Office chairs: The “center of gravity” of quality must be stable
According to estimates, an office worker spends at least 60,000 hours in an office chair during his career, and IT engineers can even spend more than 80,000 hours sitting in an office chair. It can be said that the quality of office chairs is directly related to the safety and health of every user.
In recent years, due to the rapid economic development, the domestic furniture market has expanded rapidly, and the demand for multi-functional office chairs has increased most significantly. With the increase in consumer demand, China's attention to the quality of office furniture has risen from the level of environmental protection and basic safety to the level of quality and safety grade assessment. Quality and safety levels have become another important factor that consumers pay attention to after price, appearance, and environmental protection.
Experts predict that under the background of strong market demand for office furniture, the office chair market has a promising future. The development trend of office chairs will also develop in a direction that meets different usage scenarios, usage habits, consumption concepts, and special needs. In the future, office chairs with unique design and craftsmanship, green environmental protection, and intelligent manufacturing will continue to emerge.
The largest industrial scale in the world:
China is the world's largest furniture producer and exporter and the world's largest exporter of office chairs. One out of every three office chairs in the world is manufactured in China. In 2020, affected by the COVID-19 epidemic, China's office chair production declined, but it still remained at more than 280 million units.
It is reported that China currently has three major office chair production bases in Zhejiang, Guangdong and Hebei. Zhejiang and Guangdong mainly produce leather and wooden office chairs, while Hebei mainly produces steel office chairs. There are a large number of companies in China's office chair industry, mainly small, medium and micro enterprises. The number of leading companies is scarce, and the homogeneity of industry products is serious, and industry competition is fierce.
Compared with the world's largest production scale, the brand cultivation of China's office chairs seems a bit "lagging behind". The vast majority of office chair companies only focus on production and manufacturing and do not pay attention to brand promotion. This is also related to the practice of office chairs being sold in conjunction with the entire workstation system or conference table.
At present, China's office chair industry has gradually realized the problem of lack of brands and has begun to promote quality improvement and brand cultivation. Anji, Zhejiang, China's largest office chair production base, has more than 700 manufacturing companies. With the development and upgrading of the industry, Anji has proposed new ideas for the development of the chair industry: developing in the direction of industrial integration, specialization of labor, high-quality products, and green sustainability. The profit model has changed from the traditional large-scale OEM production method to independent research and development and brand promotion. Transformation, the way of industrial organization has changed from "supply chain integration of manufacturing links" to "integration of overall industry chain and value chain". In 2021, the Anji County Market Supervision Department launched a quality management system certification and improvement action for small and micro enterprises in the chair industry. The purpose is to create a number of successful cases, improve the quality level of small and micro enterprises, and promote the overall quality improvement and brand improvement of the Anji chair industry.
Shunde, Guangdong, another major production area, has set the direction of industrial development as cultivating quality professionals and creating industry benchmarks. The local market supervision department organized a team of experts from the Guangdong Institute of Quality Inspection to station at office chair manufacturing companies, and carried out office chair product quality inspections focusing on key raw material characteristics, product quality characteristics, process control, quality problem analysis and control, standard application, etc. for furniture product quality. Practical on-site teaching, planting quality cultural soil, helping enterprises improve their quality management level, and guiding enterprises to implement their main responsibility for product quality.
The quality of office swivel chairs needs to be improved:
Judging from the supervision and spot checks at all levels of office chairs in recent years, the quality of this product is still unstable. From 2018 to 2021, the State Administration for Market Regulation has carried out national supervision and spot inspections on office chair products for four consecutive years. The unqualified discovery rates were 23.26%, 5%, 23.3% and 14.9% respectively. Stability has become the main unqualified item detected. In terms of product types, office swivel chairs account for the vast majority.
According to reports, the office swivel chair consists of multiple parts such as chair back, seat, armrests, lifting device, rotating shaft and casters. This kind of chair is becoming more and more popular in offices and homes because its seat surface can rotate horizontally and can be adjusted up and down. It is flexible and has become more and more popular in offices and homes. Among them, the pneumatic swivel chair uses a gas spring, which is commonly known as a pneumatic rod to achieve lifting. The function, technology is relatively mature, and the cost is low, so the market share of pneumatic swivel chairs is relatively the highest.
According to Chang Jin, director of the Furniture Inspection Office of the National Furniture and Indoor Environmental Quality Inspection Center, if the safety of the air pressure rod of a pneumatic swivel chair fails, it will not only affect the service life of the chair, but may even cause an "office chair explosion." In recent years, reports about pressure chair explosions have often appeared in the newspapers.
According to industry insiders, the quality of air pressure rods on the market currently varies. A good air pressure rod costs up to about 40 yuan, while a cheap one can be bought for only a few yuan. Inferior pneumatic rods have problems in terms of tube wall thickness and filling gas. If the wall of the pneumatic rod is too thin, the inert gas is impure, and some even use compressed air to pretend to be inert gas, it may cause the swivel chair to explode.
