As tech companies cut costs and shift to remote work, the office furniture they left behind has become part of a booming industry.
Erin Griffith, who oversees startups and venture capital, browsed Craigslist, toured a warehouse and an empty office in San Francisco.
Brandi Zusewitz touched the curved stitching on a pair of bright red Arne Jacobsen egg chairs and claimed they cost around $5,000 each. The chairs are in perfect condition in the reception area of the software company Sitecore in downtown San Francisco.
Trisha Murcia, Sitecore’s jobs manager, said she’s probably the only one sitting on it. “It’s really sad,” she said. “They opened an office in 2018 and then Covid happened.”
Ms. Murcia guided Ms. Susevitz through the Sitecore offices, pointing out never-used bar stools, 90-inch flat screens, shiny conference room tables and specialty chairs from retailer Blu Dot. The whiteboard walls, lined with markers and erasers, were flawless. Rows of 30-by-60-inch Knoll height-adjustable tables and Herman Miller Aeron chairs collected dust.
Ms. Suzwitz measures and photographs, identifying designer brands and models. She claims her office furniture resale business, Reseat, will do it all. “We can find a home for this,” she said. “We have time.”
Ms Suzewitz, who founded Reseat in 2020, is one of a growing number of experts behind the scenes in the Bay Area who are involved in office furniture reshuffling. There are professional liquidators, Craigslist sellers, and startups touting buzzwords like “circular economy.” There are also a few people whose warehouses are filled with really good chairs.
They are all benefiting from a wave of tech companies that are drastically reducing their physical footprint following the pandemic-driven transition to remote work and the recent economic downturn.
Nowhere is there such an overabundance of furniture as in San Francisco. In the city where tech workers are the slowest to return to offices, the share of commercial vacancies jumped to 28% last year from 4% in 2019, according to real estate agency CBRE. San Francisco’s occupancy rate at the end of January was 4% below the average for the top 10 US cities, according to building security firm Kastle. Companies of all sizes, including PayPal, The Block and Yelp, are moving away from expensive downtown headquarters or downsizing office space.
In addition, the technology industry has recently moved from optimistic hypergrowth to fear and thrift. This has led to massive layoffs from tech giants like Google and Salesforce, as well as smaller companies like DoorDash and Wish, with more than 88,000 people laid off in the Bay Area last year, according to Layoffs.fyi.
Some startups have suddenly gone bankrupt, including flying car company Kittyhawk, self-driving car startup Argo AI, and interior design startup Modsy. Others cut costs by starting with designer, dusty, rarely used offices.
Last month, Twitter held a public auction for its furniture, dry-erase boards, conference tables and a three-foot bluebird statue. The social network, owned by Elon Musk, stopped paying rent for some offices for a short time.
Martin Picchinson, founder of Sherwood Partners, a consulting firm that helps restructure failed startups, said he is hiring to cope with growing demand. Today’s reckoning isn’t as severe as the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, when dozens of tech companies collapsed, but “everyone is acting like the business is falling apart,” he said.
This has resulted in a large amount of disposable furniture, much of which fits a certain youthful aesthetic of Instagram-friendly bright colors and mid-century modern shapes. Complemented by a living wall of succulents and kombucha, this exterior is a hallmark of the tech talent wars of the past two decades, a testament to the company’s success and maturity.
Then there’s the Aeron chair. The $1,805 black desk chair on wheels is a popular barometer of tech surplus. According to the Museum of Modern Art, their elegant design makes them a work of art. In the tech industry, workers accustomed to being tied to their desks to be pampered are everywhere.
When Internet companies collapsed in 2000, liquidators filled their warehouses with “Internet thrones.” Now the smell of any empty aerons piled up reminds of that recession and raises fears that another one is on the horizon.
On Craigslist in the Bay Area, there are currently many chairs for sale, photographed in warehouses, lined up in the corners of conference rooms, wrapped in plastic near the warehouses. Some sell for as little as a few hundred dollars.
These lists serve as a reminder: Silicon Valley is a boom and bust of entrepreneurial entrepreneurs who, even in the midst of ruins, see only opportunity.
In 2019, the file storage company moved to its 735,000-square-foot headquarters in San Francisco. His 15-year lease was the longest in the city’s history to that point. The old Dropbox office was leased to other companies, and last year a bunch of furniture from this office – futuristically chic chairs, sofas and tables – was given to liquidators.
The inventory includes several Jean Royer-style Polar Bear chairs in emerald green velvet, which cost about $10,000 in 2016, according to manufacturer Classic Design LA.
Three chairs were sold to Tenzin Norb, a furniture dealer in Richmond, California, for about $1,000 each. Mr Norbu, 25, began buying and selling high-end furniture on an online marketplace early in the pandemic as people rushed to renovate homes they were stuck in and held back by delays in the furniture supply chain.
Since then, his company, Enliven, has expanded to include a van, three employees, a 4,000-square-foot warehouse and six-figure annual income.
A war for technological talent, companies competing to create the most luxurious offices have set the stage for designer furniture. Retreating from this battle is equally beneficial for dealers.
Last year, Mr. Norbu bought several armchairs and sofas from Fast, a payments company that closed in the spring. He also paid “tens of thousands” of dollars to fill a 20-foot truck with furniture WeWork has been keeping in its warehouses since 2019, the value of which has plummeted, he said. Treasures include dining chairs, lamps, sofas and a massive red Bollo armchair by Swedish designer Fogia.
