Are you in the market for a decent, modestly priced office chair? Has your search to this point left you with a bit of analysis paralysis, overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices available?
If you answered yes to either of those questions and you think you might want a Komene Office Chair, we urge you to read this review before committing to the purchase.
About the Komene Brand
Before we take a closer look at the office chairs the company sells, we need to say something as a public service announcement. This brand has a number of “problematic” entries on their Amazon sales page. At first glance, it appears that the company sells an odd assortment of products, along with about a dozen office chairs.
On closer review, you’ll find things like this:
Which appears to be a rather attractive, if pricey office chair, but has reviews attached to it describing a “pooper scooper.”
The idea appears to be to get you to spend a few hundred dollars on what you think is an office chair, send you a pooper scooper, and if you cry foul, claim that they did nothing wrong because a savvy customer would have seen from the reviews what was actually being sold.
Here’s another example:
This appears to be a pretty good looking, well-priced task chair, but the reviews describe the product as being lipstick and eye shadow.
Now, it’s possible that this is an innocent mistake, but given the number of times it is repeated and the price disparity between the product shown and the product sent, that does not seem likely.
Maybe the company has been hacked. Maybe these are the actions of a disgruntled employee. We have no way of knowing and we’re not passing judgement. We’re simply telling you what we found and advising our readers to steer clear until the company can offer an explanation and correct the issue. For us to do anything less would be a disservice to our readers.
With the public service announcement portion of this Komene Office Chairs review out of the way, we’ll say this:
Leaving aside the “problematic entries,” Komene appears to sell a modest collection of actual products that include beanies, push up bras, and a trio of office chairs. Based on our research, we have concluded that the three chairs we’ll talk about here are legitimate products, and if you decide to buy one of these from Komene, you’ll get the product shown.
We don’t recommend that course of action at all, but if, for whatever reason, you decide you just have to have an office chair made by a company that sells beanies and push up bras, we’ll duly review them so you’ll have a better sense of what you’re getting.
An Overview of the Komene Office Chairs
All of the Komene Office Chairs have one major feature in common which we’ll cover here, rather than replicating it three times. That is the fact that when you order one of these chairs, it will arrive at your doorstep in a box in several pieces. You’ll have to put it together yourself.
That’s not surprising. Most of the office chairs sold (including most of the high-end ones) come unassembled, and Komene’s products are no different.
The production quality is about average for this segment of the market, though you will occasionally have issues where holes don’t line up quite the way they should. It’s nothing game-breaking, but it will slow down the assembly process a bit.
While the total assembly time varies slightly from one model to the next, expect it to take upwards of 40 minutes if you’re doing it solo, and about half that time if you can enlist the aid of a second pair of hands.
Let’s start by taking a top-level view:
Komene Office Chairs Comparison Table
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Overall Dimensions:
29.5” x 26.4” x 46.6” to 50.4”
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Overall Dimensions:
16” x 25” x 46.7” to 50.6”
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Overall Dimensions:
22.4” x 25.6” x 48.1” to 49.6”
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Chair Weight:
46.7 pounds
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Chair Weight:
41.5 pounds
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Chair Weight:
38.6 pounds
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Max. Supported Weight:
275 pounds
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Max. Supported Weight:
275 pounds
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Max. Supported Weight:
300 pounds
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Seat Height:
18.1” to 21.9”
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Seat Height:
18.5” to 21.5”
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Seat Height:
17.7” to 21.7”
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Seat Width:
20”
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Seat Width:
19.7”
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Seat Width:
19.3”
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Seat Depth:
20.3”
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Seat Depth:
20.3”
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Seat Depth:
17.3”
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Recline Range:
90 to 135 degrees
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Recline Range:
90 to 110 degrees
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Recline Range:
Does not recline but does rock back and forth slightly.
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Summary:
A surprisingly full-featured office chair that’s decent looking and comfortable.
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Summary:
A scaled-back version of the company’s flagship model. A better value, and slightly more comfortable.
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Summary:
A decent task chair with better than average ergonomic features on offer.
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Recommended for:
Not Recommended. Not only is it a bit on the pricey side, which blunts its value, but the brand problems cripple what could have been an outstanding design.
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Recommended for:
Not Recommended. Again, while this is a good model on paper, it’s saddled with the same limitations of all the chairs in this line.
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Recommended for:
Not Recommended. Although it offers relatively good value for the money, there are better options out there, offered by brands not currently beset by issues.
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*While aesthetics is a matter of taste, aesthetic flexibility is a measure of how easily a given design would fit into a wide range of home or office décor schemes.
**Brand Reliability is a measure of the strength and longevity of the brand, which by extension, is a measure of the level of support you can expect.
Komene Mesh High Back Executive Chair
Recommended For: Anyone in need of a full-featured office chair and would not mind the price.
The Komene Ergonomic Mesh Office chair can rightly be considered Komene’s flagship model, and it’s an admittedly good chair. Sure, the production quality is on the low side, but that’s common for chairs offered at the budget end of the market. It’s the standard trade-off: lower quality materials to keep the prices low, and plenty of features you love.
This model is proof that Komene knows a thing or two about building office furniture. Virtually every aspect of the chair is adjustable in one way or another.
Here’s a quick overview:
In addition to that, the back is segmented with the well-implemented lumbar support being a separate piece from the rest of the seatback.
It’s a good idea in theory, but the whole idea behind this approach would be to make the lumbar support adjustable. Sadly, that’s not the case here. It looks like they found the design and copied it, perhaps without fully understanding the purpose or function?
