Pandemic upends office furniture sales
Companies that furnish offices have been hammered by a pandemic that has kept many workers home for nine straight months.
Companies that COLUMBUS — furnish offices have been hammered by a pandemic that has kept many U.S. workers home for nine straight months. Instead of deciding whether to remodel, employers have spent the year debating whether to keep the office at all.
As a result, office furniture sales have plummeted.
This month, the nation’s largest office furniture maker, Steelcase, reported that sales dropped 31% in the past nine months and 35% in the past three months, compared with the same period last year. Herman Miller, the nation’ s furniture maker, saw sales drop 7% in the past six months and orders slip 12%.
Ohio distributors and dealers are navigating the stagnant waters in a variety of ways. They are pitching other services, tailoring their products to fit a pandemic world, and targeting a new customer: the stay-at-home worker weary of sitting on a dining chair at the kitchen table.
“We’re seeing different opportunities emerge out of this,” said Lorene Haimerl, executive vice president of sales and design at furniture dealer LOTH’s Columbus division.
One of the biggest opportunities are individual consumers, a market that most major office furniture dealers and manufacturers never targeted.
“Build your perfect home office!” advertises thewebsite of King Business Interiors of Columbus, illustrating how companies are pivoting.
Some employers, including major ones such as Google, gave workers an allowance to furnish home offices. Work-from-home consumers are looking mainly for two items, say furniture dealers: comfortable chairs and desks — especially stand-up desks.
“We’ve sold to individual customers before this, but it’s definitely more now,” said RyanHetrick, the marketing manager of Capital Choice Office Furniture.
One especially hot item has been Herman Miller’ s A er on chair, Hetrick said.
“The biggest challenge is trying to source Aeron chairs,” he said. “Those have been the ones the average customers have been asking for.”
But selling one desk and chair at a time to individual consumers can’t begin to make up for selling dozens or hundreds to corporate clients. Herman Miller, for example, saw overall sales drop 7% in the most recent quarter even though individual online consumer sales zoomed 219%.
Ohio’s largest office furniture dealer, Continental Office, has put together home-office packages for employees of Continental’s clients, but otherwise has not targeted individual consumers, said CEO Ira Sharfin.
“We’re not set up to do full-on business-to-consumer, but we’ve been selling a bunch of Aeron chairs, which is the biggest request we get, and sit-to-stand tables.”
Instead, Continental has weathered the 2020 storm by focusing on its service division, which has stayed busy rearranging some offices, and other products such as flooring, which has remained in demand as buildings started before the pandemic are completed.
“We’re definitely down, but frankly down a lot less than we could have been,” Sharfin said.
LOTH has managed in a similar way. While conventional big-office orders may be down, the company’s overall revenue is slightly up this year, in part because of its health care and education clients, Haimerl said.