The stability item is an important indicator to evaluate whether the office chair design is reasonable. According to Zhang Lei, a senior engineer at the Furniture Wood Inspection Office of the Shanghai Quality Inspection Institute, the "Office Furniture and Office Chair Standards" stipulate that 600 N is loaded on the seat surface, which is equivalent to a weight of 60 kilograms. There should be no tipping after the test. Products with unqualified stability may tip over, causing the user to fall, and in severe cases may cause serious personal injury.
According to reports, the direct reason for the unqualified stability of office chairs is that the product design and center of gravity are unreasonable. The manufacturer did not fully understand the standards when designing the product, and did not send samples of new products to professional institutions for testing in a timely manner. These are all reasons for the unqualified stability of office chairs. It is particularly important to note that among the products with unqualified stability, the bow chair structure accounts for the majority.
The office swivel chair was found to have unqualified static load capacity of the base during supervision and spot inspections. It is understood that the five-star base is an important part of the swivel chair. It is the intermediate body that connects the casters and the support cylinder, and plays a role in carrying the weight of the human body. Engineers said that during the use of office swivel chairs, the five-star legs are subject to long-term pressure. If the static load of the base is unqualified and the quality is not up to standard, it is easy to break during use, which may cause consumers to fall and cause personal injury.
According to reports, the price of outsourced office chairs with five-star legs varies greatly, ranging from more than ten yuan to more than one hundred yuan, and the cost gap is more than 10 times. Some companies use low-quality five-star bases in order to save costs, which is one of the reasons why the office chair bases are not up to standard.
In addition to the five-star base, casters are another indispensable part of the office swivel chair. During the inspection process, inspectors will simulate consumers' daily usage habits and frequency of use, and detect the wear and tear of office chair casters on inspection platforms with and without obstacles. The unqualified caster project is also related to the use of low-priced and substandard raw materials.
In addition to the above-mentioned problems that are relatively easy to detect, some office chairs with substandard quality may also cause harm to consumers unknowingly.
According to Wu Jingxia, an engineer at the Furniture and Wood Inspection Office of the Shanghai Quality Inspection Institute, the formaldehyde concentration of office chairs should be less than or equal to 0.12 mg/square meter/hour. However, supervisory inspections found that the formaldehyde release amount of some samples reached 0.24 mg/square meter/hour.
Experts say that in the office environment, there are many types of furniture and various decorative materials. If the formaldehyde emission of a single office chair exceeds the standard, the formaldehyde emission will be higher when combined. Staying in such an environment for a long time will have a certain impact on the respiratory tract and may even cause cancer. Office chairs with excessive formaldehyde emissions may use inferior textile fabrics, adhesives, artificial panels and other materials.
It is reported that at the beginning of this year, China's first "Office Chair Quality and Safety Rating" group standard developed by the Zhejiang Light Industry Product Quality Inspection Institute was released. This standard improves and rates key quality indicators and safety indicators from four aspects: physical and chemical properties, mechanical properties, hazardous material safety performance, and spring component safety performance, and for the first time innovatively "ranks from one star to five stars" Grade" is used as the quality evaluation grade of office chairs. The development and release of this standard will further guide enterprises in high-standard production, help the formation of high-end market consumption, and promote the high-quality development of the office chair industry.
Consumption tips:
1. Look at the sitting feeling. Office chairs are usually designed and manufactured based on ergonomic design principles. Different people have different feelings about the comfort of the seat. It is recommended to experience it for yourself in terms of softness, height adjustment, seat depth, back support, etc. Make your choice later.
2. Look at the appearance and safety. If possible, you can wear white gloves and touch all accessible parts of the seat to see if the gloves are hooked or contaminated; pay attention to whether there are any nails or threads in the nail and sewing parts; some activities Components can be tested with a pen barrel as thick as a finger to see if there is a potential risk of pinching your hands.
3. Look at the stability. Consumers can adjust the seat to the maximum angle, press the edge of the seat with the palm of the hand and apply downward force. If the stability is not good, the chair will tip over.
4. Look at the intensity. You can weigh the weight when purchasing, as heavy chairs are relatively stronger; grab the top of the chair back and shake it, the connection of the chair without violent noise will be more reliable; press the chair seat surface with your legs and push the backrest with your hands, there will be no abnormal sound It indicates that the seat backboard is relatively strong; when you sit down from a certain height, the better the elasticity, the better the impact resistance; push the chair to observe the running trajectory, the straighter the trajectory, the more flexible the casters are.
5. Look at the gas spring. When purchasing, you can experience the lifting and lowering of the office chair to see if it is smooth and whether there is any lag. If there is lag, it is likely that the gas in the gas spring is impure, and long-term and frequent use may lead to the risk of explosion; observe the seat of the office chair. Whether a steel plate is installed at the connection between the bottom of the surface and the gas spring. The thickness of the steel plate is recommended to be greater than 2mm.
