Reseat’s Office Furniture Rescue

That’s where Reseat comes in. In the latest episode of Deep Green, created in partnership with Reseat, host Avinash Rajagopal sits down with the company’s founder and CEO, Brandi Susewitz. Building on Susewitz’s deep knowledge of the furniture industry, Reseat is making an increasingly big impact through furniture reuse every year. Listen to learn what’s new with the Reseat platform, how the challenges and opportunities around circularity and design have changed, and why furniture is still a key lever in our transition to a circular built environment. Read an excerpt of their conversation below or listen to the full episode on the Surround Podcast Network.

Avi Rajagopal (AR): Brandi, let’s start with the basics. Can you give us a 101 on how Reseat works?

Brandi Susewitz (BS): It’s a marketplace for buying and selling second-life furniture. After the pandemic, I really saw that there was a need for a second-life office furniture marketplace. Not like the ones we’ve seen before, but something that presents itself more like a Chairish or a 1stDibs, where the images are nice. It’s not a photo of a Herman Miller chair in a warehouse with a bunch of stuff in the background that you don’t want to see, right?

So obviously, you go to the site and see that it’s a front-facing marketplace where people can buy and sell second-life furniture, add items to their cart, check out, and get delivery and installation. But really, what we’re trying to do is take it one step further. When companies started reaching out to me wanting to sell their furniture, they would ask what the process was like: “How do we sell our furniture?” and “Can you sell our furniture? We have buildings full of furniture.”

The very first question I ask when someone says they have furniture to sell is, “Well, show me what you have.” And that starts with an inventory. Literally, after we launched in 2020, I saw this become more and more of a common theme—and the biggest problem was visibility into what companies actually own.

When I would ask for an inventory, what I got back was, at best, an Excel spreadsheet with little tiny thumbnail photos and random descriptions. What I saw was that companies didn’t even know what they had, and that was kind of a big aha moment for me because I thought, “Wow, if you don’t even know what you have, and you can’t communicate what you have in a way that an architect, designer, or dealer is going to be able to take that information and plug it into another project, then we have a problem.”

So originally, we started with the marketplace, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized we really need to start thinking about things differently if we want to create a circular economy for our industry. It really starts with tracking order information from the very beginning.

So, the way we work is that we don’t work directly with end users. We really want to be a support system for dealers and architects because we know they own the customer relationships. We really just want to be an extension of the dealer so they can easily source second-life furniture that’s been vetted, but also proactively plan with their customers for ways to manage all of their assets in real time from the very beginning.

That includes the ability to do more with their inventory—not just move, donate, or sell it, but also renew it through reupholstery, refinishing, cleaning, and repairs; connect warranty information to the product; and then also to truly recycle it. We have that option.

AR: I’m struck by the reason companies never maintained that kind of inventory or tracking information about all of these things: they didn’t treat their furniture purchases as valuable.

I mean, they were spending money on it, but the mindset seems to be that you only think about furniture when you’re buying it. You’re not thinking about the end of life or second life at the time of purchase, because that’s when you want to record and track all of these things.

So, there’s also a mindset shift in terms of all these companies that, in 2020, of course, were making very big real estate decisions, moving things around, and consolidating locations and things like that. And that activity continues today. We know that offices, on average, get renovated about every three to five years, right?

So, there’s a lot of activity at most organizations with their furniture, and yet they don’t anticipate that at the time of designing their spaces or buying their furniture.

BS: Right. And also not just to have a second-life plan, but how do you manage your furniture assets so that you’re prolonging and extending their life? Because you’re right—I mean, remodels are happening every three to four years. And the average lease term is between five and seven years.

So, every time a company moves, they’re typically getting rid of all their furniture. And so furniture that’s less than 10 years old is ending up in the landfill, sadly. Because we really look at it as three really important things: visibility, number one. So now we can do that with technology.

We can take that CIF file, or any electronic file that the dealer uses to place the order with the manufacturers, capture that information, and put it into a dashboard. Then you can manage it across all your locations.

Most of the time, I find out about furniture that needs to be sold and moved out of a building only four to six weeks before it actually needs to be out. There’s no visibility, and then it becomes a fire drill—you need it out within four to six weeks.

And I think people forget that it’s not a sofa you’re trying to resell from your house. It’s a building, or sometimes multiple buildings, filled with furniture, with hundreds of the same chair.

You need visibility, you need time. So we have to think about getting into the workflow—the daily workflow of designers and architects—to make it easy for them.

If our industry comes together, we can make it easy for people. We can start to make it easy for people.

