Digitizing the Pre Owned Office Furniture Industry

Hello, my name is Brandi, and I have been in the office furniture industry for over twenty years. 

On March 16th, 2020, most of the United States was placed into a mandatory shelter-in-place due to Covid-19. Much like many people around the world, my husband and I were impacted financially by the shelter-in-place. Our income had been slashed by fifty percent, and my emotions hopped on quite the rollercoaster. No surprise, right? One day I would be motivated and full of hope, and the next, I couldn’t get out of bed. I was so worried that I wouldn’t have an industry to work in any longer. After all, no one was buying NEW office furniture any more and the projects that I had in my pipeline had been put on hold or vanished altogether. The hashtag “WFH” (Work From Home) was trending, and it made me think, “Am I really going to sell people home office set-ups one by one after I had just spent half my lifetime earning my living by selling millions of dollars worth of office furniture each year?” Sure, I consider going that route, but what was really concerning me was the pre-owned office furniture market. I had recently read an article where I learned that seventeen billion pounds of it gets dumped into landfills each year, and a lightbulb went off in my head because I know exactly how this happens and decided to try to do something about it. After all, I had a lot of time on my hands all of a sudden-like most people!

In my years of work in the furniture industry, I found myself alongside dozens of facility managers and project managers running into the same problem: relocating an entire office space with no set plan for the furniture that they didn't plan to bring with them. Here’s a scenario: Laura, the facilities manager at Company Co., is told by management that the company will be relocating to a new facility in nine months and won't be bringing any of their office furniture. Over the next several months, most of Laura’s time is spent planning for the new building, and the next thing she knows, she has to vacate the office space within a month and still doesn’t have a plan for the used furniture. Laura thinks about posting the furniture on Craigslist or eBay, but soon realizes it’s not the right method. She calls a used office furniture broker to “buy” the furniture, but because she waited until the last minute, there wasn’t an adequate amount of time to properly market the furniture. The broker ends up charging thousands of dollars in labor to remove the furniture from the building, and most of it ends up in a landfill since the broker can’t find a buyer either. In some cases, the broker does end up finding a buyer for the furniture and makes a huge profit on it, with this information slipping by the facilities manager. I knew early on that this system was broken. When clearing office space, clients are REACTIVE instead of PROACTIVE. They end up being at the mercy of the broker and their moving/vacate date. 

On June 12th, 2020 I woke up with all the determination I needed to create the first online marketplace and app for companies to buy and sell their pre-owned office furniture, add to cart checkout with a delivery and installation option.

Thanks to the pandemic, I actually had the time needed to invest in the preparation, research, and logistics.

Welcome to Clear Office! 

RETHINK | REDESIGN | REPURPOSE