The busy furniture hustlers of Silicon Valley
SAN FRANCISCO>> Brandi Susewitz touched the curved stitching on a pair of bright red Arne Jacobsen Egg Chairs and announced they were worth around $ 5,000 each. The chairs were in pristine condition, perched in the reception area of the software company Sitecore’s office in downtown San Francisco.
Trisha Murcia, Sitecore’s workplace manager, said she was most likely the only person who ever sat on them. “It’s really sad,” she said. “They opened this office in 2018 and then COVID happened.”
Murcia led Susewitz around Sitecore’s office, pointing out bar stools that had never been used, 90- inch flat screens, shiny conference room tables and accent chairs from the retailer Blu Dot. The whiteboard walls, outfitted with markers and erasers, were spotless. And rows upon rows of 30- by- 60- inch, height- adjustable Knoll desks with Herman Miller Aeron chairs sat collecting dust.
Susewitz measured and snapped photos, identifying designer brands and models. Her office furniture resale business, Reseat, would take all of it, she declared. “We can find a home for this,” she said. “We have time.”
Susewitz, who started Reseat in 2020, is one of an increasing number of behind- the- scenes specialists in the Bay Area who are carving out a piece of the great office furniture reshuffling. There are professional liquidators, Craigslist flippers and startups spouting buzzwords like “circular economy.” And a few guys with warehouses full of really nice chairs.
All of them are capitalizing on a wave of tech companies that are drastically shrinking their physical footprints in the wake of the pandemic- induced shift to remote work and the recent economic slowdown.
Nowhere is the furniture glut stronger than in San Francisco, where tech workers have been the slowest to return to the office. Commercial vacancy rates jumped to 28% last year, up from 4% in 2019, according to the real estate firm CBRE. Occupancy in San Francisco in late January was
4% below the average of the top 10 U. S. cities, according to the building security firm Kastle. And companies of all sizes, including Paypal, Block and Yelp, are giving up their expensive downtown headquarters or downsizing their office space.
Martin Pichinson, a founder of Sherwood Partners, an advisory firm that helps restructure failing startups, said he was staffing up to handle increased demand. Today’s reckoning was not as severe as that of the dot- com bust in the early 2000s, when dozens of tech companies collapsed, he said, but “everyone is acting as if businesses are falling apart.”
That’s led to a lot of expendable furniture, much of it hewing to a specific youthful aesthetic of Instagrammable bright colors and mid- century modern shapes. That look, complemented by plant walls of succulents and kombucha on tap, was a hallmark of the tech talent wars over the past two decades, telegraphing a company’s success and sophistication.
Then there are the Aeron chairs. The $ 1,805 black roller- wheel desk chairs are a closely watched barometer of tech excesses. Their sleek design makes them a work of art, according to the Museum of Modern Art. And in the tech industry, where workers are used to being pampered while chained to their desks, they are ubiquitous.
When internet companies imploded in 2000, liquidators filled their warehouses with the “dot- com thrones.” Now any whiff of empty Aerons piling up conjures memories of that slump and sets off fears that another is imminent.
The Bay Area’s Craigslist currently has gobs of the chairs for sale, photographed in warehouses, lined up in corners of conference rooms and wrapped in plastic outside a storage unit. Some are selling for as cheap as a few hundred bucks.
The listings are a reminder: Silicon Valley is a place of booms and busts, with enterprising hustlers who see nothing but opportunity, even in the rubble.
A trail of Dropbox furniture
For furniture specialists, it all starts with supplies from tech companies like Dropbox.
In 2019, the file storage company moved into its 735,000- square- foot headquarters in San Francisco. Its 15- year lease was the longest in the city’s history at the time. Dropbox’s old office was rented to other companies, and last year, a cache of furniture — futuristicchic chairs, couches and tables — from that office made its way to a liquidator.
The inventory included several emerald green velvet Jean Royere- style Polar Bear chairs that cost roughly $ 10,000 to custom make in 2016, according to their maker, Classic Design LA.
Three of those chairs sold to Tenzin Norbu, a furniture reseller in Richmond, Calif., who paid around $ 1,000 for each. Norbu, 25, started buying and selling high- end furniture on online marketplaces early in the pandemic, when people were eager to redecorate the homes they were stuck inside and stymied by supply chain delays on furniture.
Since then, his business, called Enliven, has expanded to include a van, three employees, a 4,000- square- foot warehouse and annual revenue in the mid- six figures.
The tech talent wars, with companies competing to out- perk one another with the fanciest offices, were good for designer furniture. The retreat from that battle has been just as good for resellers.
