Choosing a new leather chair for your office or study can be a real headache.  The internet and stationery warehouses are awash with seemingly amazing bargains for under £80 but you need to consider carefully what you are getting for this price.
At the other end of the scale you can spend over £800 for what is in effect still an office chair, so why does it cost so much more?

As with most things in life, you are paying for design and quality. Apart from a few well known products, you don’t pay extra for a badge like you do with cars. You really are getting a superior product. Your problem is trying to decide how much you should spend in order to achieve maximum value for money.
So how do you do this ?

The best place to start is to put a value on your back. You could spend 10 times the cost of your bargain chair in a few visits to the osteopath. And just because you aren’t suffering now, don’t think that you won’t in the future.

Nearly half of the population suffer or will suffer from back-pain, and most of this is caused by bad posture. And bad posture is mainly caused by sitting in badly designed or ill fitting chairs, which to be frank is probably what you will end up with if you spend under £100 on a leather chair.

Next you should consider how long you expect the chair to last. Most quality leather chairs improve with age and upholstery softens and moulds to you shape over time.  So 5 years (which is the usual guarantee period) should be the absolute minimum.

That’s £16 per year for something which may be damaging your back, or 30 pence a week. Can you really still justify spending so little for something which could affect your life so much.

Then you should consider the actual leather itself. Top quality leather office chairs are often upholstered to order in a top quality leather hide from Bridge of Weir or Andrew Muirhead and the like.
These hides are full thickness hides, free from blemishes and imperfections, and can be stained to any colour you wish
At the other end of the market, you get cheap meat herd hides which have been sliced through the thickness of the hide to produce 3 wafer thin sheets of leather. They are then mechanically processed to resemble hides (the central skin is stamped with a grain to look like hide)
These chairs are only available in black, as any lighter colour would show all of the imperfections in the hide.
Often the back of chair and the armrests are covered in vinyl to reduce manufacturing costs (and no, faux leather does not come from a faux deer or cow), which will not have anywhere near the durability of even cheap leather.

You then have to consider the actual chair mechanisms. The vertical adjustment is controlled by a gas ram, which on cheap chairs, will be rated to 11 or 12 stone, and to over 20 stone on quality chairs.

This does not mean that the quality chairs are only suitable for the clinically obese, but it does indicate that the chair has been designed to last.

The same applies to any of the backrest, lumbar, seat-slide or other adjustments which are common on more expensive chairs, and not seen on the budget offerings.
Once again, as people come in all shapes and sizes, would it not be wise to consider a chair which can be adjusted to suit different body shapes and weights.

These are the main considerations, but you should also think about after sales service. If a castor breaks are you going to be left with an unusable chair whilst you wait for a week or two for a spare wheel to come from China, or find out that the model you bought is discontinued, and parts are no longer available.

Most quality chairs are made by professional office furniture manufacturers who care about after-sales service and customer satisfaction.  Most cheap chairs are made by enterprises entirely driven by profit.

So before you grab that chair because its cheap, try to think about it in terms of value for money.
Remember the Russian saying, which is, “we are too poor to buy cheap”.

Or maybe you are rich enough to waste some of your money.