iMovR Premium Drawer Review

Would you put a car bra on a Ferrari? Sure it might serve a purpose, but it doesn’t quite fit the aesthetic. Along the same vein, we hate seeing cheap drawers on beautiful standing desks. If you’ve spent hundreds (or thousands) on a desk, you can do better than a simplistic plastic or metal drawer. Enter the iMovR Premium Drawer.

For all the great things about switching to a standing desk, losing drawer space is a universal downside. But there are options. Be sure to check out our roundup of standing desk storage options (including add-on drawers, standing desks with built-in drawers, and file cabinets designed just for adjustable-height desks) to see why standing desks don’t usually have drawers, and to explore your options for creating useful storage on your workstation.

Using the iMovR Premium Drawer for only a few seconds, you can immediately tell it’s in a different league than the other add-on drawers we’ve reviewed, and well it should be considering its price is about twice that of the competition.

It blows the competitors away as far as color options (24+ ultra-durable 3D-laminated finishes, with another 38 exquisite solid now available in solid wood), weight capacity (50 lbs) and industry-leading warranty. It’s entirely made in the USA. It has cable pass-through holes in the back of the drawer so you can charge devices while they’re safely tucked away in the drawer. It has a detent latch for smooth closing.

The Premium Drawer feels miles ahead of other add-on drawers in sturdiness, smoothness and overall quality. Like the iMovR standing desks themselves, it is a piece of fine furniture, not just a functional drawer.

65+ Colors for the Drawer Face

With few exceptions (like bamboo drawers from Fully and UpLift) most add-on drawers are quite unattractive, and meant to be hidden from view rather than featured. The iMovR Premium Drawer aims to be more of a design enhancement to a workstation. 

The Premium Drawer comes in two different types of drawer faces. The 3D-laminate version is less expensive, ultra-durable and comes in all 24 colors that iMovR offers on their premium standing desks. The Premium Drawer also comes in 36 different solid wood finishes, to match the luxury desktop options on iMovR’s Lander Desk and Lander Lite Desk. 

This broad choice is generally enough to ensure you’ll find a perfect match for your desk color, or perfectly complementary color. While getting things all matchy-matchy is great, it isn’t the only way to go. Say you have a white desktop, you might want to go for a splash of red on the drawer front to spice up your workstation. Or say you have an iMovR Luxe Cadet desktop, you could perfectly complement it with a Luxe Sage drawer front in the same tonal range. If you want to make sure you’ll like the color match, iMovR allows you to order 4”x6” color samples of their laminate selection.

Mix-and-match is a little harder to do with wood grain tops, where black, white, or one of the grays would be a good way to go if you have a different brand of desk than an iMovR. But we love the idea of two-tone workstations and have asked iMovR to shoot a few examples in their photo studio that we could publish here in short order.

Measure, Measure, Measure

Though designed to be sold as a factory pre-installed option on their factory pre-assembled Lander desks, the drawer is also compatible with older iMovR desk models such as the Elite and UpTown (both discontinued), both of which were also sold with 30″-deep desktops and a C-frame base. The iMovR Jaxson, which also has a C-frame will work with the desk drawer if it has the select (thicker) top. Other iMovR desks like the Energize and Cascade (which use the wide-crossbar Freedom base) or ZipDesk and Lander Lite (which have T-frame bases) are not compatible with this drawer.

And that’s going to be the same rule of thumb as far as the add-on kit goes. Desktops that aren’t deep enough or bases that have T-frames instead of C-frames may not have the necessary free draft from the user edge of the desktop to the crossbars for this drawer to be installed. Fortunately, the majority of standing desks on the market are good candidates.

When it comes to installing under-desk accessories we always strongly recommend getting a tape measure and actually seeing whether they’ll fit on your specific desk before purchasing; avoid the hassle of returning the product later. There are too many desk models out there with too many different setups of crossbars, top support arms, handset mounts, power supplies, cable management kits, CPU holders, etc., etc., etc. And looking online for a good diagram of your desk’s underside, with accurate dimensions, is often futile. Just measure it.

Even if the drawer physically fits, it’s also important to see how it will change your desk space. Will it hang down too low and bump your knees? Will it affect your ability to retract or pivot your keyboard tray? Will it be in the way when you try to swivel out of your chair when seated at your sit-stand desk? Whichever drawer you install these are important issues to explore in advance of purchase.

Quality and Heft are Built-In

The Premium Drawer’s inner dimensions are 27.84” x 14.16” x 2.66” and, if you’ll allow us a quick tangent, we’ve developed a bit of a dimensional pet peeve in researching add-on drawers for our round-up. Other manufacturers, especially when the products are made in China, have a propensity to round up to the nearest hold integer, or worse, round down. Dimensions like 12” x 12” suddenly turn into 11.75” x 11.75” when you look at the specifications tab. And many of them lack drawings altogether. iMovR doesn’t play these games with the Premium Drawer, giving the exact same measurements everywhere on the product page, as well as a detailed dimensional drawing (below).

This drawer is extremely well constructed, using heavy-gauge, powder-coated American steel and really high-quality slide rails. At 16.6 lbs the drawer itself weighs more than the content weight limit of most of the standing desk drawers we’ve reviewed. So this isn’t something you’re going to want to ship back if it doesn’t fit your brand of desk. At the risk of repeating ourselves again, please do measure your desk’s undercarriage precisely before buying any accessory that might be a tight fit.

iMovR also goes the extra mile in giving thorough, clear explanations for what to measure to make sure the drawer will fit your setup. Cruise the reviews for other manufacturers’ drawers and you’ll see a litany of customers who purchased drawers that unexpectedly didn’t fit their desk.

The Premium Drawer extends back 15.08” from the front edge of your desktop and is 31.06” across. It also sticks down 3.24” from the desktop. iMovR recommends the drawer be installed on desktops at least 1” thick. Thinner desktops will need shorter screws and might not perform to the full 50-lb content capacity rating.

Installation

Installing any add-on drawer is made easier by flipping your desk over (if you don’t mind taking everything off of it) or having a helper, and this is slightly exaggerated with the Premium Drawer because of its sturdy construction and 16.6-lb weight. It’s possible for some to do it solo with the desk right-side up, but most people wouldn’t want to undertake it. Whether you flip the desk over or not, we always recommend using a drill bit with a depth-setting collar to make sure you don’t drill through your desktop and destroy it.

iMovR does make things easier by providing a template for drilling holes (you can find it here on the product page), something we haven’t seen with other add-on drawers. This simple step makes the whole process much easier and means you’re much more likely to get the drawer straight and looking exactly as you want it to.

The Takeaway

The iMovR Premium Drawer has the broadest color selection, highest construction quality, greatest weight capacity and longest warranty that we’ve seen from any standing desk drawer. It is simply the best drawer you can get for a standing desk, full stop. It all comes down to if you’re willing to pay the price for such quality.

iMovR does also offer a lower-cost, molded-plastic, Hide-Away Storage Drawer ($73), which up until now was the only storage option they offered outside of their elegant mobile file cabinets. So we’re glad to see this new drawer that enhances the look of their handsome desks rather than detracts from them.

Don’t Stop Here

Standing desk storage is an excellent place to start but it’s best to think of your ergonomic setup as a work in progress. There are always ways to improve. Check our in-depth reviews on standing desks, keyboard trays, monitor arms, ergonomic seating, cable management and standing mats.

Frequently bought with standing desk storage