Over the last few months of lockdown during the global COVID 19 pandemic, most Kiwi’s have had to revisit how they work from home. We all know that sitting throughout the day is bad for us, but is there really any better way? Enter Limber desks, designed and produced here in Wellington by entrepreneur, ex-physiotherapist, and Edmund Hillary Fellow Bart De Vries. Bart is a passionate believer that how we move every day in our lives, whether in the office or at our home desks and that our workstations can significantly impact our wellbeing.
Five years ago, Bart recognised that the way we work needs to change. Limber is the result. Moving through a full range of motion, from standing desk to seated on the floor, Limber is a full personal workspace system dedicated to improving your health and performance, making more movement faster, easier, and more attractive. Limbers cool design and engineering allows you to have a workspace ergonomically specific to your body, move much more, and create a space-efficient office. It also smells really, really nice, like cedar (it’s the polish apparently).
My own Limber journey happened because Matt and I decided to buy a Limber desk just before New Zealand moved into COVID 19 Level 4. Our existing desk had collapsed a few days before. We wanted to support a local Wellington business, and buy something we’d like forever, not just for a few years. As a man of six-four, Matt has had significant growing pains and football injuries over the years and he needs to be careful about straining his body both inside and outside the workplace. Outside of COVID 19, he also has exams for professional development so he has to study at home. Matt and I, therefore, invested in the Limber full-sized rectangle desk with low-lying stool (full disclaimer: Bart kindly chucked the stool in for free. Thanks Bart!).
Limber’s founder was born in Te Awanga, near Cape Kidnappers in the Hawkes Bay. “My Mum and Dad met just before they started art therapy university. Mum’s a Kiwi girl who grew up in Danniverk and Dad is a Dutchman” Bart explains. “They’re both quite entrepreneurial. Mum started the New Zealand School of Art Therapy and Dad started an art shop.”
Despite an early interest in art, Bart found himself drawn to playing sport. “Sporting-wise, I did everything growing up, including cricket and rugby. I played badminton, hockey, and golf. I was even looking at going to the USA to do college golf, but in the end, I studied physiotherapy. I had back problems all through high school and growth problems in my knees. After two years I decided to get interested and start asking my physiotherapist more questions because I was there so often.”
As a kid, Bart didn’t think about his body being a hurdle. “My coach at the time had a ‘No pain, no gain’ approach with an ex-army background. Looking back, that was the wrong approach. I still have growths on my knees, from being pushed too far” Bart says. Overall, playing sport was a positive experience because Bart was able to lose himself in the moment of sport, experiencing enjoying the game, being good at something, and getting into a state of flow.
After working hard to get into physiotherapy, Bart made good friends at university. “I remember eating horrible meals my flatmates cooked and only cooking spaghetti bolognese. Nowadays, I’ve expanded my range” Bart laughs.
On graduation, Bart wanted to keep learning. “When you leave college, you only have just enough knowledge to start working. I found a job with an awesome private practice in Wellington. It was the only job I applied for and I got it. I immersed myself in playing sport again and was a medic for rugby teams.” Bart played sports for Wellington and helped out with the Wellington Firebirds and the Saints Basketball team. “I came to respect the personal journey of the player from a physiotherapists perspective. That led me to want to really get a sense of their lifestyle so I could relate to athletes better, which drove me to go overseas and play hockey full-time for a few years.” While Bart remains coy about who he worked with when pushed he says he worked with Olympic athletes, Captain of the New Zealand Blacksticks Anita Punt (as she was then), and “a certain basketball player from Wellington who seems to be doing pretty well these days.”
When he returned from the Netherlands, after almost three years of being away, Bart became interested in the business side of physiotherapy. “I was interested in how environments were set up to help you thrive,” he says. “I experienced different environments being a sportsman, and so I got interested in people who have had chronic pain and improving their function to get back to work. It made me reflect on what most people are going through compared to what the sliver of sportsmen experience. The way people are working isn’t healthy quite often and it overlaps into their home-life and relationships. As a clinician, you’re privileged to learn more about people’s lives and you might hear more than they would tell good friends. I wanted to be less about being the ambulance at the bottom of a cliff and more about prevention.”
Meanwhile, working in the office at his laptop, Bart started to get a sore neck, back, and headaches. “I saw the irony in that,” he says. “I looked at what products were available to me and really couldn’t find anything good enough. My friends and I got together, and five years ago Limber was born” he says.
A key element Bart needed to improve about the desk is that it could quickly move up and down. “Research shows that 20 percent of people using standing electric desks actually make it go up and down. The rest of those people leave it the same height due to the time lag of the desk going up and down. We looked at our options, and old school counterweight technology, using steel bars in the desk, make the desk move swiftly.”
After refining the desk upwards of eight iterations, and road testing it with Xero and Trade Me, Xero bought a number of desks. Slowly, Bart and his team kept improving the desk. “Space is a premium, so one great thing we did was cut the back edges off for the petal-shaped desk” Bart explains. “Even saving a little space is a plus. We also included a power dock, smoothed the edges and double oiled the desk to make it really nice.” Through the years, Bart has worked with designers, engineers, and user experience designers to help get Limber in the strongest position possible. “I work with a guy called Andrew who used to work on models in the Lord of the Rings but had to stop working due to injury. He helps out, as does my Dad when he’s down in Wellington” says Bart. “There’s also a bunch of local people who we outsource specific work to, like steel cutting. Everything we do is pretty much local.”
Jumping into entrepreneurship is scary, Bart says. “However, there’s also a lot of fun, and satisfaction to be found in solving the problems that arise as a business owner. It’s character-building and gives me a sense of stronger autonomy. I know I can cope with anything that comes my way. If you let yourself, you can get stuck in a world of feeling overwhelmed, you don’t move forward.”
Sustainability is a core principle of the Limber brand. “There’s no point in making any product which is going to take the environment down with it,” Bart says. “The point of the product is to improve people’s health, and you can’t do that unless you take care of the natural environment. We offset the carbon emissions we create from our carbon emissions and support charities and people who are incarcerated and even refugees getting used to things in New Zealand. If we can’t get transparency in our supply chain, we push for it.
During the lockdown period, Bart has had to pivot his business to be less about business-to-business and more focused on direct to consumer online. This wasn’t initially a priority. “We’ve been through some massive changes since you bought your desk. I shifted some work to a joiner because he was going under due to his work being canceled. It’s exciting because it means we can partner with joiners anywhere in the world. It’s a new level of scale that’s opened up to us. I’ve also been trying to share how to set up your workspace if you are working from home. People are doing their best but often their knowledge of ergonomics is outdated. I even spoke with Radio New Zealand about that a few weeks ago.”
Bart and Limber are living proof that you can create something which is functional, well-designed, and improves people’s health - all while being ecologically friendly. His grit and determination to make Limber succeed may due to his grit and determination learned through the sports he played - but could also be from a mindset as flexible as his product. Bart’s attitude - to never let problems overwhelm him, to find solutions which work and think outside the box - have made Limber a success and demonstrate how this resident of Wellington won’t let anything, including a global pandemic, slow him down.
