Shop dwellers are fond of quipping that working in a garage can be back-breaking work. While they may not mean it in the literal sense, it’s easy enough to understand how the work could wreak havoc on your back, as it requires regular bending over, under, and sometimes around various parts of a vehicle.

Given that fact, it should go without saying that a durable and functional shop chair or stool could provide plenty of back-saving comfort to those in need. They also make for an easy garage upgrade, and if that sitting device is also comfortable, all the better. Many shop workers might tell you that chairs and stools bearing the Vyper logo check most of those boxes, even as they are hardly among the most budget-friendly garage upgrades. If an item’s country of origin is important to you, you might also be interested to know that Vyper chairs are made in the United States.

More specifically, chairs bearing the distinctive Vyper logo are manufactured in the American Midwest, with the company producing its chairs at a facility in the Badger State. That’s Wisconsin for those who are not up on their state nicknames, and yes, Vyper has called that Midwest mecca home since the moment of its inception. These days, its chairs are being manufactured in a high-tech facility in Wrightstown, Wisconsin, and are likely to come from that factory for the foreseeable future.

With their point of origin being the American Midwest, you might now have a question or two about who started the company and who is currently running the show at Vyper Chairs. If you are among the consumer base that is gung-ho about Made in America brands, you’ll no doubt be happy to know that Vyper Chairs is also an American-owned company. In fact, it is a family-owned business, with brothers Dayne and Dylan Rusch, the company’s founders, currently serving as its president and CEO, respectively.

In reality, the company they founded is not called Vyper Chairs, but Vyper International. It also didn’t begin as a chair company. Instead, Dayne and Dylan got their start selling single-phase and three-phase electrical motors out of a 400-square-foot apartment. That venture began in 2019, but by 2020, the brothers were out of the motor game, pivoting instead into the production of shop chairs. 

As the story goes, their father, Chris, of Rusch Machine & Design, was the inspiration for the first Vyper International chair, as the elder Rusch had long desired a shop chair that was as safe as it was comfortable and durable. They delivered Papa Rusch his chair in 2020, and by 2021 had grown the business enough to move into a legit, 2,500-square-foot production facility. Fast forward to today, Vyper is newly installed in a state-of-the-art facility, some 64,808 square feet in size. With its chairs classing up garages all over the world, Vyper chairs are one garage upgrade that appears to be well worth the money.