Ian Ang spotted a niche creating chairs for gamers and his Secretlab is now the leading player.
Take a look through your social media feeds, and chances are, you may see a few of your friends flaunting their home offices, complete with dual monitor setups, wireless keyboards and mice — and a giant gaming chair. Chances also are that more often than not, that chair is a Secretlab chair.
How did a chair, primarily marketed at gamers and mostly only seen at eSports events, suddenly turn up everywhere, even though many who have it cannot claim to be professional gamers?
Secretlab was founded in 2014 by the duo of Ian Ang and Alaric Choo, who met while playing the real-time strategy game Starcraft II. As Ang recalls, the inspiration to start Secretlab came when he renovated his room a year earlier.
"I wanted a gaming setup, and the only thing missing [after the renovation] was the chair,” says Ang, CEO of the company, in an interview with The Edge Singapore. “As a gamer, I wanted to pick the best. So, I did a lot of research and I just couldn’t find one that I felt was really optimal.”
He cited several factors behind why he was not satisfied with the range of chairs at the time, including the price, the warranty, and most importantly, the comfort. “We just thought that is something that is missing, and we set about creating the best experience.”
And the best they did make. Secretlab’s chairs, most notably its 2020 series, have won multiple Editor’s Choice awards from gaming sites such as Gamesradar and Gameranx, and have garnered positive reviews from the likes of Forbes and cnet.
But perhaps the biggest validation for any gaming chair is for it to be used at a professional, worldwide, gaming competition: Secretlab was chosen to be the official gaming chair for the 2019 edition of The International, the world’s largest gaming tournament for multiplayer online battle arena game Dota 2 with the largest prize pool in eSports history — a whopping US$34.3 million ($46.6 million).
The company has also tied up with game publishers such as Blizzard to create its first officially licensed chairs featuring popular team-based multiplayer first-person shooter Overwatch, as well as chairs featuring Riot Game’s League of Legends. According to Ang, the 2020 series is “the vision that we had for the perfect gaming chair”, and also the product of three years of R&D.
Perfect chair, perfect timing
As luck would have had it, this “perfect chair” could not have come at a more opportune time. When the Covid-19 pandemic forced many people to work from home (not unlike professional gamers), demand for Secretlab chairs surged as more people started to desire a more comfortable home office.
Months after the lockdown measures were imposed, the company is still seeing “multi-fold growth”, and according to Ang, this is “mainly contributed by Secretlab as a brand penetrating the mainstream market”. “We’ve seen a huge uptake of demand by desk workers who want a quality chair for work during this period. We’re looking at a 30 times growth compared to just three years ago, and revenue for this year is projected to exceed $300 million,” he adds.
The demand has been so strong that the company had a “good problem” on its hands, as it struggled to cope with meeting all the orders. “It was insane,” Ang adds. A check on Secretlab’s website in September revealed a pre-order lead time of about two to six weeks for many of its chairs. But Ang assures customers that the company has scaled up production capacity, and is doing their best to meet orders.
What makes Secretlab chairs so desirable that even non-gamers, such as the doctor and dentist that Ang visited recently, would order them? Most get them for the comfort and build quality, but another factor is the “presence” that a Secretlab chair commands, says Ang. “The room looks cooler and grander with the chair.” This phenomenon is not limited to Singapore, as even overseas customers such as militaries and hospitals are buying his chairs.
When asked what was Secretlab’s, well, secret, Ang reveals that the company focuses on not only the product, but also the entire customer experience, from the online ordering process to the packaging of the chair and customer service experience.
Ang calls this Secretlab’s “obsession to the customer”, and that paying attention to small details like these is what makes buyers satisfied. It generates a snowball effect, in which satisfied customers will leave good reviews, which will, in turn, draw more customers.
Furthermore, Secretlab has a five-year warranty for all their chairs as a testament to their quality. A buyer gets an immediate three-year warranty, which Secretlab will extend by another two years for $49, or for free if the customer posts a about the chair on their public social media profiles and notifies the company.
However, Ang says running this business is not all just about figures and sums. “We [Choo and himself] didn’t start this company from a purely business perspective. We didn’t see that there was a $300 million gaming market out there and decided to go into it. We started this because we needed a chair.”
Going global
Many entrepreneurs tend to have a role model whom they look up to or model themselves after. But Ang and co-founder Choo prefer to take the best traits from different business leaders as their guideposts.
For Secretlab, Ang is driven by the principle that a business must innovate in order not to fail. This is despite this being an irony in itself because “by innovating, you take risks, which opens yourself up to failure”, he says.
Take for example, Nokia and Kodak, which are but two former world-dominating giants who fell to the unrelenting march of innovation in the mobile phone and camera sectors when they failed to adapt to the rise of the smartphone and the digital camera, respectively.
The same lesson to be constantly innovative applies to start-ups and smaller companies too, not just giant brands. Also, such innovations may not need to be simply for the product itself. For Secretlab, innovation can be applied to the way things are done. “If you don’t have the ‘adapt or die” mentality, it is only a matter of time before someone will come along and challenge you at what you do,” says Ang.
Singapore’s tiny domestic market has not cramped Ang’s style or his ambitions at all. The global market is what Secretlab is eyeing — and what it has been getting. “I have always believed that Singaporeans are in a great position to sell global consumer products because of our natural exposure to both Eastern and Western cultures,” says Ang.
He does not believe it is necessary for the company’s turnover to hit a critical mass before it sets its sights global. Via 10 hubs around the world to process orders and ensure fulfilment, Secretlab is already selling to more than 60 countries, and some 95% of the company’s revenue comes from outside Singapore. Even so, the home market is one which the company “holds close to the heart”, he says.
Looking to the future, Ang declined to give specifics of any plans for the company, except that he plans to expand into more countries and develop more products. Beyond that, the 28-year-old also wants to groom the next generation of Secretlab leaders, to ensure that the company maintains the ongoing culture of innovation and customer focus that he and his co-founder hold.
Although Secretlab’s future is still a secret, it is safe to say that Ang and Choo have taken this company from strength to strength, and clinching not one, but two EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards (EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2020 Singapore and EY Entrepreneur of the Year — Consumer Products) is a testament to their efforts for the past six years.
Or, as gamers say at the end of a game to congratulate their opponents: “Good game, well played.”
