Furniture Tester

Before a chair, recliner or bed makes it to the showroom and eventually in someone’s house, it has to be tested for safety and comfort. Many companies such as Lazy Boy hire furniture testers to carry out such work.

You will be required to sit in, lay on and wiggle around in a piece of furniture and grade it according to comfort. Think about it for a moment. Your job is to find comfort in a piece of furniture. Of course you will have to do this many times over each day but such is the life of a furniture tester. Many companies hire out temporary or summer help for this type of work but it’s not a bad gig if you can get it. With all of the sitting, standing and moving around you may even burn a few calories.

There is no required training for such a position but some companies have height and weight guidelines so check them out before applying.

In addition to comfort testing there is safety testing. This is more of a laboratory research type of job and requires some laboratory experience. There are strict standards that the piece of furniture needs to meet in order for the furniture to be available for sale to the public. Some companies perform these test onsite while other businesses like Inertek are in business to do nothing but test furniture.

The next time you sit in your easy chair or recline on your sofa and think: “Boy is this comfy” - you can thank a furniture tester for doing the hard work of making sure that the comfy factor is in place before it hit the showroom.