In a Nutshell:
The Via Seating Run II is a study in technical excellence and modularity. This is a great chair by any definition. Recommended for anyone who weighs up to 300 pounds, especially if you love customizing every detail about your chair.
Value for the Money
Comfort
Brand Reliability*
Aesthetic Flexibility**
Overall Rating
4.4/5
Benefits
Drawbacks
Recommended For: Anyone who weighs up to 300 pounds, especially if you love customizing every detail about your chair.
Is your current office chair beginning to show its age? Are you on the hunt for its replacement? Are you specifically looking for a chair that’s built to last and can be customized and personalized to fit you like a glove?
If you answered yes to those three questions, then you’re going to love what you read in this—our Via Seating Run II review.
Haven’t heard of Via Seating? We’d be surprised if you had. Although the company has been around since the late 1980s, they don’t have a huge presence in the market. In that time, however, they have built a reputation for quality and excellence in both design and post-sales support.
Although the company sources some of its materials from overseas, all the chairs they sell are hand-sewn and assembled in the United States. By any reckoning, this is a superb company with an exceptional track record.
Broadly speaking, there are two design paradigms office chair vendors can take.
They can build a chair with specifications that are broad enough to encompass a large segment of the office chair market and which are ideal for homes or offices where multiple people will be using the same chair, or they can build incredibly modular chairs that can be custom ordered to fit a single user perfectly.
Via Seating is a company that mostly sticks to that latter approach.
Their chairs aren’t cheap, and you should know that going in. On the other hand, if you’re willing to spend a little more to get a high-quality product that will last you more than a decade, and you want something that fits you like a glove, then there are only a handful of companies you want to buy from, and Via Seating is one of them.
In the sections that follow, we’ll step you through everything the Run II has to offer. More specifically, we’ll also walk you through the buying process so you can get a feel for how many customization options you’ve got. That way, you’ll have all the information you need to decide for yourself if this is the chair you’ve been searching for.
If that sounds good to you, read on, and let’s take a closer look.
Overview of the Run II Ergonomic Chair
We regard this as a very strong component of our Via Seating Run II review for various reasons. First and foremost, the Run II makes an excellent first impression. It’s not what we’d describe as a gorgeous chair, but it does boast an incredibly distinctive look.
That’s very much a Via Seating tradition. The company is known for the distinctive appearance of the chairs they make and their use of mixed materials, making this an excellent example of their work.
Before diving into the details, we should point out that the Run II isn’t a single chair. There are actually five different variants on offer. These are:
You can pick exactly which chassis you want when placing your order, assuming you buy from the company’s website directly. If you opt to buy on Amazon, you’ll find a number of pre-configured options with no ability to deviate from whatever the vendor is offering.
The good news is that Amazon vendors tend to offer a number of different options, so in most cases, you can find what you want. If Amazon happens not to have the exact configuration you’re looking for, the company’s customization and sales page will give you as much granularity as you need.
The Via Seating Run II chair is interesting partly because of the use of mixed media. It incorporates mesh in the seatback and your choice of either fabric, vinyl, or top-grain leather for the seat upholstery, which is a fantastic combination that gives you the best of both worlds.
We’ll have more to say about the use of mixed materials a bit later on in this review. For the moment, though, let’s just leave it that Via’s implementation is awesome and one of the things that makes this design so great.
Its distinctive appearance is just the tip of the iceberg and doesn’t really do the design justice. In order to dig deeper, we’ll need numbers, so here’s a quick overview of the numbers behind the design:
These are categorically superb numbers.
The seat depth and width are a good pairing with the supported weight, which is right in line with the average across the industry. We also love that the height adjustment range straddles big and tall territory, which tends to start at 18″ and goes up from there. This chair, then, is a good fit for shorter people and taller folk who are of light to medium build.
The headline here, though, is the warranty. Yes, these chairs are pricey. There’s no denying that, but with a 12-year warranty and depending on how old you are, this could literally be the last office chair you’ll ever need.
If you buy a low-end chair, it’s likely that you’ll need to replace it at least every two years—and possibly every year—and if you spread the cost of one of these out over 6, or even 12 years, you’ll find that the Run II task chair compares very favorably on price.
We’ll have a lot more to say about the various options you can order if you’re getting your chair from the company’s website.
But however you decide you want your chair, it will automatically come with the company’s excellent 3-position tilt and lock feature that gives you one fantastic customization option right off the bat with much more to come, depending on the specific options you select.
The Run II Office Chair Is Surprisingly Comfortable And Can Be Amazingly Adjustable Too!
In our view, this is the single strongest component of our Via Seating Run II review. It is both delightfully comfortable and is (or can be) incredibly adjustable. To illustrate that, after we talk about comfort, we’ll walk through purchasing one of these chairs from the company’s website to illustrate all the fun ways you can customize your chair.
In terms of comfort, we already mentioned that the Run II utilizes mixed media, incorporating mesh for the seatback and a variety of materials (leather, vinyl, or fabric) for the seat itself, which is used to cover a generous amount of padding.
Mesh is a great choice for the seatback because it keeps the overall weight of the chair down and is incredibly breathable, which means you can spend extended periods of time in the chair and still be quite comfortable.
Normally, we’re not a fan of leather upholstery, but that’s mostly because over the longer term, it makes your back hot and sweaty. Here, that’s not an issue, and the leather-clad seat gives the chair a nice polished and finished look that you’re sure to love.
