agile, for the more flexible and fluid ways in which people were found to be working, Herman Miller in essence created its own start-up. A little over a year ago, a group of several dozen employees were recruited for what would eventually become Red. Parsons, then in the middle of launching Herman Miller's Resolve line, recalls that "we just sort of started." Like a nascent presidential campaign, the team repaired to a war room last January. "We holed up in a weird little motel on the shore of Lake Michigan," Parsons recalls. There the Agile team started strategizing. The goal was to have furniture ready within seven months--a far cry from the usual years of research and development inherent in a product such as the Aeron. The team interviewed panels of typical new economy customers, sent teams to observe dozens of small businesses, and began putting together briefs for potential Red designers.

From the motel room, the Red team expanded to an actual office. Wanting to replicate the experience of a typical start-up forced to look for real estate and then make the best of a generic, drop-ceilinged office space, the group left the storied confines of the "Design Yard" at Herman Miller's Holland, Michigan, headquarters for what Parsons describes as a "boring box building" nearby. "What was there wasn't us," Parsons recalls. "The furniture was from 15 years ago--it was a cubicle farm." By redesigning the office to their own needs, the Red team hoped to gain insight into the needs of small businesses. "We were living the problem," says Dyan Van Fossen, Red's director of design integration. "We made makeshift furniture ourselves, and even purchased furniture over the Internet from some of our competitors."

By the end of January the Red start-up had sent briefs to a range of designers. The company, says Van Fossen, was looking for designers who were fluent in new materials and could conceptualize solutions to problems of new workspaces. Designers such as ECCO (Eric Chan, Rama Chorpash, and Jeff Miller) and Olive 1:1 (Ayse Birsel and Joe Stone) were given briefs, which included scenarios of a typical worker's day. Rather than aiming for a specific aesthetic, Red was looking for expressions of speed and flexibility, hoping to reflect the lifestyle of a worker for whom, as Van Fossen says, "the lines are being blurred between what's personal and what's office." A reigning metaphor was sports equipment. "In that realm any kind of design excess is cut away--especially in a sport like rock climbing," Van Fossen says. So no interlocking panels, no stationary file cabinets, no desks that can't be moved by a single employee. "Another metaphor we used was movie set design," Van Fossen says. "Roll it in when you need it, roll it out when you don't."

By November Red had an initial product line and a Web site. The products included the ECCO-designed Red Spider desk; the Red Rocket desk (designed by Birsel), with its whimsical canopy meant to provide privacy; and the Birsel-designed backpack on wheels that looks as much like a space-age refrigerator as a file holder. In less than a year Red had gone from an idea to an Internet-driven furniture retailer that could promise delivery within ten days--a feat that had thwarted online vendors such as furniture.com (now defunct), and one that certainly was outside the norm of the contract furniture industry. Herman Miller also had a Web site, the HM Store (www.hmstore.com), a Web pioneer with no competition that by the end of 1998 had surpassed $200,000 in sales. (Current unofficial sales estimates are $8 million.)

For Red, Herman Miller simply had to "connect some key pieces," as Nathan Chandler, Red's director of order fulfillment, describes it. When an order is placed on the Web site, it is sent directly to an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. A program known as Expert Scheduling checks availability and schedules the processing of the order. Within 36 hours it's picked, packed, and shipped. Suppliers are notified when items are removed from inventory. At no point except the actual packing, says Chandler, is the order handled by a person (unless a problem surfaces). The pace is more akin to a UPS handling station than a furniture manufacturer.

Red is bringing the just-in-time component-assembly techniques that have revolutionized the automotive and other industries to contract furniture. Herman Miller is betting that its brand, as well as manufacturing and distribution know-how, will allow it to succeed on the Internet, where so many have failed. "Furniture.com was trying to play the role of a market-maker between the consumer and more than a hundred manufacturers," Chandler says. "That's nearly impossible." Herman Miller's dealer network will also sell the Red line--and offer such services as design and installation--and the company is opening a New York office and interactive showroom (designed by Brett Tiper) in April. Parsons describes the Chelsea outlet as an experiment: "We want to see if we can develop an interaction between the site and the store."

Herman Miller--which historically has been an innovator in office furniture design (e.g., the open-plan Action Office from the 1960s, chairs ranging from the 1976 Ergon to the 1994 Aeron)--is attempting with Red to get back to its roots: the days of the $14.25 Eames plywood chair, when design was about responding to problems. Now a basic desk and Aeron chair can be purchased for less than $1,000 and a complete workspace for less than $1,500. Indeed Red as a company has been designed in what Van Fossen calls a "holistic" manner: product, process, and philosophy are intertwined. The beginning stage of design must take into account the end state of shipping; wherever possible, says Parsons, products are "designed to be UPS-able." To Charles Eames's classic design manifesto, "To get the most of the best to the greatest number for the least," Parsons adds, "And to get it there the fastest."