The warehouse is filled with used Herman Miller Aeron chairs, Herman Miller Mirra 2 chairs, Herman Miller desks and other remnants of the commute era. “There are too many goods. We don’t have enough space in the warehouse,” says Zachary Unger enthusiastically. “At the moment we need 10 more warehouses. This is madness”.
A few weeks ago, the owners of Swivel Office Solutions, in a modest warehouse an hour east of Manhattan just past John F. Kennedy International Airport, saw what has become the norm since the pandemic: Fortune 500 companies reached out to them saying they need to clear their office space, and if Unger’s company could do it quickly and cheaply, they could get the furniture almost for free. “The office real estate market is crashing like crazy,” Zachary said. He and his family business began to focus on making the most of it, relentlessly selling refurbished old-era luxury furniture at low prices on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. Here, thousands of dollars worth of standing tables sell for $600, while thousands of dollars of Aeron and Mirra 2 chairs cost $500 or less.
Since the pandemic, Swivel Office Solutions has taken off by collecting office furniture from companies that have laid off employees and selling it on the Facebook Marketplace. (Image credit: Maxwell Strachan)
Before the pandemic, Zachary’s father, Steven Unger, made a living buying chairs, desks and cubicles and selling them to start-up businesses. Some of the most profitable companies in the world need 300, 400 or even 1000 chairs, and fast. Unger can do it.
Then the coronavirus pandemic changed everything for Ungers. Suddenly, as employees began to adjust to working from home, many businesses have good reasons to downsize their offices and little reason to expand. One company even bought millions of dollars worth of furniture and never opened. “No one opens up space anymore. Everything just shrinks,” Zachary said. At first, the transformation frightened Ungers. “It’s scary because no one else is buying,” Zachary said. “We couldn’t sell the company’s furniture.” This trend continues to this day. According to Zachary, the company has not sold 100 tables to any company in three years.
But a host of leading media, financial and technology companies are saving money by reducing office space or completely closing offices, which gives the Ungers an opportunity. Traditionally, clearing houses are not cheap, sometimes they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But many companies have valuable tables and chairs. Where there is beautiful furniture, Swivel Office Solutions is willing to step in and provide removal services for a fraction of what shipping companies charge because they are willing to take the risk of stocking the best furniture and then finding a buyer themselves. “We had to start liquidating companies instead of selling to them,” Zachary said. “We came in and said we’d do it for a quarter of the price and we could do it in a day.” let them know when the business was due to move. Unless now they say more often when a business moves out.
It turns out that Fortune 500 companies are increasingly willing to provide Ungers with hundreds of high-quality chairs and tables for free (or almost free), as long as they are willing to deal with clearing office space fast enough for the company to get them. back field. Here’s what the Ungers did, and how they ended up with more Herman Miller than they used to carry.
For example, the weekend before our meeting, Ungers was contacted by the company and told them that the office was suddenly closing and he needed to take 150 chairs out of the office “as quickly as possible,” Zachary said. Swivel Office Solutions went through quickly and took away the chairs, they are like new. “In fact, they haven’t even opened an office. They ordered a bunch of stuff and then they closed,” Zachary said.
Cellophane-wrapped chairs and tables began to pile up. Suddenly, Ungers had hundreds of used designer chairs at a time when millions of workers wanted to upgrade their living comforts cheaply. Supply chain issues also give Ungers the added benefit of having hundreds of chairs to sell at a moment’s notice. If you order 100 new chairs from one company, it can take up to a month, says Zachary: “We can have them in a truck in 10 minutes.”
It turns out that Fortune 500 companies are increasingly willing to give Swivel Office Solutions hundreds of high-quality chairs and tables for free (or almost free) if they’re willing to take care of clearing office space for that purpose fast enough. company, return the deposit. (Photo courtesy of Swivel Office Solutions)
Swivel Office Solutions is a small part of a growing market for used office space that is benefiting from services like Meta, Twitter and BuzzFeed as companies cut office space due to a string of layoffs in the tech sector and more immediate complex macroeconomic changes. flooding the market with office chairs and desks. “I’m just one of many who took advantage of this opportunity,” said another salesperson who started selling Herman Miller chairs in California due to layoffs in Silicon Valley.
