NEW Haworth Zody Review - The ULTIMATE Standing Desk Chair transcript

this is the new Hayward Zodi it's also been called the Hayward Zodi 2 however on hayward's website they're calling this new Zody just Zody and the Zodi one the older Zody they're now calling the classic Zodi now this newer Zody here man I said Zoe so many times this newer Zody here is hands down the best chair for standing desks but to get there they did have to make a few compromises let's get honest [Music] starting from the bottom and working our way up the casters are soft casters meaning they're going to work well on carpet and hardwood floors the legs on this have a decent amount of flatness so if you're someone who likes to sit in the chair and raise their feet up there is a good amount of width on here and it's flat enough that your feet aren't just going to be slipping off the sides now in terms of material three of these chairs or at least three of the quicker ship models they're going to be metal this is the only one this is the fog color this is the only one that comes with the polished aluminum however they're going to be two models that come with plastic bases I think it's in the black and then like the grayish whitish one and those both start at Sub 900 whereas the metal ones start at about little over a thousand dollars the controls under the chair are plentiful and quite confusing I was really confused because I was reading one thing on the website but I didn't know exactly how I control it so hopefully this breakdown will help you guys out okay so let's start with the simplest on the left side here is going to be a single Tab and this is going to allow you to control the seat depth and the seat deploy plenty of a c-tap adjustment so if you have extremely long legs you're going to be able to get more support for your legs General principle is that you're supposed to be able to fit two fingers between the crook of your knee and the front edge of the chair and that's supposed to be like the ideal position on the right side is where things get a little confusing so we're going to start with the base chair so every single chair are going to have these features the first is going to be this tab is going to be your height adjustment I really love that they put it right here because I have short arms and if you're like me you don't have to like go all the way down here to lift up your height because the whole point of height adjustment is to align yourself with your monitor right and your PC so then you want to have your eyes at the top of the monitor well if it's down here every single time it's always guesswork but because it's so close I can keep my torso pretty much the level that I would have it when I use a computer and just be able to make fine tune adjustments just like that so love it love it having it here now the knob and the back tab those are going to come on a base model chair the one in the front is the perch mode which isn't a optional upgrade but let's start with this rolly thing here or this knob here that's going to be the obvious one it controls how easy or difficult it is to tilt back in your chair what I love about these higher end chairs is that it only takes about 10 turns for you to get from totally stiff to tally back very very easy to do really nicely really nicely adjustable now this back tab here this is going to control your back stop but this is pretty confusing okay so when you're all the way up it's going to be totally unlocked and you do get a ton of lean back in this chair a ton of like you get a huge degree in which you can lean back in this chair I just wish that they would have a headrest or something so you can take advantage of being able to lean back this far unfortunately I don't see a chair or an option anytime soon with a headrest okay now the confusing part becomes that when you push this tab down it locks the chair in place but on their website it clearly states that there are multiple levels of lock but you're kind of like how well instead of doing the guesswork like I did the way you do it is that you lean back to a position that you'd want to be able to get to or you want to lock it at so let's say I want to lock it back here then you push this all the way down and when you now lean back it's going to stop you in about that position it it's not the most intuitive thing coming to this front tab here this is your perch mode and this is what makes this chair an excellent chair for standing desks and I'm going to kind of try to demonstrate this here for you my desk area is really really messy I'll do some b-roll over there but please forgive me for that but this perch mode what it does and this is a little confusing when I activate this perch mode here you have to you have to tilt it forward and when you lean back in the chair you're going to hear something kind of unlock and then when you go forward you're going to be able to go forward in your chair now this forward tilt is something that you see in the Hayward Fern and a lot of the Herman Miller chairs and the reason for this is because when your feet are planted into the ground like this when your chair tilts forward like this when your feet are planted it allows you to have actually better posture when you're sitting in your chair compared to just like standard sitting in a chair because you can slouch really easily but when your feet are planted that you're more compelled to keep your back straight now what's unique about this chair about the Zodi compared to the fern and any other Herman Miller chair here is that not only does the chair tilt forward but then this seat goes a little forward as well and that little tilt actually makes all the difference in the world especially as you go higher up because here you can see that I have very short legs but when I'm sitting in the chair so when I tilt forward it's like this but then the chair continues to tilt forward this means that when I'm standing at my desk like this and then I go ahead and sit down in this chair I can still sit at the crook at the tip of my chair and still be in a relatively similar position I can probably actually go a little higher here and take advantage of that so you can see here I'm on my standing desk watch my hand level and then I go down into the chair and I'm still able to sit and stand at the exact same level and this is what makes this chair an excellent hybrid for standing desks but this little tilt board feature comes with some compromises primarily this okay and by the way if you want to re-lock this you have to lift that tab back then lean all the way back in the chair hear that click and then you'll be at Center Station again or you'll be level again in but the reason why I say it comes to compromises is because you know that extra seat forward Tilt at the end that makes all the difference well that happens in the chair whether you have that unlocked or not watch this watch the amount of play there is in this chair oh so let me lock the back so you guys can see it so all chairs have a little bit of play in the back every single chair even the highest end chairs I get I hear complaints about this all the time it's just the nature of chairs I don't know exactly why here is me at normal and then you can actually feel a forward bump so there's actually a good amount of play on the forward and back of this chair and it has to do with the fact that this chair can tilt forward and I know not a lot of people are going to love that I will say that when you're sitting in a chair primarily you're not really tilting forward so you may not feel it as much and it