Answers, Not Homework: Why We Publish Every Spec We Can Find

The question I am asked most often is some version of: will it actually fit? Not what colour it comes in, not whether it is comfortable. Will it go through the door, under the desk, into the gap by the window. Office furniture specifications answer nearly all of that, which is why we print as many of them as we can get our hands on.

For years the habit in this trade was to leave the numbers off the page and wait for the phone to ring. It works, in the narrow sense that the phone does ring. It also means somebody who wanted five minutes to check a seat height has to give up twenty and talk to a stranger instead. That is a poor deal for them and a slightly grubby one for us.

The office furniture specifications we publish

Where the supplier hands over the data, and quite often where they do not and somebody here has to go and ask twice, you should find all of this on the page:

• Overall width, depth and height, then the measurements that get used in practice: seat height range, seat depth, back height, arm height, clearance under the desk.

• Weight capacity. The Chiro Plus is rated to 150kg and says so, rather than leaving you to judge it from a photograph.

• What the fabric is, how it is rated for wear, and which colours are current rather than quietly discontinued last spring.

• Whether it turns up built, part built, or flat in a box with an allen key and our best wishes.

• The lead time, stated honestly, including the weeks nobody enjoys quoting.

None of that list is glamorous. It is the sort of thing that gets left off because nobody in a marketing meeting ever asked for more numbers on a page. Buyers ask for them constantly.

Why the numbers beat the photograph

A photograph tells you a chair is black and has a mesh back. It will not tell you the seat lifts from 45cm to 55cm, and that range is the difference between a comfortable afternoon and a dead leg by three o'clock. Two chairs that look identical in a picture can sit 8cm apart on seat depth, which decides which one suits somebody who is five foot two and which suits somebody who is six foot four.

Desks are the same. The step between a 1400 and a 1600 sounds like nothing until the pedestal has to live underneath it and the monitor arm needs a clamp point at the back. Those are the calls we used to get every day, and they were entirely avoidable.

There is a comfort argument too, and it is the part of my job I care about most. A chair that does not adjust far enough for the person sitting in it gets blamed for being a bad chair. Usually it is a perfectly good chair that was never going to fit them, and thirty seconds with the seat height range would have said so before anyone spent a penny.

When we cannot find something

Sometimes we cannot. A supplier has mislaid the drawing, or the figure they give over the phone contradicts the one on their own data sheet. When that happens we leave the field blank and say so, instead of printing a sensible-looking estimate. A guess dressed up as a fact is worse than a gap, because you cannot tell it is a guess.

If you need something we have not listed, ask. Somebody here will chase the supplier for it. It usually takes a day and occasionally a fortnight, and whatever comes back goes on the page afterwards so the next person never has to ask at all.

All of this makes for longer product pages and a good deal more work at our end. It is worth it. You should be able to buy a task chair the same way you buy anything else: read the details, make your mind up, get on with your day.