There Is No Such Thing as "The Best Sofa"

Every once in a while, a blog or review site publishes a list of "the best sofas." Every single one of these is wrong.

And, okay, I'm going to get this out of the way right up front: We are not often included on these lists because we're a smaller, luxury manufacturer, and yes, I'm a little cranky about that. If a blog ranked us as the best sofa on the market — well, I wouldn't complain!

But composing a top ten list of something with as many variations and applications as a sofa is a silly pursuit. It's like trying to find "the best shoe." For what? Running? Ballroom dancing? Wearing to an office? For whose feet? Yours? Mine? (Oh, how I wish I could still wear Converse Chuck Taylors. Alas, I am old and so are my feet.)

Yes, you can pretty reliably come up with a list of the best vacuum cleaners for hardwood floors, or the best no-nonsense printer for light home use (the answer is the Brother HLL2460DW monochrome laser printer — if you're in the market, don't even think twice. Just buy it and I promise you will never yell at your dumb printer again).

But a sofa? What style? Who's using it? How tall are they? What color do they want? How long does it need to be?

There is no one-size-fits-all, and it's absurd to pretend otherwise.

The top ten lists for sofas that you will run across online usually fall into one of the following categories, and I find all of them to be at least somewhat deceptive.

1. The most obnoxious are those that are obviously created to game the search engine algorithm. These will live on a website that seemingly only reviews furniture, but suspiciously keeps recommending one particular (not very reputable) brand. They're pretty clearly fake, so take anything BestSofasReviews.info or the like says with a huge grain of salt.
   
   
2. You may not be aware of this, but many reputable home design magazines and blogs have, in the desperate search for revenue in this era of collapsing circulation numbers and advertising income, turned to affiliate marketing for their product reviews. That means the only products that get featured on their lists are from companies that pay the reviewer a commission for every product sold via their article. This is not very clearly disclosed, if it is at all, and the whole practice is...icky. We don't play the affiliate marketing game, so our products and probably quite a few other ones from reputable manufacturers never get featured. Not exactly fair for consumers, in my (again, extremely biased) opinion.
   
   
3. The last category is legitimate review sites. There are a few big names in this field that do, all things considered, offer valuable reviews of products. Again, this is where you turn to when trying to find a good vacuum or printer. But their review methodology tends to fall apart when assessing and ranking something more subjective like a sofa. They will employ the services of a legitimate expert on the topic — perhaps a working interior designer — to come up with a list of sofas that are "the best" for a variety of applications.
   
   The problem is that every time — and I mean every time — these lists include a mixture of genuinely high-quality products and straight-up disposable junk. Which makes me ask: Is this reviewer truly an expert? Do they not understand the wild disparity in product quality between the sofas on their list? How can you showcase one product that I would be perfectly confident in recommending to a friend right next to one that is mass-produced junk?

But all of that is just the start of the problem, because a sofa is (at least in our opinion) a highly personalized purchase. Our line is so extensive because the sofa that is right for your home may be totally inappropriate for your neighbor's. Your style is not my style. Your comfort requirements are not my comfort requirements. The way your dogs drool on fabric is not the way my dogs drool on fabric. (Okay, maybe there are some commonalities...)

In the same way that a cute dress that looks amazing on your best friend wouldn't work for you or your dream car wouldn't be right for the next person, the best sofa is going to vary from household to household. Heck, even the company you buy a sofa from will vary — I am quick to acknowledge that, while I'd love to have one of our sofas in every house in America, we're not the right fit for everyone.

And that's okay!

What isn't okay is pretending that there's a single, perfect sofa out there on the market. It simply does not exist.