During a recent tour of his warehouse, Mr. Norbu pointed out a pair of never-used felt pouffes from a startup, two glass coffee tables from Delta Air Lines, a few gray sun loungers “probably Google” and a pair of slates. from a venture investment company
Mr. Norbu aims to attract more tech start-ups as the business expands. These companies are always buying or throwing away furniture because they grow quickly and suddenly collapse. Many of his customers also work in the tech industry, he says, meaning they can dine at conference tables where they once gathered for meetings.
Last year, Mr. Norbu sold Dropbox’s Polar Bear Chair to fellow furniture salesman Nate Morgan for $1,400. Mr. Morgan began trading furniture in the fall after he was fired from his business development job at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. He said he quickly discovered that there were “crazy pockets with tons of furniture” in the Bay Area.
Mr. Morgan’s company, Reclamation, recently worked with a wealthy tech entrepreneur who bought a second home in San Francisco to live in while his primary residence was being renovated. This entrepreneur has furnished his 4,000-square-foot second home with new Restoration Hardware products. Nine months later, when the entrepreneur moved into his primary residence, Mr. Morgan bought all the furniture for the second home for 10 percent of the retail price.
Morgan, 44, said the furniture business was a welcome change after 15 years in the tech industry. “It has been a real pleasure to create a local community business that is relevant to this geographic area,” he said.
Later, Mr. Morgan sold the “Polar Bear” chair that was in Dropbox at a profit to an interior designer in Los Angeles, who in turn sold it to a client in the Hollywood Hills. From the liquidator to Mr. Knob, Mr. Morgan, and the interior designer, everyone in the chain was making some money.
Dropbox declined to comment. The company moved to remote work during the pandemic and plans to sublease 80% of its headquarters. Buyers were slow; the company recently lowered its expected rates, delayed its goal of finding tenants by two years, and recorded $175 million in real estate spending in 2022.
The remaining Dropbox spaces have been converted into what the company calls “studios” rather than “offices” for meetings and “landing pads” or cafes and libraries where people can sit, chat and work for a short time. There are no more tables.
Ms Suzewitz, 49, has been in the office furniture industry since 1997, when she became a customer service representative for Lindsay-Ferrari, the Bay Area furniture retailer now known as One Workplace.
She says furniture industry waste always worries her, as companies throw away strong, durable commercial items every time they move. She said the company waited until the last minute to dispose of the furniture, increasing the likelihood of it ending up in the trash.
During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, Ms. Suzwitz developed a business plan to create an online marketplace for used office furniture. When eBay took off, she abandoned it, thinking the company would figure things out eventually. “But that never happened,” she said.
For the next two decades, she worked in sales and business development, supplying Bay Area businesses with products from the “big five” work furniture—Steelcase, MillerKnoll, Haworth, Allsteel, and Teknion.
When the pandemic hit, Ms Zusewitz’s livelihood from buying new office furniture came to an abrupt halt. She watches in disgust as the company throws away barely used tables and chairs.
So she created Reseat to help businesses eliminate furniture. The company uses an inventory management system that tracks the “life cycle” of items, so furniture specifications can be quickly exchanged, making it easier to sell items. Given enough time, sellers can expect their furniture to sell for as little as 20 cents, she said. Reseat has 14 employees, works with over 100 companies and has sold over 8 million pounds of furniture.
“Our goal is to sell it as is,” Ms. Sussewitz said. “Once it gets into the warehouse, it loses its value and starts collecting dust.”
Last December, Reseat was hired to clean more than 900 workstations, 96 office chairs, 40 desks, 24 couches and 84 filing cabinets in an office in Santa Clara, California. Semiconductor maker Analog Devices, who left, had little to no use of its space during the pandemic. But Pure Storage, the storage company that moved, didn’t want that. Reseat has only four weeks to sell products.
“It ate my heart,” Susevitz said. She added that it was “a miracle” that she found a buyer in time.
Pure Storage says it is reusing “a significant amount” of Analog Devices furniture, including tables, chairs and conference room items, but plans to install existing desks “to better accommodate Pure employees in a more open office environment.” A spokesman for Analog Devices declined to comment.
Ms. Suzwitz was thrilled with Sitecore furniture because the company contacted Reseat months before the move, which made it easy for them to find a home for their merchandise. At the Sitecore office, she shows you how to size your Aeron chair. Each has a hidden set of plastic bulges on the back. The two bulges indicate the most common “B” size.
Sixteen B sizes surround a wooden conference table that Sitecore built with lumber from a boathouse in Sausalito, California. In the center, a bowl filled with Lego bricks is surrounded by the universal symbols of the pandemic: a bottle of Purell and a pack of Clorox wipes.
Before the pandemic, Sitecore was expanding its space so rapidly that it rented another half-floor in an office building. But “as soon as the pandemic hit, it was a ghost town,” said Brad Hamilton, the company’s real estate and facilities director.
Sitecore plans to reduce the number of desktops from 170 to 30. “We pay huge amounts of money for an unused floor,” he said.
At the end of her tour of the office, Ms. Zusewitz looks around the empty Sitecore kitchen, complete with a ping-pong table, Ms. Pac-Man and two 6ft high curved covers. Ms. Zuzevitz said she would take everything except plates and silverware.
One result of the furniture deal is that more people are sitting in Zoom meetings in really nice chairs — and not just in the Bay Area.
In January, Los Angeles-based software engineer Gilad Rom decided to upgrade his home workstation. He scoured Craigslist and found a vendor in Culver City, Calif., with 500 Aeron chairs—apparently purchased from a SiriusXM office that had moved to work remotely.
When he posted a photo of chairs clustered in a room with intertwined black foam armrests, the reaction was explosive. Some people want to get their own cheap Aeron. More people want to remember what empty chairs mean – corporate frills gone wrong.
Post time: Feb-28-2023