Beneath the leather (or vinyl or fabric), you’ll find a generous amount of cold-cured sculpted foam padding.
The company utilizes a proprietary technique here, sculpting the foam ergonomically and specifically using cold-cured injection molding because it offers a delightfully comfortable seating experience and helps ensure that the foam won’t break down over time, which is the biggest weakness and limitation of foam padding.
All that to say that when you buy one of these chairs, you can expect the foam padding to stand up to the rigors of continuous use year after year, which is amazing.
Now, let’s talk about adjustability and customizability, which is where the Run II truly excels. To demonstrate just how good this chair is on that front, let’s walk you through the purchasing process.
When you go to the “Build and Spec” page, the first decision you’ll be asked to make is regarding the base model you want to build from. Here, your options are:
Once you’ve made that decision, your next option relates to the color of the frame. You’ve got two options: standard black or magnet grey, which is slightly more expensive.
Once you’ve settled on that, your next decision relates to the control mechanism. This is pivotal because if you spring for the deluxe option here, you’ll add a new “stool kit height range” feature, which adds to the versatility of the design.
That done, your next decision relates to the armrests of the chair, and this, like the control mechanism, is an absolutely pivotal decision, so you’ll want to consider carefully what your needs are and how you plan on using the chair. Your options on this front are as follows:
As you can see, there are a lot of different options here. Although the 8-way armrest adjustment options are more expensive, they definitely enhance the value of the chair.
After that, you’ll get to choose what kind of base you want, picking between three different options: a black nylon 5-star swivel base, a polished aluminum 5-star swivel base, or a brushed aluminum 5-star swivel base.
Then, it’s on to the type of casters you want to add to the chair. You’ve got three choices here: black carpet casters, two-toned black with grey soft rubber tread all-floor casters, or black all-floor glides.
Are you impressed yet? Well, hang on, there’s more! You also have the option to add a safety feature (reverse-locking, weight-activated brakes for the casters), and you can add a black height-adjustable lumbar support option, which we absolutely recommend.
Finally, you get to choose the color scheme you want, both for the mesh on the seatback and for the seat upholstery.
Where the mesh color options are concerned, your choices are standard black mesh, black copper mesh, natural copper striped mesh, grey mesh, blue mesh, green mesh, red mesh, grey patchwork mesh, blue patchwork mesh, or orange patchwork mesh.
Where the seat upholstery is concerned, you don’t only get to pick the type of upholstery used but also the quality grade, color, manufacturer, and pattern. In other words, your chair, your way.
And finally, if all that wasn’t enough, you can opt to have the chair either 95% assembled, fully assembled, or blanket-wrapped at your option.
We flat-out love the customization process here, and we think you will too. If you’re willing to spend a little extra, you can have this chair configured exactly how you want it. You won’t have to just “live with” the arbitrary design decisions of some team that doesn’t know you. You get to decide, and that’s awesome. That, more than any other single reason, is why we love this chair.
Pros and Cons of Via Seating Run II Chair
Literally, the only potentially negative thing we have to say about this model is the fact that it only supports an average amount of user weight at 300 pounds. While it’s true that the weight limit means that the chair will accommodate some 95% of the market, if you’re a big and tall user, you get left out of the equation.
Everything else about this model is solid gold.
Via Seating Run II Review Conclusion
If you weigh 300 pounds or less and are looking for a chair you can customize to your heart’s content, this is the one you want, or at the very least, it belongs on your shortlist of options to consider.
The only potential downside is that over the course of the very long life of the chair, your tastes and preferences may change so that by the time it reaches the end of its useful life, you may not be as in love with it as you were on the day you placed the order.
That’s not something you have to think or worry about where most other office chairs are concerned, but it could be an issue here.
Even so, we absolutely recommend this model. We love it, and we think you will too.
Other Options To Consider
If you’ve read to the end of this review and you’ve decided that this model just isn’t for you, here are a couple of other options you may want to consider:
Provisionally recommended for users weighing up to 340 pounds—if you can afford the chair and are looking for a chair with (potentially) lots of high-tech gizmos and options attached.
This chair has quite a lot in common with the model we just talked about but offers a different suite of adjustment options. While its appearance isn’t as striking as the model we just reviewed, it’s certainly not an ugly piece of office furniture and is a capable, highly adjustable office chair in its own right.
In addition to that, the X-Chair offers options you won’t find on any other office chair on the market today, including heat, cooling, and even a massage function.
Recommended For: Users weighing up to 300 pounds who need a chair designed for heavy daily use.
If you’re like most people, you may have never even heard of SIDIZ. They actually have a huge presence in the office furniture market and are one of the largest players in the industry from South Korea, but most of their sales are B2B. They sell to giant corporations for the most part, but they do have a web portal that individual consumers can access.
It’s well worth taking the time to do so because the T-50 is not only a highly adjustable chair but also a sharp-looking and well-built model to boot. If you want a Run II but can’t afford one, this is a viable alternative that won’t set you back as much money. While the warranty isn’t as impressive, it’s still quite good, and this chair is loaded with value.
References and Resources:
- Via Seating, Official Brand Website.
- 9 Ergonomic Tips for Synchronizing Your Work Station and Office Chair, Spine Health.
- Development of Ergonomic Backrest for Office Chairs, Research Gate.
- Office Chair Backrest Height Affects Physiological Responses to Sitting, Taylor and Francis Online.