Money doesn't actually talk. We do.

Ameriprise Doesn’t Deserve to Sit in a Classic Like the Eames Chair

There are probably not a ton of people who are both personal-finance geeks and the type that drools over the curves and angles of the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames.

But I’m one of them. Which is why I’ve been horrified to see one of the scoflaws of the personal-finance industry appropriate an Eames icon to make itself look good, all with the permission of the Eames team itself.

See that lovely red chair? It’s the Eames Molded Plywood Lounge Chair. A classic.

Recently, the chair has been showing up as a central figure in ads (see the Ameriprise Web campaign featuring the chair here and one of the Dennis Hopper commercials here) for financial-planning giant Ameriprise, which is decidedly not classic. Or classy. In fact, Ameriprise has been in a world of trouble in recent years.

Here’s just a bit of the Ameriprise lowlight reel:

• An arbitration panel found that a broker at an Ameriprise unit made a mess of many Exxon employees’ retirement accounts, causing some to have to return to work.

• Several states examined claims that Ameriprise financial planners forged customer signatures to make it look like they’d received financial plans that they’d paid for but never actually got.

• Ameriprise paid a huge fine to settle accusations that it was involved in the mutual-fund trading/timing scandal of a few years back

• And in my personal favorite, Ameriprise paid a fine after it appeared as if it was literally fleecing little kids for their college money, putting their savings in a single state’s 529 plan that it just so happened to help manage (and draw fees from).

I asked Herman Miller, which makes the chairs these days, why it would get in bed with an outfit like this. Turns out it’s the Eames Office, the operation that manages the Eames brand and designs, that agreed to let Ameriprise use the chair. Amerprise gave the Eames Foundation a donation as a token of its gratitude.

A spokesman for the Eames Office said he didn’t know that Ameriprise had been in any sort of hot water.

Look, I’m not naïve. Plenty of big financial-services firms besides Ameriprise have done all sorts of consumer-unfriendly things. Many of the above incidents ended in Ameriprise neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing (while paying fines or other penalties).

But given how clear the public record is on Ameriprise (Check out a vicious, cutting spoof of an earlier ad here, courtesy of ameriprisesuck.com, which lays more of it out), the Eames folks should never have let the company tarnish its exalted furniture.

– Ron Lieber