Floyd Standing Desk Review

[Editors’ Note – This desk is no longer available from Floyd, but we will leave this review up for historical purposes and reference.]

Filling Out a Home Collection

Floyd Home is a highly curated seller of home furnishings including sofas, beds, tables, storage systems and the like, and one supposes that with the pandemic they felt the need to add a compact standing desk for that home office that so many people have transitioned to.

To be clear, Floyd is not what we think of as a true office furniture company, much less a standing desk manufacturer. They took a shortcut here, as many retailers do, to get a unique-looking standing desk product into their catalog by sourcing the lifting base from Fully, which is now owned by Floyd’s Michigan neighbor, Knoll.

The Floyd Standing Desk Lifting Base

The Jiecang base the Floyd Standing Desk utilizes is a singular, dual-stage version of Fully’s Jarvis standing desk, which is actually manufactured by Jiecang (and used by UpLift and many other competitors). Jiecang is the world’s largest manufacturer of commodity-quality standing desk lifting bases, known more for their low OEM price point than their quality or innovation.

Fully and Knoll being among Jiecang’s largest and longest-time customers, they are able to supply the base at a reasonable price to resellers like Floyd, who otherwise on their own could not likely ever meet the minimum container-load quantity order requirements to buy direct from Jiecang’s Ningbo factory.

See our separate reviews of the Jiecang base and Jarvis Standing Desk to learn about the quality/value equation on those.

The Birch Desktop

As we cover in our primer on desktop materials used to make standing desks, birch is an increasingly popular natural wood product that we’re seeing being used on standing desks (to the degree that we’re now working on a reviews round-up of all the birch standing desks on the market; subscribe to find out when it publishes.)

A lot of people like the look of the thin veneer plies that make up the birch desktop core, visible around the edges. The way that birch is turned into lumber, by gluing 1mm-thick veneers together crossgrain to build up the thickness of the wood panel, gives it excellent strength and stability (resistance to changes with temperature and humidity).

The thing to know about birch wood panels is that they come in a wide array of quality grades, the best stuff coming from the Baltic region (a vast birch forest exists along the coast of Russia and Finland that is the world’s second-largest sustainable forest), and called Baltic birch specifically.

Baltic birch has been used by European furniture makers for centuries, who covet its precision machinability, durability, value and character. Building up a piece of furniture lumber using the plywood method uses up less than half the amount of wood to make a desktop from natural hardwood (e.g. maple or walnut) for the equivalent strength and stability, so it has an environmental story as well. But as far as the top-facing veneer sheet goes, the raw slab of wood looks remarkably similar to maple yet costs about a third as much.

Floyd is opaque about a lot of things in its listing for The Standing Desk, but we’re surprised they don’t even specify whether their birch is from the Baltic region. All they say is that they use a “high-grade veneer” for the top-facing sheet of wood. A top-grade would be true-Baltic, “grade BB/B”. Anything less is likely to have unsightly “football patches” and other fixes to the veneer to remedy knots and other defects in the veneer sheets and may have voids in the core that compromise the wood’s integrity and long-term stability.

And this is likely why Floyd charges more for a natural finish birch top than they do for the “fog” desktop that has a gray laminate sheet on top and the same non-visible core underneath. Similarly, with the walnut desk, they use one sheet of walnut veneer on top of the cheaper birch plywood core (i.e. this is not a solid hardwood top like you can buy from several different standing desk makers.

The desktops all share the same 1.25″-thick core that has a knife-edge treatment on both the front and back edges. It comes in only one dimension, 26″ deep by 54″ wide, which is very limiting considering how many shapes and sizes most standing desk makers offer these days, not to mention how many different desktops types and finishes they offer.

And so that’s why we have to classify this offering as an online home furnishing retailer’s “filler” product and not a real contender in the highly competitive field of standing desk manufacturers.

Warranty and Shipping

While the retailer has a great 10-year warranty program on all their other products, they seem to have forgotten to list one for the Floyd Standing Desk, so caveat emptor. For more information on warranties, be sure to read our primer on How to Compare Warranties on Standing Desks.

Another telltale sign that this isn’t the kind of e-commerce seller we’re used to seeing in the office fitness field is that they actually have a separate charge of $99 for shipping on top of the retail price for this unexceptional desk.

The Takeaway

The Floyd Standing Desk is truly a filler product for this home furnishings retailer and doesn’t provide the range of choice in desktop sizes, finishes, materials, etc.

If you really want one-stop shopping for a bunch of home furnishings and you like Floyd’s product line look, it’s not a terrible choice if you’re looking for a nice-looking compact standing desk for your home office (though the lack of any accessory offerings like monitor arms, keyboard trays, standing mats or cable management kits makes it anything but “one-stop shopping”). Suffice to say, Floyd Home wouldn’t be the first place we’d go when so many other desk makers offer boundless choices, easier assembly, better support, including higher-quality American-made standing desks in the same price range.

We find it a bit ironic that Fully has chosen to compete directly with its own dealer by offering a plywood desktop option for their Jarvis desk, with many more sizes and finishes, and at prices starting at $599.

Check out our round-up reviews of all the top-rated standing desks, and if you’re looking specifically for a home office desk that’s less than 28″-deep check out the short list of top-rated compact standing desks.

If birch is your thing sign up for our free newsletter to be the first to know when we’ve completed our round-up of the best birch standing desks. To get a sense for what the other end of the spectrum of Baltic birch standing desks looks like check out our recent review of the new Captain’s Desk from iMovR.

Frequently Bought With Standing Desks