Change Making

Long before it became fashionable to identify the phenomenon of disruption, and especially before it was regarded as bold and innovative to be a disruptor, there were some significant disruptions in the office furniture and workplace industry. 

In 1992 Steelcase launched Turnstone as a distinct enterprise, a subsidiary, technically. Steelcase leadership, especially Jim Hackett, its vice president of sales at the time, identified a rapidly accelerating trend in the business marketplace. Technology companies were demonstrating a fondness for and a pursuit of speed and agility, and start-up companies were experimenting with new ways to work and wanted workplaces that matched their innovative personalities. And, on top of it all, they didn’t want to pay for expensive systems furniture.  Hackett was tapped to lead the Steelcase response to these market trends, a response which would disrupt the industry’s staid business model. 

“It really was a disruption in the model of work itself,” Hackett said. He’s now retired — from his role as the CEO of Steelcase from 1994 to 2014, from his role as interim Athletic Director at the University of Michigan from 2014 to 2016, and from his role as the CEO of Ford Motor Co. from 2017 to 2020. “Steelcase created a new portfolio of products, a new way to bring them to the marketplace, and some new pricing models. It was so disruptive, we had to have a secure entry system on our Turnstone offices because there was so much alarm among some people at what we were doing – or trying to do.” 

Turnstone aspired to sell furniture to smaller customers than Steelcase usually served, to sell it directly (and the internet was not widely implemented in those days), to keep the prices lower, to explore more agile design and manufacturing models, and to generally disrupt the way business was done in the industry. Eventually, Hackett was asked to leave Turnstone after only two years at the helm and to become the Steelcase CEO. Turnstone eventually was nested as a brand within the Steelcase portfolio of brands, and today there is scarce use of the word on the Steelcase web site. So much for that disruption. 

And Steelcase was not alone. Herman Miller, in 1996, launched a subsidiary called SQA, an acronym for Simple, Quick, Affordable. What had begun as a take-back entity for the original Action Office and evolved into a responsive producer of custom and adaptive products (Phoenix Designs), now became the foundation for Herman Miller SQA. With a separate brand and a dedicated sales force, SQA gained significant traction for Herman Miller in responding to the same market trends that Steelcase had sought to address: customers who wanted office furniture that better aligned with their business objectives. Not unlike the Turnstone trajectory, SQA would experience rapid and significant success, and it would generate a good measure of conversation in the industry about how to stay current with market conditions, about how to be innovative. Alas, however, SQA also created some alarm in some segments of the industry, and the SQA products and people were eventually absorbed by the parent brand, Herman Miller. Today, SQA is but a small notation on the Herman Miller corporate historical timeline. Disruption dismissed. 

However, the appetite for disrupting the office furniture industry, despite some of these historical experiences, remains strong.  

Attendees at Orgatec in 2010 would have seen an array of furniture that offered height adjustability, worksurfaces that enabled people to shift their posture from sitting to standing while continuing their work. Chairs were formerly one of the few mainstream products that featured adjustability, but now it was desks and tables that were height adjustable, at least in Europe. It would take manufacturers in North America a few more years to catch the wave of this new trend, and even then, only slowly. But in 2013, there began to appear multiple magazine advertisements for a product called the VariDesk. It was called a “desk converter,” a two-tiered scissor mechanism product that could be placed on a conventional worksurface and enable a user to move a computer display and a keyboard up and down offering either seated or standing work. The VariDesk originally sold direct via the internet or via telephone orders for around $300. Office furniture manufacturers were largely dismissive, but the company behind the VariDesk started to realize brisk sales, and sometimes sales to large corporations in surprisingly significant quantities. The VariDesk did not take over offices everywhere, but there are those who would suggest that this occurrence might have accelerated the integration of height-adjustability into the product portfolios of the major manufacturers. 

Today Vari, as the company is now branded, has evolved significantly. Beyond simply offering a converter product for height adjustability, the company has embraced a mission of delivering greater simplicity, speed, and flexibility to the industry, providing everything from space planning to delivery and installation support. Vari seems to straddle the delicate balance of selling directly to customers, but also in some circumstances complementing the activity of dealers and designers. It might well be construed as a continued attempt to disrupt; to do things differently. 

More recently, another effort at disruption has emerged in the posture and positioning of Branch Furniture. From his perch in the commercial real estate business, Greg Hayes, the founder of Branch, identified what he saw as the unnecessary and costly complexity and layers in the contract furniture industry. He launched Branch Furniture to disrupt that complexity, and then immediately faced his own unexpected disruption: a global pandemic. “We were going to be totally focused on a business-to-business model but had to quickly pivot to also selling directly to consumers,” noted Drew O’Brien, the leader of strategic partnerships at Branch. “People were rapidly transitioning to working from home and they needed products they could get easily, quickly, and less expensively.” 

By leveraging creative approaches to sourcing, warehousing, and agile reactions to customer needs, Branch has used their success in the B-to-C pandemic period to propel its current growth within the more traditional commercial office furniture market. They are, like others before them, aspiring to combine ease, affordability, and flexibility to disrupt the customary models for furnishing the office workplace. They appear to have disruption in their personality. 

What conclusions can be drawn from all these efforts around disruption in the office furniture industry? Were they failures? Did they, in fact, disrupt the status quo? Or were they only half-hearted efforts without the horsepower necessary to really disrupt? Hackett said that these types of initiatives provided foundational lessons. “Today we pay attention to designing for ascending technology and the speed of computational power because of what we started learning when I was at Turnstone.” 

Veterans of Herman Miller SQA would say that their efforts expanded the thinking of the parent brand about customers, products, and approaches to markets. Vari and Branch Furniture appear fully confident that their continuing efforts to create some waves of disruption will make a difference and will propel change. 

Perhaps change itself is the ultimate winner. All these disruptive initiatives (and likely many others not noted here) served to identify industry weaknesses and they instigated responses that aspired to make the industry better, stronger. For that reason, there should be a debt of gratitude paid to all those who contributed to the efforts at disruption. And also, perhaps, a more welcome embrace of the disruptions that might be on the horizon.