Last year, Norbu scored some lounge chairs and couches from Fast, a payments startup that collapsed in the spring. He also paid “tens of thousands,” he said, to fill a 20- foot truck with stillinthe- box furniture that Wework, whose valuation had plummeted, had kept in storage since 2019. The trove included dining chairs, lamps, couches and a chunky red Bollo armchair by Swedish designer Fogia.
On a recent tour of his warehouse, Norbu pointed out a pair of never- used felt poufs from a startup, two glass coffee tables from Delta Air Lines, some gray lounge chairs that were “probably from Google” and plants from a venture capital firm.
Norbu aims to target more tech startups as his business expands. The companies are always acquiring or shedding furniture, since they tend to grow quickly and shut down abruptly. Many of his buyers also work in tech, he said, which means they could find themselves eating dinner at the very conference table they once gathered around for meetings.
“It was a ghost town”
Susewitz, 49, has worked in office furniture since 1997, when she became a customer service representative at Lindsay- Ferrari, a Bay Area furniture dealer now known as One Workplace.
The furniture industry’s wastefulness always bugged her, she said, with companies discarding durable, commercial- grade items that were built to last decades every time they moved. Companies waited until the last minute to deal with the furniture, she said, increasing the odds it would wind up in the trash.
In the late- 1990s dotcom boom, Susewitz created
a business plan to build an online marketplace for used office furniture. She abandoned it when ebay took off, thinking the company would eventually solve the problem. “But that never happened,” she said.
Over the next two decades, she worked in sales and business development, outfitting Bay Area businesses with goods from “the big five” of workplace furniture — Steelcase, Millerknoll, Haworth, Allsteel and Teknion.
When the pandemic hit , Susewitz’s livelihood of new office furniture screeched to a halt. She watched with disgust as companies tossed out barely used desks and chairs.
“Perfectly good, brandnew furniture is just being carted off to landfills,” she said.
So she created Reseat to help businesses liquidate furniture. The company uses an inventory management system that tracks the items’ “life cycles” so it can quickly share the specifications for the furniture, making the goods easier to sell. Given enough time, sellers can expect 20 cents on the dollar for their furniture, she said. Reseat, which has 14 employees,
has worked with more than 100 companies and sold more than 8 million pounds of furniture.
“Our goal is to sell it standing,” Susewitz said. “Once it ends up in a warehouse, it loses value and ends up collecting dust.”
Susewitz was excited about the furniture at Sitecore because the company had contacted Reseat months before its move, setting up the reseller to easily find a home for its goods. At Sitecore’s office, she showed off how to identify the size of an Aeron chair. Each one has a set of plastic bumps hidden on its back. Two bumps indicate the most common size, a “B.”
There were 16 size B’s around a wooden conference table that Sitecore had built using wood from a houseboat that was in Sausalito, Calif. In the center, a basin filled with Legos was f lanked by the universal emblems of the pandemic: a bottle of Purell and a package of Clorox wipes.
Before the pandemic, Sitecore was expanding its space so rapidly that it had leased another half of a floor in its office tower. But “once the pandemic hit, it was a ghost town,” said Brad Hamilton, the company’s head of real estate and facilities.
Sitecore plans to downgrade to 30 desks from 170. “We’re paying an outrageous amount of money for a floor that nobody uses,” he said.
Toward the end of the office tour, Susewitz surveyed Sitecore’s empty kitchen area, outfitted with a Ping- Pong table, a Ms. Pac- Man machine and two curved, 6- foot privacy coves. Susewitz said she would take everything, except for the plates and silverware.
Chair influencers
One result of the furniture trading is a lot more people logging into Zoom meetings from very nice chairs — and not only in the Bay Area.
In January, Gilad Rom, a software engineer in Los Angeles, decided to upgrade his workstation at home. He searched Craigslist and found a seller with 500 Aeron chairs — apparently acquired from a Siriusxm office that had shifted to remote work — in Culver City in the Los Angeles area.
When he posted a picture of the chairs gathered in a room, their black foam arms intertwined, the reaction was explosive. Some people wanted to score their own cheap Aeron. Many more wanted to reminisce about what the empty chairs represented — corporate excess gone awry.
“I think it brought back a lot of memories,” Rom, 43, said. “Flashbacks from 2008 and 2000.”
The seller, a secondhand furniture shop called Wannasofa, was so overwhelmed with calls after Rom’s tweet that the store gave him a 25% discount. “Apparently I’m a chair influencer now,” he said.
The reaction also gave him an idea.
“Maybe I should build an app that helps people find cheap luxury furniture,” he said. “Maybe there’s something there.”