may not bother you as much but just wanted to give you guys a heads up the seat on the Zody is pretty wide and it's got a good amount of depth it's soft on all sides making it good for people who like to be ergonomic Rebels and kind of sit in their chair leg over leg or leg tucked under leg so nothing there's no hard Parts there how however I will say that this cushion in this chair is probably a medium firm firmness now it's not medium firm as in like you're hitting a brick wall it's more like a memory foam that's really really dense that's what it feels like when you sit on this you're going to be kind of sitting on top of it but there is give it's just going to take a little while for that give to kind of sink in now this is a complaint that I don't think I've ever made about any other chair especially a high-end chair but the stitching on this chair looks awful like man the stitching here I don't know it just doesn't look super duper appealing the colors on these new zodies are insane they look great but unfortunately the stitching isn't great the fabric material is quite scratchy it's this is the highest end one on their pre-built ones this is a 1400 chair and I was expecting better but this fabric is quite scratchy one thing I noticed is that because the seat is so dense when you go to sit in it and then adjust the seat depth out you actually feel the Gap significantly on your butt I think it's got something to do with the fact that if it was a much plushier cushion you'd be lower in the chair and then your butt would be hitting kind of the more curved part of the back so you don't feel it as much but on this because you're sitting on top of it you do feel a gap and so if you are someone who's I'm gonna say five foot eleven with particularly long legs this may be one that you just want to avoid altogether the arms on this chair are great they have a good amount of cushion it's not super duper plush but it feels really supportive and then one of the best things that I love about these arms is that they don't have a ton of give at the top that you they do rattle just a tiny bit but one of the things I love about it is it's not that easy to just hit and kind of move around this happens on the fern this happens on all the steel case chairs these arms are going to stay in place the way you have them so that if you come and you actually hit it it's not going to change positions on you which apparently is a complaint that a lot of you guys have about those chairs so with this one it takes quite a bit of force to move it front and back in and out and then it swivels and this swivel especially is one that's quite difficult to do now it can feel like it's going to break but trust me it's not and if it does you've got a 12-year warranty and that's part of the reason why you buy an expensive chair like this this is the mesh back Zody and this thing feels freaking super comfortable but it has two big flaws all right so what I like about it is that when you sit in the chair and you're just sitting man the flexing of the back and the the mesh is like at the perfect tension and bounciness that it's just oh man it feels really good on your back but there are two flaws one is that compared to every other high-end ergonomic chair that I've tested this one must have the worst range of motion I've ever tested so Watch What Happens I'm gonna move my arms back and here I can barely so my chest open would be like here this would be my having my chest open but when I sit back in the chair you can see that actually my shoulders are being pushed forward because I'm just not my arms are crashing into the frame and if you're wearing short sleeves here yes this is scratchy back here so that is a big loss for the Zody especially if you like having your chest wide open open while sitting in your chair the second flaw of the zody's back is that I know that people have written in the comments that they get mad when a chair don't doesn't allow them to sit in like a perfect 90 degree so like this is me sitting perfectly straight like my back and everything is just perfectly straight I I don't like this position but it's too much tension in my shoulders but watch what happens this is me perfectly 90. look how far and this chair is locked right now so everything is locked watch how far the default position is in this chair that's how much further I can go back in the default position and for some people I know that's going to be a deal breaker I'll do it one more time just so you can see it's perfectly 90. that is a huge distance from perfectly upright now for me personally whenever I sit in the chair I do like to relax it so that I sit in a more natural position so that I'm not putting tension on my shoulders when I sit so for me this works but I know that doesn't work for all of you so just want to give you guys a heads up on that the the one kind of fix that you can have especially for people with taller torsos because I've noticed that if you have a taller torso what's going to happen is not only will you go back in the chair but then your shoulders because your back is taller or your back will just kind of lean back and at this point if you're sitting like this in the chair look at my arms man this is mad uncomfortable who types like this like your arms are kind of forcing their way out here so one kind of fix that you can make is by getting the optional upgradable Lumbar and you can raise it all the way up and by doing that now what happens is when I sit in a chair it that lumbar prevents my shoulders from slouching back too so now not only am I back in the chair but then that actually pushes my up like the top part a little bit bit forward or it supports it a little bit more forward so that now my arms aren't shooting out from back here but now I'm kind of sitting in a more natural position so that's one of the positions you can have for your lumbar the downside is is that maybe you want your lumbar lower right maybe you want it lower on your back maybe you don't want it all the way up there so if that's the case yeah it gets a little tricky there now when we talk about the lumbar support this thing is a giant piece of plastic now I will say to hayward's credit uh when I was wearing a t-shirt because I tested this for quite some time when I was wearing a t-shirt this thing didn't dig into my back so it is a piece of plastic but it's not something that's going to be stabbing you unlike some other cheaper plastic lumbar supports that we've seen but this you can't feel it and what you can do is you can adjust it up and down and then you've got this tab here and if you roll it up towards your back it's going to give you a little extra oomph it's not crazy it's just a little extra and again when I'm wearing a thick sweater like this I barely feel it but when I was wearing a t-shirt I could feel that extra oomph now one of the cool things about this is that let's say you decide you want more support on your right side versus your left side well these handles act individually now they can't act individually and up and down but they can't act individually and how much oomph they give you so for example with this right one I'm going to go ahead and make it give me more oomph but on the left one I'm going to keep it down here so it's not as much and then I can also do it the other way around so that only my left side is getting that extra oomph I don't know exactly when you'd use this I'd love to know down in the comments below if that's something that you would use like subscribe and leave a comment down below until next time stay honest foreign