We can’t say for sure. In any case, while the lumbar support is well-implemented, it is sadly not adjustable although it does offer dynamic support, so it “pushes back” depending on how much weight you put on it.
On top of that, the seat is waterfall-edge style, which keeps the seat from cutting off the circulation in your legs when you sit for long periods. Combine that with the fact that the chair is mesh, and you get a chair that’s well suited for long duration sitting and the rigors of heavy daily use.
Unfortunately, the chair is 100% mesh, so there’s no padding in the seat. That works against the notion of long-duration seating, but only slightly. This is definitely a chair you’d be comfortable in, even if sitting for more than eight hours a day.
Our main issues are these:
Although we like what this chair has to offer, we can’t recommend it for the reasons we’ve already discussed.
Komene Mesh High Back Computer Chair
A scaled-back version of the flagship model. A better value, and slightly more comfortable.
While less capable than the company’s flagship model in most respects, this one offers a slightly better value for the money while retaining a surprisingly good feature set. The company advertises this as a “heavy duty” model but lacks the superior welds, high strength base, and added weight limit to support that claim. Even so, it does have some good features on offer.
Here’s the overview:
We count this as an all-mesh design because the seat is covered with a cotton-based mesh-like fabric, so it retains its breathability while providing a greater level of comfort overall.
Again though, given the low-quality materials used in construction and the relatively modest weight limit, we can’t agree with the company that this is a “heavy-duty” design. Further, given the brand issues already mentioned here in our Komene Ergonomic Mesh Office Chair review, although there are things we like about this model, we can’t recommend it.
Komene Mesh Task Chair
Recommended For: Anyone looking for a decent task chair with better-than-average ergonomic features on offer.
The Mesh task chair is the least expensive model offered by Komene and offers a better value proposition than the flagship model, owing to its substantially lower price, but a slightly worse one than the computer chair, which puts it squarely in the middle of the two overall.
The Komene product line is somewhat unusual, then, with the flagship model being simultaneously the most capable and feature-rich chair the company makes but also the lowest rated, mostly on account of its hefty price tag.
This is a good little chair, although we’ll be quick to point out that it falls short of greatness. Even so, it’s got an impressive feature set for a task chair, including:
The armrests are height adjustable but otherwise uninspiring, being simple T-shapes (not ergonomically designed) and only nominally padded.
Also note that the chair does not recline at all, but it does allow the person sitting in it to rock back and forth slightly, which is something. Oddly enough, this chair boasts a 300-pound user weight limit, which is higher than the more expensive chairs in the company’s lineup.
Why Komene didn’t make that the standard and offer the expanded weight limit on all their chairs, we can’t say. That strikes us as a missed opportunity though. Had they done so, their other chairs would have appealed to a broader segment of the market and probably scored nominally higher.
In any case, as task chairs go, this is a pretty good one. We still can’t recommend it, on account of the very real issues the brand as a whole has, but credit where credit is due; all of Komene’s office chairs are decent, if a bit on the pricey side, given the relatively low-end materials used in their construction.
Pros & Cons of Komene Office Chair
While each of the three chairs sold by Komene has features we like, we cannot recommend any of them in good conscience.
The value segment of the office furniture market is a bustling, thriving space with literally dozens of companies selling comparable products. Most of those alternative companies don’t have Amazon Sales Pages that are littered with problematic entries. In our view, there’s just no valid reason to take a chance on any of these chairs with so many other options available.
Leaving aside the brand issues, here are the things we think you’ll like best about Komene’s chairs in general:
Unfortunately, those things are countered by the fact that the production quality on all these chairs leaves a lot to be desired, and the materials used in the construction of the elements designed to support user weight (the base, the gas lift, and the tilt/lock mechanisms on two of the models) are substandard and will probably start showing their age much sooner than you’d like.
On top of that, they tend to be a bit on the pricey side. Combine that with the aforementioned brand problems, and it’s hard to justify a purchase here.
Komene Office Chairs Review Conclusion
When you look through the Komene Brand page, it appears they have upwards of a dozen chairs for sale. Unfortunately, most of these entries appear to have problems associated with them. On the face of it, they seem to be selling chairs, but on closer review, they’re associated with low-value products.
Of the chairs the company does sell, we regard them as being decent but overpriced. The various strong points of each model are overshadowed by the problems the brand as a whole has.
Even in the absence of problematic entries on their sales page, the fact that the company sells such a mishmash of products, including beanies and push-up bras, doesn’t inspire much confidence in us where the company’s long-term viability as a major player in the office furniture market is concerned.
We’re certainly not saying that companies can’t have multiple product lines and still manage to produce good products; of course, they can. It happens all the time!
Unfortunately, when you combine their scattershot approach to products, the small number of them, the fact that the Komene Office Chairs hasn’t been around very long and the fact that their brand page is filled with “problematic” entries, we feel that our lack of confidence is entirely justified.
We absolutely do not recommend buying from Komene at this time, though we’ll be happy to reevaluate the brand if and when they clean up their brand page on Amazon. That’s unfortunate because all three of the chairs they offer show promise.
REFERENCES & RESOURCES
- Komene, Official Brand Site.
- Why Prolonged Sitting Is Bad for Your Health, Time.
- How to Fix/make Sinking Office Chair Reusable, Instructables.
- Too Much Sitting Is As Bad For The Brain As It Is For The Body: Study, Forbes.
- Sitting Is Bad for Your Brain — Not Just Your Metabolism or Heart, ScienceDaily.