In this new age of hybrid working, people aren’t just using their home-office set-up for work tasks – they’ve often combined these spaces with their entertainment area, and that means that, on occasion, we can spend both the workday and evening sitting in the same spot. If this rings any bells, you’ll probably know by now that having a high-quality chair is very important. Getting the wrong model will lead to acute aches and pain and, over time, chronic posture issues. So where do you start if you’re after a legitimately high-quality, ergonomic seat? A good chair can last for many years, but today’s market is admittedly a confusing one, with hundreds of options at wildly differing price tags.
To help cut through the noise, we’ve put together this quick list of the top five things you need to consider when shopping for a new office chair.
1. Brand matters
Not all chair brands can be Herman Miller. Nonetheless, there are many high-quality manufacturers that aren’t well known which float atop a sea of cheap, rebadged rubbish that come straight out of shifty factories.
The chances are you’ll be spending a great deal of time in your new chair and you’ll be hoping not to buy another for a decade. So, be sure to buy one from an established brand, whose products have legitimate reviews and, if possible, a community of happy customers who you can ask questions of. Otherwise, you could find yourself sitting on a wobbly base for the next 10 years and your skeleton won’t thank you for that… if it even makes it that long.
2. Don’t forget the warranty
Intrinsically linked to brand, the warranty is where a company demonstrates its willing to ‘put its money where its mouth is’. An office chair is not like buying a pair of cheap fashionable shoes, that all parties expect to fall-apart quickly – leading you to buy another cheap pair. An office chair will be a work partner in the same way a pet will be a life companion – you’ll want both to live long happy lives and remain in top condition.
While you’ll certainly pay more for a high quality office chair, the standard warranties on top models generally back this up by running from between 8 to 12 years – meaning you’ll be looked after if something does need fixing a number of years down the line.
3. Consider total cost of ownership
Good stuff generally costs more. However, we’ve all probably had experiences dealing with overpriced rubbish and revelling in finding bargains that are more-than suitable for our needs. It can be tempting to apply the same logic to buying an office chair, as they can often look very similar but for the price tags.
Over the longer term, however, buying a model with saggy mesh or whose stem bends or wobbles will annoy you (and potentially cause injury) until you throw it away and spend more money on what you should have bought in the first place. A quality chair should last you a decade or more, so recognise that your initial outlay represents an investment that will spread itself over that time.
4. Comfort or posture?
When it comes to comfort, who among us doesn’t like to be enveloped in a beanbag or sprawled out on a couch? However, if you’ve ever worked in one of those settings for an extended period, you’ll likely have walked away regretting it, with your musculoskeletal system painfully (not) adjusting to its new layout.
Some office chairs offer big, cushioned pads which suit certain body types or situations, like pregnancy. Others have an ergonomic focus, ensuring that your body stays in the right shape throughout the day, with posture-friendly features like lumbar and neck support. These aim to enable you to both work comfortably… and to then comfortably walk away at the end of the day. If you experience pain in your back or neck, a good posture-focused office chair can help alleviate those symptoms.
5. Mesh or cushion?
It’s natural for many people to take one look at both options and choose the comfy-looking cushion… but is that really the optimal choice? We live in a hot and often humid country, and cushion-covered chairs absorb and retain more heat than mesh designs. This is one of the key reasons behind mesh seats’ growing popularity. Mesh is fully breathable in all types of climate, it doesn’t absorb anything and it’s easy to clean. Furthermore, advanced, hybrid mesh-and-fabric materials like DuraWeave provide a superior-quality mesh, which avoids being overly bouncy, won’t tear or sag over time and will help retain its delicate, bright texture (and looks) over a chair’s lifespan.
Which chair?
There’s one brand out there that amply qualifies on all the above considerations – NorthDay’s ErgoTune. The boutique company specialises in office chairs (ErgoTune) and standing desks (EverDesk), and the high quality of its products have allowed it to build up a fanbase, which it then consults with when designing new products.
The third iteration of its flagship chair, the ErgoTune Supreme V3, has just launched and incorporates a range of improvements based on real user feedback – and NorthDay stands firmly behind the design and the quality of the materials, with an industry-leading 8-year warranty!
NorthDay believes that natural comfort only comes when a chair can be tailored to you. This is the ethos that underpins why the V3 incorporates DuraWeave hybrid mesh, sports a new wide and adjustable lumbar component, has added three-axis neck support to protect your head and upper spine, plus the new gas-lift height adjustments that make it suitable for very-short and very-tall people (and everyone in between).
These sit alongside existing innovations such as highly adjustable ‘5D’ armrests (that can turn inwards for specialised desk activities) and recline features. It all means that no matter what size and shape you are, it’s the chair you can genuinely live in.
To find out more visit the official NorthDay website.
