Herman Miller Aeron Chair - Size B Mineral color

Switching to working from home has caused me to not only be sitting more often, but to be sitting in my subpar desk chair. This has caused me to get lower back pain since it has no lumbar support and is not very ergonomic. In my search for a solution to the problem I have tried 3 other chairs: Steelcase Leap v2, Herman Miller Embody, Autonomous Ergochair 2. All of these chairs were OK but had major flaws in comfort for me, especially considering the first 2 are very expensive chairs. The Leap and Embody both reclined too far back which caused upper back pain. The ergochair 2 was definitely kind of cheap in construction and was only ergonomic fully upright. For me being kind of short and liking to sit upright the Aeron is the only chair that offers everything. And it is the only thing that has helped my lower back pain since lockdown.

This is the 2nd Aeron chair I bought - the first one was on its official website a few months ago and this one is from Amazon. It looked like a good deal here: the "same" configuration but can save you about $100. However when I receive the chair I noticed the difference very soon - it's the material of the base. The one purchased from the official website is made of aluminum with a matte finish, but the new one uses a plastic base with a visually similar finish so they look really alike. And this explains why the "polished aluminum" option available on the official website does not exist here. They can't polish plastic to make it look like metal while they can produce matte-finished plastic easily. So if they want to add the "polished" color option here, they will have to use real aluminum and this will cause inconsistent prices among different colors. I don't want to say it's cheating, but it's definitely misleading that it tries to tell you that you've got a good deal here without explicitly state that the "deal" is due to cheaper materials on the base. With the $100 price difference I'd rather upgrade to the aluminum, matte-finished base.

After a couple of decades of using this chair at the office, I finally bought the Aeron for my home office in Mineral. It's a lovely light gray. The chair is new, arrived in a Herman Miller box and was fully assembled. It was nice to just roll it out of the box.

Worth every penny! I played around with cheaper chairs and it would have saved me money if I had just bought this first. Glad it comes in the color other than black for my home office.

The chair was arrived in several parts. The official Herman are good to go right after you open the box. This one requires assembling! And scratches are everywhere on the metal and plastic surface.