This desk from Costco has gone viral on TikTok and I'm not sure why

Costco desk surrounded by hearts on a light gradient background — (Image credit: Costco)

There's a mega-star growing over on TikTok right now, something that attracts hundreds of thousands of views, if not millions, for merely showing up in a video. It's not what you'd expect either; it's not even someone pulling funny faces in time to a lo-fi beat. It's a desk. A $250–$330 desk from Costco, in fact.

It's called the Tresanti 47-inch Adjustable Height Desk, which is as much of a snappy name as you'd expect for this unassuming social media star. It is, however, a desk with a few modern frills: adjustable height settings at the push of a button, wireless charging, and USB ports.

None of which really goes to explaining how this one desk has amassed millions of views on TikTok over the past few years. The Tresanti isn't alone in offering many of these features, which can be found on a vast array of desk today. That includes some which can be shipped for cheaper, though reportedly the Tresanti sells for a fair chunk of cash less than its $330 online price if available in-store.

The most popular video of the desk is from TikTok user yallabella. By far the user's most watched TikTok, their run through of the desk's features clearly struck a chord with the scrolling public; the video has been watched around 11.5 million times.

One video from earlier this year describes the desk as "the famous costco desk", and currently has over 800K views. Another video that calls it by a similar name has 1.7M views. A video from a TikTok account specialising in Costco buys has gained 2.7M views. There are many more, raking in 100,000s or millions of views.

@yallabella
♬ So Fine - Trees and Lucy

This desk's odd fame has managed to rake in more views than many avid TikTokkers combined.

There are other popular desk videos on TikTok, of course, but few singular products have seen such intense interest. If you search "Ikea desk" in TikTok you'll find some popular homebrew ideas for desk setups, but nothing quite so singularly popular as the Tresanti. Ikea does sell a similarly neat standing desk, but it is pricier than the Costco model and doesn't quite match its feature set. For that, it is receiving a colder shoulder from the social media app.

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Perhaps everyone collectively smells a bargain, but then as I noted before it's not like it's the cheapest adjustable standing desk available today. It's not a bad deal by the looks of it, but that really depends on how it stands up to repeated daily use.

If this desk's popularity means more people are switching between sitting and standing while working/studying/streaming, then that's a win. All the ergonomics experts we've spoken to recommend shaking your posture up regularly, and if you want to hear more we have a guide to how to sit at a desk with good posture that will give you a good idea of the basic principles to healthy sitting.

It is strange that a desk you might not glance twice at in the store has become something of a TikTok star. Is there some sort of dark art to success on the platform? Probably. But this doesn't appear to be some next-level play to outsmart the algorithm. There's just something about the Costco desk's design that has tremendous mass appeal, and I can't quite put my finger on it.

It could've been any number of standing desks, but oddly it's this one.

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.