WEYBRIDGE, UK — Tucked away in the leafy London suburb of Weybridge, challenger premium seatmaker Unum is readying Unum Two, the second seat that it will reveal, but the first that it expects to sell. At Unum’s small design and production site, Runway Girl Network sat down with founder and chief executive officer Chris Brady and vice president of business development Alan McInnes for a wide-ranging discussion about the new product and the company’s plans.

Unum Two is, on the face of it, a fairly standard-looking forward-facing staggered business class seat with suite doors. But the virtual reality headset demonstration that RGN experienced on-site, and the renders provided by Unum for this article, show a product that is — perhaps surprisingly — more advanced in its engineering than in its passenger experience design.

The driver to developing Unum Two as a stagger, Brady tells RGN, is that “we know that herringbone seats can be polarising — business classes in general are polarising. Some people like this, and some people like that.”

“We wanted to broaden out the product portfolio,” Brady says, “so that we were more than the herringbone company, the herringbone startup. We came into this business not to be fancy product designers, but to be the credible alternative, and that means being a seat supplier and partner to airlines over the long term. That does require great products, obviously, but great products are just simply not enough if you haven’t got the industrial strategy and ability to manufacture and deliver them at quality and at rate, and then support them.”

The end result of the engineering-first philosophy for Unum Two is that while seat structural and certification testing — including dynamic testing at the new Mirus facility in Norfolk, a few hours away by road — is due to complete by the end of May, adjustments to the way the seat looks and feels may change. It would also not be surprising to see Unum pursue a similar product separation to Unum One, offering either more space (Unum One) or higher density (Unum One HD).

In terms of the look and feel, there are visible questions at render level, all of which Unum is already aware of. For one, the middle centre pairs have shrouding structure between them that would preclude a true honeymoon seat product. In addition, there are a number of locations at which a few more iterations around the interfacing between separate elements of the seat would be useful from a passenger experience, part count and maintainability perspective: the corner where the passenger’s elbow meets the side table, for example.

But any change to the visible structure hides the engineering advancement of Unum Two’s unique selling point: the scimitar recline mechanism the company designed for Unum One, also used on this seat. Since executing the passenger-to-seat-to-track connection requires the greatest certification and testing — much of which was done as Unum One — the functionality of (say) table mechanics or the design ergonomics of the footwell are less fixed and more easy to revise with minimal further testing required.

Unum’s secret sauce is made up of several ingredients: the scimitar recline mechanism, its guiding design philosophies, its people (and their expertise), and the nimbleness of a small organisation. 

Watching Unum’s hires over the last year or so has been an exercise in identifying experts in their fields, while visiting the compact Unum production site — a very British setup within an old barn on the same farm campus as armoured vehicle producer Jankel — reveals a remote-first company born during the pandemic and thus inherently designed around the latest generation of digital collaboration tools.

All this enables innovation, from the scimitar to Unum’s new track adapter system and modular table cassette, through to upwards and downwards supply chain integration with the company’s tech setup, where its own suppliers and Unum itself as a supplier can communicate digitally, supported by collaborative tools.

While Brady and McInnes express clear frustration with the current state of seat certification approvals in the UK — to distil the point down, the UK decided to leave EASA as part of its government decision to pursue a hard Brexit, and the Civil Aviation Authority has still failed to put in place the expertise to enable it to swiftly follow the FAA and EASA in implementing new international standards, specifically here TSO/ETSO-C127c [PDF], leading to frustrating and needless delays — Unum believes the seat is ready for its first customer.

“We could be delivering at the end of 2024,” Brady concludes.

Related Articles:

• Up close with Unum’s first seat, the 34” Unum One herringbone
• Unum’s new herringbone business seat aims at design and delivery
• Seatmaker Unum talks strategy, supply chain partners

Featured image credited to Unum