iMovR ZipDesk Standing Desk Review

An American-Made Motorized Standing Desk in a Box

This year has been filled with changes, but one of the most fundamental has been with how we work. More than ever before, the workforce has been pushed into the home. That means reconsidering how we approach our jobs, encapsulating everything from our schedules and practices, to our PCs, peripherals, and the very desks we’re working on.

That last point brings us to the subject of today’s review: the iMovR ZipDesk. Dubbed iMovR’s “desk-in-a-box” this standing desk comes 95% pre-assembled, making the remaining assembly fast and easy. What’s more, it’s one of the only standing desks on the market that’s made to be disassembled and rebuilt, which means it can follow you back to the office or campus. At $679 for the 24×47” version and $799 for the 30×53”, these unique benefits don’t come cheap — is the added flexibility and features of this standing desk worth the cost of entry? Let’s take a close look and find out.

The ZipDesk

The first thing to know about the ZipDesk is that it may just be the only desk of its kind. Sure, it’s a standing desk, and we’ve seen an increasing amount of options in that field over the years. With that, it carries the same health and workplace flexibility benefits that all standings desks do — it’s a good idea to mix sitting and standing if you work at a computer all day. Your body will thank you for the investment. But the ZipDesk sets itself apart in a number of ways that truly make it one of the most versatile I’ve encountered.

First a quick look at key features:

• Arrives in one box and sets up in under 8 minutes, no toolbox required
• State-of-the-art, dual-stage, dual-motor electric lift with 265 lb lift capacity
• Fully-programmable digital controller with LCD readout and three height favorites
• Advanced anti-collision and tilt-over detection
• American-made quality, with 10-year “top-to-bottom” warranty
• ANSI/BIFMA X5.5-2014 Certified for incomparable durability and reliability
• ANSI/BIFMA G1-2013 Ergonomic Guidelines compliant
• 100-Day Satisfaction Guarantee

The core takeaways here: setup is incredibly easy and fast. More on that soon. Second, it’s quiet and capable of lifting a ton of weight. It’s hard to imagine a situation where you would be loading more than a 265 lb payload, so your quad-monitor, dual-system full tower PC setup should be absolutely no problem for the motors built into the legs. Third, it’s safe. Anti-collision and anti-tilt detection are important features, especially if you’re working from home where kids might be present. Fourth, it’s ANSI/BIFMA certified, which means taking it should meet the safety and reliability requirements for most workplaces — take your desk back to the office when you go. And last, that 100-Day satisfaction guarantee means you can return it if you decide it’s not for you. Good stuff, all around.

With that out of the way, let’s get on to the biggest reason you would likely consider this desk over the competition: assembly and teardown.

Assembly

Everything for the ZipDesk arrives in a single box and is extremely well packaged. That might not seem remarkable, but if you’ve never bought a standing desk before, it is, since usually the legs and other components come in a separate parcel from the table top itself. Usually, that’s no big deal, but this style of packaging allows iMovR to ship these desks more quickly to customers (and will eventually allow it to be sold on Amazon). And, of course, there are the times when it can be a big deal, like when the second package gets lost or separated during shipping which is what happened to me last month with another standing desk I was reviewing.

iMovR has also done a great job of making sure everything arrives safe and sound. Everything is in its own protective box and comes together to form a kind of shield for the tabletop surface underneath. The tabletop is also well protected beyond on its own, but small elements like the corner reinforcements and plastic binding to keep the two halves of the box together in transit do a great job of warding off dings and damage from careless couriers. That same desk — which was several hundred dollars more expensive than the ZipDesk — was bound by tape and needed to be replaced because it arrived with major drop damage to two corners. When the second desk arrived, I found it propped against my house with the tabletop touching my driveway because the tape had broken and allowed the box to separate. The desk also had damage, albeit to a lesser degree. Coming from that experience, and half a dozen other standing desk unboxings, the ZipDesk is a pleasant experience and feels prepared with care.

As side note: you’ll want to keep this packaging because the desk is made to be torn down and re-boxed. Getting everything re-packaged exactly as it was shipped was surprisingly easy (sans plastic straps) and only took about 10 minutes.

iMovR wasn’t kidding about just how fast it is to assemble. Even taking pictures to document the process, I was able to build the desk within 25 minutes. Had I just set about building, I’m sure it would have been inside of ten. This is because the frame on the underside of the desk comes pre-attached and the leg assembly uses a novel, tool-free design that takes seconds to secure. iMovR provides everything you’ll need in the box, as well as detailed instructions, but believe me when I say that you don’t need to be handy to put it all together. In fact, there’s a grand total of 12 screws that need to be tightened, eight of which are for attaching the feet to the legs and two more for attaching the control pad.

The other two screws act as safeguards for iMovR’s proprietary leg-lock system. After setting the legs into place, you insert an angled lever through two ports on either side of the frame. Pressing the lever backward locks the leg into place. Those screws then thread into the frame just above to make sure they don’t come loose in normal use.

