Leap

1/14/2021 Update: I've had this chair now for several months. In the beginning it was not comfortable but that changed. For all the sitting I do while working at home I do not have back issues. I like the ability to recline to stretch out my back throughout the day. Overall I am satisfied with this purchase. 9/30 Update: In hindsight I probably would not spend the money to purchase this chair. I was fortunate that my employer subsidized the cost. I do still have back pain, not as much as the previous chair but it's still there. Based on online reviews of this chair on the Internet I would have thought this would be the most comfortable chair I could sit in but it is not and for the money I would expect that it would be. Original review: I decided to spend the additional funds to purchase this chair because I did not have a positive experience with lower priced office chairs. Based on my research I discovered that this is one of the top office chairs on the market. It has lived up to its reputation. It came assembled which was great because I didn't have to worry about not screws that did not fit properly into their holes. I'm very pleased and it's worth it now that I am working at home and require a very high quality chair....my back is worth it!!

Disclosure: I purchased this chair 2 months ago. I've been using it every weekday from about 9am to about 6pm. I get up for lunch and the occasional errand. However, I spend at least 6-7 full hours on the chair each day. After spending a year on a cheap desk chair (~$100) and dealing with pain in my legs and back I finally had enough and started researching the best chairs. I came across Steelcase and eventually settled on the Leap chair as my next chair. I thought about buying it from Steelcase directly, however, their online shop isn't too user friendly and I would have had to wait at least 3 weeks for it to arrive. With Amazon, it was going to arrive between 5-7 days since they had it in their warehouse. The Leap chair arrived fully assembled (the packaging was actually quite impressive!). This chair has several settings so that you can customize it to your height and size and make it feel just right. The one I got came with the carpet casters, however, they work great on my hard floor. They glide smoothly and comfortably. FYI - I weigh about 170lbs. I have a feeling this is a chair I'll have for at least a few more years. I highly recommend it. After this chair I will never go back to cheaper desk chairs.

The chair itself is fine, but apart incredibly cheap feeling fabric for a chair of this price, it creaks and groans relentlessly despite being putatively brand-new and not refurbished. This certainly does not feel like a $1,300 chair––the value is not there for the money. The good news is, apart from it being delivered fully assembled, and providing good back support, it is free and easy to return.

My office has had lots of Steelcase Leap chairs for years, so I am very familiar with them. Many years ago, we tested several quality office chairs, and the Leap got my vote over all the others. At the start of the pandemic, like many others, I started working from home almost exclusively. I bought a cheap $150 office chair at the time and suffered through the discomfort and back problems that came with it. More recently, I tried "upgrading" to a $300 office chair, which proved to be even worse, giving me a consistent neck ache due to poor posture that was impossible to correct. I looked at a lot of different options but kept coming back to the conclusion that anything less than a Leap would just mean a new set of problems. There are so many aspects of a chair that can go wrong -- lumbar support that is too far forward or non-adjustable, useless neck supports, uncomfortable arm supports stuck in place, hard seats, seat backs that don't come up far enough to sit straight, crappy wheels, the list goes on and I simply don't feel confident being able to judge all of those things especially while looking at chairs online given my experiences thus far. Even when I have tried to test them in-store, I have ended up with problems I didn't anticipate until I was actually using the chair over a period of time. The Leap is excellent in every respect. The cost is definitely high to pay out of your own funds for a home office, but the way I see it now, if you sit all day for your job, you can either pay the cost of that in the form of a nice office chair, or in the form of lots of visits to the doctor/physical therapist/chiropractor/etc. (been there, done that). Do yourself a favor and spend the money preventing those problems instead.