Herman Miller

Submitted By: Group 1

Objective: To decide whether Herman Miller (HM) should use PVC for its “Mirra” chair product line,
or explore alternatives to meet C2C standards

Environment Attitude:
- Big on environmental sustainability
- A leader and flagbearer of environmental initiatives in the industry
Vision:
To become a sustainable business with capacity sustenance for future reserves and strive for a
better world through pursuit of sustainability and environmental wisdom

Analysis
Alternatives Available:
1. Move forward with PVC, and continue searching for a viable alternative
2. Press ahead with TPU
3. Modify PVC to work with TPU

Suggestion: Group 1 suggests to go ahead with PVC in the current product cycle and aim for gradual
brand positioning in subsequent cycles.

Reasons:
1. Quality: With PVC, HM would be able to offer assured quality of the arm-pads. However, the
same cannot be said about TPU. Although, early tests were favourable for TPU, but there is
considerable risk in incorporating TPU without concrete data on production tooling at higher
volumes
2. Cost:
o Raw material: TPU’s raw material costs twice as much, and pushes up the cost of arm
pads by 30%.
o Retooling: To switch to TPU, HM would have to shell out $100K to suppliers for
retooling
3. Familiarity: PVC is a standard material and well-known in the industry. Assessment is that
suppliers and development engineers are more comfortable working with PVC
4. Dfe score: Becoming PVC-free does not improve the Dfe score significantly
5. Adherence to Product Launch Timeline: Product team already proceeded with tooling for a
PVC part. As retooling requires considerable time, switching to another alternative will delay
the launch.
6. Additional Burden of Customer Expectations: The precedent of using another alternative
might have unhealthy market sentiment repercussions as customers might expect the same
for all of HM products, i.e., aligning existing as well as future products to be PVC-free with no
performance loss and at a reasonable price.

The return on “green” publicity of becoming PVC-free is an attractive option. However, this gets
weighed down by factors such as an increase in the per-unit cost of the Mirra Chair and no significant
improvement in the DfE score. Currently, HM should focus on a sustainable business model so as to
not be edged out by competition. Parallely, it should aim for gradual brand positioning by investing in
a cost-effective& C2C compliant alternative to PVC.

Marketing Management Group Submission 1