If you’re tired of feeling like Quasimoto’s cousin, hunched sadly over your keyboard and desk day after day, you might want to listen up. No matter how you slice it, we’re spending a lot of time at our desks these days, whether at work or in your home office. One of the keys to great posture and an ache-free back come end-of-day Friday is an ergonomic desk chair. Because not all desk chairs are created equal, we did some digging to come up with a list of the best at every price point. If you’re tired of feeling like Quasimoto’s cousin, hunched sadly over your keyboard and desk day after day, you might want to listen up. Herman Miller Aeron Chair ($729) Best Assets: The most commonly used chair in the professional world. Rates high in style and comfort. High-tech mesh fabric keeps the chair cool and comfortable. Made from recycled materials. Eurotech Seating Ergohuman ($624) Best Assets: Designed to comfort lower back. Made with eight-hour days in mind. Good design for taller people.
Best Assets: Promotes low-intensity, but active, engaged seating. IKEA Markus Swivel Chair ($200) Best Assets: Great value. Lumbar support for ergonomic comfort. Back mesh keeps you cool. Best Assets: The curves and flexes are made to support the body. Optional lumbar support available. Lightweight and designed for a 270 degrees of comfortable sitting. Herman Miller Sayl ($459) Best Assets: Great value for a high-end model and design. Full range of motion thanks to frameless back. Back material keeps chair cool. Stylish design with streamlined engineering for easy assemble. Knoll Remix Chair ($617) Best Assets: Good value for price, design and comfort. Available in array of colors. Tilt control with three adjustable tilts for seating control. SPACE Seating Professional Desk Chair ($160) Best Assets: Low price without compromising style and comfort. Lumbar support for extended comfort. Versatile fit for all heights. VIVA OFFICE Mid-Back Computer Chair ($99)
Best Assets: Very low price for quality office chair. Mesh keeps chair cool. Adjustable tilt tension and seat height. HumanScale Freedom Task Chair ($989) Best Assets: Designed to minimize pressure points and distribute weight distribution. Clean lines and an architectural look. Designed to fit 95 percent of population. Steelcase Leap Chair ($920) Best Assets: Flexible in comfort and movement; designed to support the nine common modes of work and seating. LiveBack technology flexes to change shape with your movements. What office chair do you use at home or at work? Tell us in the comments!Click Here to Get the Buyer’s Guide: Furniture About to purchase furniture, or other home products, from suppliers in China? Keep reading, and learn what you must know about finding the right furniture suppliers, relevant trade shows and customization options. We also explain what furniture importers must know about fire retardancy regulations, quality control and shipping.
When sourcing Furniture manufacturers online, there’s a variety of factors to use when assessing potential candidate suppliers. Below follows a few examples: Registered Capital: A low registered capital may indicate that the supplier is a small trading company. As there are no real benefits of buying from a trader, you want to avoid that. A Furniture manufacturer should have at least RMB 1,000,000 in registered capital, which is specified in their business license. Business Scope: Possibly even more telling than the Registered Capital, the Business scope explains what the company was set out to do. Look for “furniture” and “manufacturing”, or “production”, to assess if the supplier is a true manufacturer. Traders, on the other hand, tend to have business scopes, including a wide range of very different products, and include terms such as “Wholesale”. Quality Management System: A Quality Management System, for example, ISO 9001, is implemented to track and prevent quality issues.
Why does this matter? Because it only applies to manufacturers, not traders. When buying furniture from Chinese suppliers, why is it important to first filter suppliers? Because the majority of Furniture manufacturers are not geared towards developed markets, offering the quality options and stability you need to compete. If you don’t feel like browsing supplier listing online, you may want to consider visiting a Home products trade show in Mainland China or Hong Kong. Below follows a summary of relevant, annual, trade fairs in the Furniture and home products industry: What differs a retailer, or even wholesaler, from an OEM manufacturer? When you buy a product from a retailer, take Ikea for example, you know that their products are made according to the very same specification sheet. There is no variation in terms of materials, design, dimensions and functions. Yet, many importers of home products, including furniture, make the assumption that this is how OEM manufacturers in China, also operates.
OEM manufacturers operate according to a ‘make to order’ principle. While they may have “catalog products”, these are mere references, at best. What this means for you, is that you must provide the supplier with a spec sheet – even if the product is based on a factory design. There is no uniform Furniture spec sheet template that can be used. However, below follows a few examples of what you must include in your specification sheet: In many markets, there are mandatory Fire Retardancy Regulations, applicable to various types of furniture. In the United States, there’s no federal framework to which American importers must comply. However, California Technical Bulletin 117 (TB117) has become ‘de facto’ mandatory, as it is asked for by both retailers and customers. However, In the European Union, there are mandatory Fire safety standards, to which buyers are forced to comply. Below follows an overview: Keep in mind that you must communicate to the supplier, to which standards your product must be complied with.
A few years ago, I remember how we performed a quality inspection on upholstered furniture in Hangzhou. As we started testing the fire retardancy of the cover fabric, it turned out that the goods were in no way going to pass a third party audit. However, the present sales manager, quickly brushed off any responsibility. Instantly, he underlined that they are indeed capable of ensuring compliance with all European and American substance and fire retardancy standard, but that this customer did not communicate that their product had to be compliant with a certain standard. Hence, the procurement officers, working in the factory, did not make this specific request to their subcontractor for cover fabrics… and indeed, they didn’t ask either, so the result was a batch of a non-compliant goods. As such, you must first assess which regulations apply to home products in your market, and then communicate this requirement to your manufacturer. To ensure that your supplier is not shipping substandard or damaged goods, which is perfectly possible, you must hire a quality inspector to check up on the goods.
There are several companies offering quality control services, already in China. However, you need to communicate what they should look for. Below follows explanations of two of critical checkpoints, when importing furniture from China: Visual Inspection: Check for potential damages, or usage of incorrect materials and components. Fire retardancy testing: While most compliance tests can only be carried out in a laboratory, fire retardancy of fabrics can be checked just as well with a lighter and a stopwatch. Furniture is heavy, and can easily break under the weight of stacked units. Many manufacturers understand this, while others routinely fail to apply common sense when packing furniture. As such, I suggest that you request packing, as following: As furniture is not only heavy, but also taking up quite a bit of space, most buyers in this segment base their imported volumes on a container basis, rather than a unit bases. Hence, request your supplier to quote a volume based on an FCL 20’’ or 40’’ HQ container, and let them specify the number of units that can be loaded in each.