This salesperson said he didn’t have time to talk after we exchanged messages on Facebook. This shows that there is a distrustful sector of the economy that mostly prefers to work in the shadows rather than posting on the Facebook Marketplace. Another New York chair salesman asked me not to name him because of his own distrust of the media, calling the negotiations between Top Firm and the shipping company “one big conspiracy.”
In all cases, the most coveted and iconic item is Herman Miller’s Aeron chair, arguably the most iconic piece of office furniture in corporate America. Since its introduction to the market in 1994, the Aeron chair has become synonymous with Silicon Valley and, more broadly, doing business, especially in the vaguely creative kinship of serving as a workwear chair. In the history of the company, Herman Miller claims that the Aeron “quickly revolutionized the office furniture industry” and sparked an “ergonomic revolution”.
As silly as it sounds, it’s hard to argue with that too. “This is by far our most popular chair,” Zachary says. By 2000, BusinessWeek named it “Design of the Decade”. The following year, Fast Company took it one step further, calling it one of the best product designs of the last 100 years, second only to cars and Harley-Davidson and ahead of the iMac, Coke bottles and Disney World. It was recently named “America’s best-selling chair” (8 million pieces or more) and has a place in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
And now they’ve flooded the market, just like they did after the last tech bubble burst when they got the moniker “Internet Throne”. Zachary began proposing to his father to build a used goods business selling chairs and tables on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, eBay and Amazon. It was a riskier proposition, and his father was very nervous. Instead of buying 100 chairs in bulk and then turning around and selling them all at once to one company as quickly as possible, Zachary suggests buying 100 chairs, sitting on them, and selling them piece by piece over the Internet.
Zachary asked his father to give him two months, he was in charge of online sales and his father was in charge of liquidation. Stephen eventually relented, and the company began refurbishing old chairs that had worn out over years of use, such as painting them with a special paint called Arm Chair Black. “When they arrive, they [sometimes] look like crap. Nobody wants to buy shit,” Zachary said. But he said that Swivel Office Solutions wouldn’t sell the chairs unless they could bring them to “perfect condition” and proudly showed me the refurbished chairs to make them look like new.
The plan started to work. People will come, sometimes with scholarships, who want to upgrade their home office. Usually they are from the city, but there are also from New Jersey, Connecticut and even Boston. Swivel Office Solutions ships discounted used Aeron chairs to Florida, Kentucky, Minnesota and Mississippi. “The whole business has changed,” Zachary said.
The lack of new offices and the associated risk of using hundreds of chairs gives Swivel Office Solutions an edge when negotiating with layoff companies. Where before you had to pay for the best furniture, now Office Swivel Solutions can often pay little or nothing. “We don’t want to spend money on furniture anymore,” Zachary said. But he quickly noticed that free isn’t really free. Ungers still spend big money paying for workers, trucks and other equipment and warehouses needed to liquidate the office, and then keep the furniture until they find a buyer online. (It’s worth noting that, according to Zachary, compartments are rarely returned to the warehouse.)
Selling chairs and tables one at a time required more work and time – Zachary lived on the phone and constantly texted potential buyers – which meant they had to get used to a huge amount of office furniture. But the math works, says Zachary, because they can sell furniture for what buyers think it’s worth, but more per chair than Ungers wholesales to companies that want wholesale prices. Take, for example, a desk that retails for $3,000. Zachary said that when wholesaled from the company’s used tables, they can cost as little as $150-$200 per table, but when sold to WFH customers, they can make a net profit of $600.
Zachary likes eBay the most – “people trust him” – while Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist can be harder to navigate. On these sites, people regularly offer him low prices or make his crew drive for hours only to be told they don’t need the chairs at all. (The company requires prepayment for shipping.) At the same time, the stakes are high for Amazon, and the chairs need to look clean.
Business is going well so far. But the problem remains. From what he’s seen, Zachary expects the decline of suburban culture to continue from here. The people he talks to often say that now that people are used to working from home, renting a lot of office space doesn’t make as much sense as it used to. “They all say that in five or six years. I don’t know if there will be more chairs because all companies will be working from home. There will be no more furniture,” he said. “If the entire office industry closed its doors and left no furniture behind, it would be a huge bust.”
Zachary remains optimistic. It’s good business, he said, because there will always be a demand for chairs. As he put it, “Everyone needs a place to sit.” But he later admitted that even he didn’t spend all his time there. Why he?
Zachary Unger remains optimistic about the office furniture business. As he put it, “Everyone needs a place to sit.”
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