AR: Obviously we need a change in how companies that have furniture holdings and furniture assets record those assets, and make it easy for them to pull that into a database or into a platform like Reseat. We need that data, and we need partnerships with dealers and so on to make that possible.

But we also need second-life furniture to be as easily specifiable as new furniture within the software that designers use. So having second-life options available there on par with new furniture gives people an option.

I’m going to ask you to go one more step: talk to me about the logistical challenges. I often hear, when we talk about the circular economy, that time lag and coordination between first life and second life come up as challenges. How does Reseat address that? What is your vision for that?

BS: We’re in California, and we’re working a lot like new furniture dealers work when they’re selling new furniture. So, for example, when I was at the dealer in the San Francisco Bay Area, let’s just say I had a client like Oracle, and then Oracle has a New York project that we want to do.

How I could still keep that sale as the salesperson and do that project in New York is through our dealer network. So all we would do is reach out to the dealer network in New York and have them help us receive, deliver, and install.

So, we utilize those people, those dealers in those cities. And the cool thing about how we’re working with dealers is that we are now offering our technology as white label. So it would be the dealer’s fonts, their colors, their logo, and at the bottom it would say, “Powered by Reseat.”

If you’re a dealer and your client has access to the technology we’re providing, every time that client logs into their platform to move, donate, sell, renew, reorder, or repair, they’re contacting the dealer. Dealers make money on the first lifecycle sale—the new furniture, obviously—but if they put it into our platform and that client later resells it, they’re also making money on the second-life sale because we’re sharing in the profits. We call it “sticky tools.”

You want to stay sticky to your client because if you’re the only one who can tell them what they have, where it is, what it is, and give them a way to proactively manage it, then every time they want to renew, clean, repair, reupholster, sell, or donate, they’re coming back to you—and you’re going to earn money on it.

Even when you have a really cool technology, it’s the change in behavior that’s the hardest. And we do feel like we’re having more luck in Europe and the UK, and now we just launched in India—our first dealer in India.

So that’s really exciting because these people are no joke. They really care about sustainability and circularity. Not to say that the U.S. doesn’t, but it’s a different vibe.

AR: I want to talk about that in a minute, but just to reflect a little bit on what you’ve said so far. If I were to look at that module that you just laid out, but from an environmental point of view, what I love about that is we know that furniture pieces are being sold with 25-year warranties or, in some cases, 40-year warranties.

So even if you assume a 25-year warranty and an average lease length of five years, we’re talking about four to five new opportunities for us to recoup value on that single piece of furniture within its lifecycle, right? If that chair had just gone to the landfill, nobody was recouping any value from that.

Not the manufacturer who made it, not the dealers who provide that sale—nobody is recouping value. But once we set up this system, we’re creating a kind of model for various stakeholders, and I’m sure there’ll be more innovation coming from Reseat and from others, right?

That will let people recoup value, and that’s really fantastic because, on the other side, every time we reuse a piece of furniture and we don’t buy new for that project, we’re also avoiding carbon emissions. So we’re recouping monetary value and, at the same time, avoiding waste and carbon emissions—and those carbon emissions stack up pretty high, right?

So, for a standard office renovation, furniture can be up to about 50 percent of the embodied carbon on that project. And so for every office renovation, we have this opportunity to avoid carbon emissions, save money, recoup value for stakeholders, and bring a new value chain—a new economics—to the business of furniture.

And I think that’s what Reseat has unlocked for many people, and it’s really absolutely fantastic.

Let’s come back to the idea of your expansion in Europe, the UK, India, and other places. What you were talking about—how there are lots of incentives around sustainability in those areas. Let’s talk about what it has taken in order to expand your network in that way and be available in other markets as well.

BS: It’s honestly just been organically growing in that direction. So we were first contacted by a rep firm in the UK that really saw what we were doing as valuable and something they wanted to help promote because they’re seeing it from all their clients, wanting an easy way to manage their assets with the ability to keep them in a life cycle.

And then we got introduced to several of his clients, and he introduced us to India. So it’s really just kind of growing word of mouth, quite honestly. And it’s cool—it’s really cool to see.

And I’m sure there are things we still need to work on. I mean, we’ve been in business since 2020, and there have been a lot of highs and lows. There are things I look back on and wish I hadn’t done. We have to go back and change things, or we see something isn’t working the way it should.

It’s all about not giving up, as long as you’re able to pivot and work through those issues—because we’ve had many issues, trust me. But if you’re able to work through those issues and you have a smart team, because we all need to work together to actually make this happen, then there’s a lot of that too.

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Listen to “Reseat’s Office Furniture Rescue” on the Surround Podcast Network.

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