Recently, our coverage of the work-from-home universe expanded to include “gaming” chairs. This is because, in spite of their branding, they’re not much different from average office chairs—and in a year when remote work has become ever more commonplace, they’re sometimes a competitively priced home-office option.

But what about the inverse idea of a traditional office-chair company launching a gaming chair? That’s the idea behind Herman Miller’s latest line of Logitech-branded chairs, which caught our eye when the company reached out with a loaner chair. Herman Miller’s decades of $1,000-and-up chairs have never previously included a gaming-branded product, while Logitech, better known for peripherals like keyboards, mice, and headsets, has never produced its own chairs. We were curious what the mashup would produce.

The quick answer is simple enough: it’s an existing Herman Miller chair model with a mild aesthetic tweak. And while it’s as solid as you might expect from a $1,499 home office chair, its game-specific branding doesn’t quite add up.

Unboxing and (lack of) assembly

The best part about the Herman Miller x Logitech Embody chair is the unboxing experience—if your home is suitable for it.

When reviewing a pair of gamer chairs in October, my colleague Jim Salter received each chair as its disassembled parts, and his initial setup included two different versions of the unboxing-and-assembly process. HM, conversely, ships the Embody in a larger-than-average, 40-inch-tall box, and its unboxing process is decidedly simple: open box, pull off a single cardboard mount, and roll the chair out, already assembled.

Should your ideal office or gaming environment be easy to reach from your preferred outside door, then it’s a matter of lugging the chair (38-inches tall, 26-inches wide at its most shrunken state) inside. But if you need to move the chair through narrow doorways or over stairs—or if you ever want to ship it in a smaller box in the future—be warned that there’s no official way to neatly disassemble and reassemble the Embody. Herman Miller only offers Embody buyers a “recycling” disassembly manual, which requires, among other things, a variety of Torx bits and a hammer to tear it apart.

Adjusting for office use

Weirdly, the model I received included a “welcome” booklet printed on fancy paper stock, but that booklet included zero instructions on how to adjust the chair to my liking. Since this chair has a few unique levers and a trippy grid of bracing points on its back, I opted to search the Internet for a setup guide. When I received the chair in October, I could only find a non-Logitech manual for the older Embody model online, though Herman Miller has since uploaded a Logitech-branded manual.

Unsurprisingly, those manuals are nearly identical, pointing to the same seven points of customization. Where the Logitech manual differs is its lack of recommendations. The normal Embody manual points out ideal or proper tweaks, accounting for things like when your feet touch the ground or how your shoulders shouldn’t lift when elbows touch the arm rests. The Logitech version’s manual does not.

Everything that has proven time-tested about the Embody applies to the Logitech model. Its adjustable seat depth, in particular, is a customization godsend, ensuring that bigger and taller users can enjoy as much under-thigh leverage as they might desire. I easily found an ideal tilt adjustment, which means I can enjoy a gentle, comfortable curve of increasing resistance as I lean back.

Most of my early testing on the Embody revolved around working on Ars articles at my desk, and this was the more comfortable way to use the chair. Its arm rests fan forward in a way that promotes sitting upright and resting elbows while typing, and its back support revolves around a “flat or curved” adjustment dial. The latter essentially operates as a lumbar adjustment, but it works less as a pad to sink that portion of your lower back into and more like an active support meant to promote even posture while actively using a computer.

Quibbles with gaming use

Once I moved my attention to gaming on the Herman Miller x Logitech Embody chair, on the other hand, I ran into personal usability gripes.

My biggest is with the armrests, which are designed to guide the right hand either to a keyboard or to very mild mouse use. If I’m playing games at my desk on PC, my right hand is locked onto a mouse, but the specific shape of the Embody’s armrest is sloped and weighted in such a way that my elbow isn’t supported if I go beyond micro-movements with my mouse. I’m surprised that the Logitech version of the Embody doesn’t let users change the arm rest’s angle so that an arm’s rotation toward a mouse pad is better supported.

Worse is the armrests’ clear focus on upright mouse-and-keyboard use, which is wonderful for an average day’s duties on a computer but less so should you lean back and hold a gamepad. Doing this exposes the armrests’ shallower bases closer to the chair’s back. If I’m not sitting at Herman Miller’s preferred “upright” position while holding a gamepad, my elbows slip off. The solution has been to adjust the back-support curve in a way that leads my elbows to the armrests’ sweet spot, but even when I do that, my posture continues to degrade over time with a gamepad. This is when my forearms fall back and become my arms’ resting point, which is worse in terms of posture. A deeper position for elbows to rest comfortably would fix this and prove better for my back.

More than any of this is the sense that the Embody is designed to keep you forward-and-upright while sitting, which is arguably the right call for an hours-every-day office chair. But whenever I turned the chair away from my desk and toward my living room TV, I always felt like I was at work. There’s nothing in this chair that manages to combine best-in-class posture support with coziness. The adjustable back support either pushes firmly into your back to ensure lumbar support, or it gives way as an uncomfortable curve. And there’s no headrest that my noggin can splash back on when things go awry in a tricky, modern game like Demon’s Souls.

Aesthetics, fabric, and bottom line

In good news, the aesthetic touch-up is in line with Logitech’s more tasteful strides in recent years. You can barely tell it’s a “gaming chair” from the front, since the only indication is a “G” marker on the chair’s face. (The letter receives a different black stitching than the rest of the black chair, so it’s visible, but mild.) On the back, the Embody’s plastic back-support grid is set off with a bold teal coloration, and the black-and-teal grid will be up to personal taste. I’m personally a fan, as this shade of teal doesn’t look particularly garish or clashy, but the color makes it easier to tell that this is a plastic grid than you might notice with the same grid in black.

Otherwise, again, this is identical to the default Embody, with an apparent exception to its fabric construction. Though I do not have another Embody to compare with, I’ve seen reports about the fabric used on the Logitech model, including a mild tweak to its padding—enough so that dedicated Herman Miller users have called the Logitech update a preferable option of this model for anyone set on the Embody as a home chair option.

That’s assuming you have $1,499 to devote to a new chair, either for your home office or your favorite gaming room. And when we take a hard look at ergonomics in a chair you use frequently, the Herman Miller x Logitech Embody hits many crucial notes—adjustability on multiple axes, room to comfortably shift, and promotion of proper posture. The thing is, you can likely find those in solidly built chairs for hundreds less, whether or not they include gaming logos or branding.

I enjoyed testing this version of the Embody, as it’s a dependable chair without issues like uneven wheels, squeaky joints, or other things that are easy to take for granted. And I appreciated that it left good-enough alone instead of adding questionable updates like “racer”-minded redesigns. Still, I didn’t send the loaner back convinced that I needed to swap out my existing chairs or that Herman Miller had solved problems in the gaming-chair spectrum.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1725119