The Secretlab Story: Two Gamers Who Took the Chair Seriously

Ian Ang and Alaric Choo were competitive gamers in Singapore — the kind who sit for ten-hour stretches and know exactly which centimetre of a chair fails first. In 2014, unable to find seating that took their world seriously (office chairs were dull, 'gaming chairs' were flimsy costumes), they started Secretlab in 2014 with modest savings and a conviction the furniture industry found amusing: that gamers deserved engineering, not just racing stripes.

Their credibility was the marketing. They were visibly of the community they sold to — they spoke fluent esports, sponsored tournaments and teams, and iterated on feedback from streamers whose chairs appear on camera for thousands of hours a year. Every major broadcast became an unpaid showroom: the chair behind the champion. The company reportedly turned a profit within its first months and grew into one of the category's defining brands, its limited-edition collaborations selling out like sneaker drops.

The deeper move was semantic: Secretlab did not position the chair as a peripheral but as equipment — the athlete's seat, engineered like one. In doing so it borrowed the oldest trick in sports marketing (the hero's gear) for a sport played sitting down. A niche the incumbents dismissed turned out to contain millions of people who had simply never been taken seriously before.