If you’re looking for a high-quality office chair, and you haven’t heard of the Steelcase Leap, you haven’t done your homework. It is Steelcase’s best-known chair and their biggest sales hit. If you were to make a chart of all-time best-selling high-end chairs, the Leap would almost certainly occupy a (distant) second place after Herman Miller’s Aeron, that mainstay of Silicon Valley startups. The Leap has certainly stood the test of time, having been in production since 1999 (albeit with some changes).

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In early 2017, after spending hundreds of hours testing high-end ergonomic chairs, I found myself in a dilemma. I had narrowed down the choice to two chairs – the Leap and the Please from Steelcase – but for the life of me, couldn’t decide between them. Compared with the Leap, the Please offered the option of a usable (if awkward) headrest, but had uncomfortable armrests. The Leap’s armrests were just perfect, but the optional headrest was so bad that I would never buy it, and the backrest was excessively sticky, which meant that changing the position would sometimes take too much work. Since both chairs are thickly padded with foam, I also had a crazy idea to buy a second chair – a mesh-backed Steelcase Think – to save myself from overheating during hot Polish summers. Yeah, I know – as if one high-end chair wasn’t expensive enough…

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In my review of the Steelcase Think chair, I wrote that it is a chair that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. This goes double for the Steelcase Please, which is a model that is almost absent from online reviews, most likely because it is only available in Europe. This lack of online prominence does not mean that it doesn’t have its ardent fans. I’ve dealt with two salesmen at my local Steelcase dealer – both told me outright that they prefer the Please to all other Steelcase chairs, despite the fact that its current version turned 14 years old this year, and, in theory, should have been superseded by newer offerings like the Leap v2 and Gesture.

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After test-driving the Herman Miller Embody and the Steelcase Gesture, I felt a bit down. I had just tried out two top-of-the-line models from the two most renowned high-end chair manufacturers and neither was good enough. Would I ever find a suitable chair for myself? As it happened, my next candidate, the Steelcase Think, restored my faith in ergonomic chairs.

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