This system is outstanding on multiple levels. First of all, it dramatically cuts the build time of the desk. Attaching the legs takes less than a minute each. It’s also incredibly easy: set the leg into the brack, slot the lever and press, then thread the screw. No finagling with allen wrenches to tighten screws hidden in the frame like the legs of my last desk. Third, since this system doesn’t require screwing into the table top, it also means it can be disassembled just as easily and then rebuilt again without needing to drill new pilot holes. It’s fairly ingenious.

From there, it’s as simple as pressing the control box into the plastic bracket, plugging in the legs and control pad and tidying your cables. Flip the desk and it’s done.

The Power of Disassembly

Being able to disassemble a desk should be a given but it isn’t. The simple fact is that most standing desks are made to be built one time and placed where you would like them. You can disassemble them and rebuild them — at least some — I’ve done it several times. But, ask anyone who has tried and they’ll tell you that it’s a royal pain the kind of which you don’t want to repeat.

You might assume tearing down a standing desk is just the reverse of assembly like I did, but depending on how it was built in the first place, things might not be so simple. Some desks use retention brackets for the legs which can bend and then not lock again properly. Even without, you’ll often be forced to shift the frame and drill fresh pilot holes to ensure it’s secure, which then shifts the balance of the desk itself. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and that won’t be the case, but it’s not something I would consider easy in my experience. If you do have to re-drill every time, you have an extremely limited window of rebuilds before the desktop will need to be replaced.

Given the times we’re living in, and the cost of a piece of furniture like this, it’s not unreasonable to want to continue using the desk when your work or school environment changes. Even outside of these times, if you’re a student living on campus, this is a desk that could be reboxed and loaded in the back of your parents van to use over break.

That mobility comes at a cost, but if you find yourself needing to move, this is definitely a major benefit of the ZipDesk I haven’t seen anywhere else.

The Standing Desk Life with the ZipDesk (Impressions)

With the desk built, I positioned it in my temporary home office (AKA, my kids’ playroom), and set up my work laptop. The first thing I noticed is that the desk surface is very nice and seemed very resilient to scratches. I was able to use it with my computer mouse without a mouse pad, even when gaming, with no tracking problems. The edges are also contoured, so when I lean against it, there’s no hard edge driving into my side. It’s also very solid and doesn’t have any worrying flex or undue wobble.

The sit-stand motion is excellent. The motors are very quiet and move smooth enough not to disturb a full glass of water on my desk. The amount of lateral wobble in a standing position is also minimal, even when under a heavy load. I would have no concerns whatsoever putting an expensive tower on top and extending it to its highest height. The safety features are also a major highlight with kids running, as the any kind of resistance will cause the motors to pause and raise several inches.

I also really like that the controller has three built in memory settings for quick sit/stand positioning. One important thing to note is that the kit actually comes with a bluetooth transceiver to integrate with an upcoming app. The app isn’t quite finished, but is planned for near future. When it arrives, I’ve been told it will have similar features to iMovR’s flagship, including height control and memory presets. Health reminders will come in a future version, as well as bringing a number of other products under control of the app.

I’m a teacher by trade and this year I’ve been assigned an all-virtual elementary class in a whole new classroom, without my previous standing desk. Before this year, my day was filled with movement, and the adjustment to sitting all day has been challenging. By the end of the second week, my colleagues and I were each feeling the strain in our necks and backs and finding that each of us had less energy throughout the day. Ironically, sitting all day seemed to sap my energy, so when I would get home I was even less motivated to move than I was at the start of my day. As luck would have it, just after receiving this desk, our district closed down until the new year, so I’m using it at home until I can take it in, but I’ve already seen the benefits.

By this point, we all know the benefits of adding standing to our workday. You burn extra calories, practice better posture, and reduce your risk of repetitive stress injuries. At the same time, standing has a tendency to wake you up and increase blood flow, which is great for productivity. Perhaps most importantly, it breaks the patterns that can lead to life threatening injuries like Deep Vein Thrombosis.

That last one was my driving force for investing into standing desks in the first place (horror stories of people who sat too much literally dropping dead) but after working with one for so long, and then being forced to go without it, I can tell acutely how important it’s become to my day. When I feel like I’ve been sitting for too long, I simply press “3” and can shift to standing without missing a beat. This is also great if I need to move around the room, like when I’m testing a piece of gear and bouncing back to my computer to take notes for my review work. The versatility of a standing desk is nothing short of freeing once you get in the habit of utilizing it.

The only downside is that the color selection is currently limited to white or black. iMovR plans to expand this in the future, however, and has some interesting plans for desk customization it’s not prepared to discuss publicly yet. Typically, I would take this with a grain of salt, but the company is one of the very few in the U.S. that actually owns its own production line and is uniquely positioned to update its offerings throughout production.

Conclusion

At $679 to start, the iMovR ZipDesk is expensive, but the features it brings just can’t be found anywhere else. This was easily the fastest and easiest to assemble standing desk I’ve ever encountered. Getting it built should be no problem, even if you’ve never assembled a piece of furniture before. On top of that, being able to tear it down and re-build it in another location is an absolutely killer feature you just don’t see anywhere else and one that could save you buying a whole separate desk at the end of semester or WFH season. In virtually every way, the iMovR ZipDesk is impressive and feels well worth the investment.