VWINDESK Bamboo Tabletops for Standing Desks

While most people buy their standing desk as a complete system, i.e. getting the lifting base and the desktop together from the same seller, you may find yourself needing to acquire a new desktop on its own. For example, you may already own a standing desk but the top has gotten damaged, or you may want to upgrade to a different size and/or color. Whatever the reason, there are a mountain of options to choose from. Read our Guide to Buying Your DIY Standing Desktop to ensure you know what to watch for when purchasing a standalone top for your desk or table. 

In this review we explore the desktops individually sold by VWINDESK, and discuss where they may excel and where they might fall short of consumer expectations.

A Larger Tabletop Option than Many Standing Desks 

To tell the truth, there wasn’t a whole lot that our experts could find to rave about when looking at the VWINDESK standalone tabletops. The deficiencies were a bit too pronounced (see more below), but there were a couple things of note where VWINDESK stood out among most competitors.

The biggest thing we noticed was their size. While they don’t have a great many options in any aspect, they do offer their desk in a generous 80” wide model. Compared to most of the commodity standing desk manufacturers that sell on Amazon, this is a huge improvement (pun intended) for shoppers that have a lot of stuff to put on their tabletops.

While these tabletops don’t take opportunities to make a truly ergonomic desk, like an ergo-contoured edge around the entire tabletop that is comfortable for arms and wrists to lean against, they do offer a model that has rounded corners that will at least help avoid bumps and bruises from hitting a sharp corner with your hips.

Greenwashing Bamboo at a High Price

As many marketers of bamboo products do, the makers of VWINDESK don’t hold back on greenwashing. Hyping it as an environmentally sensible wood (even calling it a wood, it’s really a grass converted into wood using massive amounts of chemicals, water, and energy and wreaking all sorts of environmental havoc wherever it’s grown and produced), they also claim that it’s strong and durable—more on that later. To learn more about the truth regarding bamboo’s true environmental attributes be sure to read our highly-researched article on the “greenwashing” of bamboo products.

Scouring through verified user reviews of VWINDESK’s desks that we found on Amazon, there are a bunch of complaints about the tabletop arriving damaged, likely from a combination of the material not actually being as durable as they claim and the packaging insufficient to keep something so fragile protected from the brutal G forces that parcels endure in transit. Many manufacturers that receive these kinds of complaints are more worried about saving money by using cheap materials and cheap cardboard packaging than by ensuring a delightful customer experience. 

Having received hundreds of desktops in our labs over the years we have seen a wide range of packaging quality, and as a rule of thumb the commodity-grade (most typically Chinese) producers will not invest in costly cardboard and foam materials to properly protect a desktop in transit. They’ll just take the replacement hit as a cost of doing business, which may be fine for them economically but a hassle for the consumer (not to mention how hard it is to actually dispose of a desktop, or how costly to ship it back). 

Along the topic of quality, customers also report that there are defects in the surface that are rough to the touch. This is likely because the lacquer spray they machine-applied to the surface didn’t get fully sanded down. This is something that should be caught in quality control, but considering they don’t bother packaging the desk properly, it is unlikely that they will invest in another level to ensure customer satisfaction.

More complaints in reviews reported some desks arriving smaller than the Amazon description says. For example, a 60” desk actually measured 59.75”. While this might not matter in most cases, if you need precise measurements for your DIY standing desk project, that quarter inch could make a huge difference. In those cases, you’ll probably want to look for a tabletop elsewhere.

These desktops come pre-drilled specifically for VWINDESK bases. If users are building with a different base, they will have to drill their own pilot holes in the bamboo surface, which can be quite difficult compared to drilling into real wood. Another user commented “It looks like the pre-drilled hold is a bit too tight for the wood screw. Not easy to tighten the screws.” This is likely because a bamboo top has so much resin in it to bond the fibers that it’s super hard to get through. A self-tapping wood screw definitely wouldn’t work; a strong and sharp drill bit and a powered driver for pushing in the screws will be required.

We couldn’t find an actual website for VWINDESK products outside of Amazon, and neither could we find any mention of a warranty on their desktops. If there is no warranty, that is a huge red flag. Even if there is just a short warranty that they are too embarrassed about to list, it is scary to think of how short of a time this tabletop will actually last for users. Bamboo tops have a reputation for premature delamination, in particular these cheaply made ones from China.

Get the VWINDESK Tabletop for Your DIY Standing Desk Workspace?

Overall, the good aspect of having a large option and a rounded corner option just isn’t quite enough to outweigh all the concerns we have with the quality of VWINDESK’s tabletops and their damage-prone packaging. With quality concerns raised by multiple user reviews, a lack of warranty coverage, and bamboo that isn’t really friendly to the environment, we can’t really recommend this to shoppers assembling their own adjustable sit-stand desk.

Don’t forget to learn all you need to know about finding the perfect desktop for your standing desk workstation in our primer – DIY Standing Desk: Choosing the Right Desk Top.

If you don’t already have a base and frame, make sure you know how to choose one of those as well by reading our guide to buying standing desk bases.