Attention, furniture dealers (and manufacturers): There’s a new underserved market niche for you to explore. In Toronto, Integral Business Interiors, a furniture dealership and workplace design firm, is a pathfinder in this new Wild West. Integral acts as a one-stop shop for startups making the transition from shared space in an incubator to their own office premises.
“We mentor them once they’ve signed the lease,” said Integral co-founder Lorne Robertsduring a recent interview. His firm offers consulting and fulfillment for a startup’s furniture and other office infrastructure needs.
“These are aspects about which most fledgling companies are babes in the woods,” said Mr. Roberts. “Their most common mistake is buying office furniture not suited to an expanding, vibrant staff with unique requirements. They need the flexibility of custom furniture to provide a fluid workspace.”
With five to 100 staff members, startups are too small, and too financially strapped, to be on the radar screen of the familiar office-furniture giants because these companies often need customized products and the requisite handholding. Yet, they require high-quality, expandable office furniture beyond the capability of IKEA.
Startups are a constant in the hothouse business atmosphere of Toronto, thanks to its status as eighth-most influential financial centre in the world (after Zurich) and second-most in North America (after New York), according to the Global Financial Centres Index.
In turn, a disproportionate number of startups are engaged in that hot buzzword du jour, fintech. Beverly Horii, Managing Director and Principal at the Toronto office of design firm Interior Architects, used the term in a 2017 officeinsight story: “It’s a hot topic. ‘Fintech’ means financial technology. It means that banks are starting to consider themselves as high-tech companies rather than banks because those are the people they need to attract. They say to themselves, ‘We’re a high-tech company that happens to be in the business of banking’ instead of ‘We’re a bank that utilizes high-tech.’ They’re after the same employee base. They have to compete in the same way as Google, Twitter or LinkedIn. They compete by designing the workplace in a way that appeals to that [Millennial, Gen Y] generation.”
Proper office furniture adds to that appeal: This is where Mr. Roberts steps into the picture. Sensing an opportunity to assist startups and acquire them as clients, he became a consultant to tech incubator OneEleven, an open-concept space in a former Royal Bank of Canada data center beside the Metro Toronto Convention Centre serving as a “scale-up innovation hub” for startups that had already raised between $1-million and $5-million.
“No other dealer in Toronto has done what we’re doing at OneEleven,” Roberts said. “We’re looking for growth potential. Even if they’re just six people, I don’t care. We’re not looking for the Fortune 500s, the [office furniture] manufacturers go direct to them.”
“Some startups are so small, they have no structure. And they’re so young – I’m dealing with folks in their late 20s and early 30s. They’re very good at what they do, but they have no experience in the world of commercial real estate and the nuances that go along with it. We know the pitfalls of this sphere; we work with general contractors, facility managers and real estate brokers. The broker, of course, wants to close the deal. But if you go in there unprepared, you will have major headaches.”
The notion of a startup succeeding in chasing the same pool of prospective recruits as the big banks and mega-firms like Google, Twitter and LinkedIn is not as quixotic as it sounds, to judge from a visit to Koho, a fintech startup based in Toronto’s Liberty Village, a district just west of the downtown where new builds mingle with old industrial lofts.
Koho partnered with a credit card (Visa) and a bank (Vancouver-based Peoples Trust Co.) to create a smartphone app that offers customers unprecedented flexibility in spending and saving their money while tracking their transactions. The app is free to users; Koho takes a cut of transaction fees merchants pay to the card company.
Koho’s success led to rapid growth. Indeed, Portag3 Ventures, a fintech-focused offshoot of holding company Power Corp. of Canada, according to a May 17 story in Financial Post, “now owns more than 50% of Koho, having invested about $44-million [U.S. $33-million].”
“We are always on the lookout for top talent in a number of fields,” said Koho Communications Strategist Tanya Black. As of this past April, according to a dailyhive.com story, Koho was looking to hire a User Success Agent, Frontend Developer, Backend Developer, Sr. Software Engineer, QA Analyst, Jr. Software Engineer, Senior Product UX Designer, IT Analyst, VP of Growth, Bilingual User Success Agent (French/English), VP of Finance, Part-Time Company Coach, and Senior Product Manager.
To lure such in-demand types, Koho offers weekly free team lunches, full health and dental benefits, equity in the company, team events, personal life and financial coaches and a darkened wellness room with yoga mats and foam rollers, in addition to a lounge-rec area with Ping-Pong and foosball tables.
Another amenity is the base building, part of a block-square former carpet-factory complex dating from 1891 that houses over 125 businesses, primarily film and video companies, post-production firms, marketing and communication agencies, software developers, and design firms, including II By IV Design (whose New York City project credits include Yankee Stadium’s Legends Suite Club, Legends Dugout Lounge and Yankee Steakhouse, and the Trump International Hotel & Tower’s public spaces).
Trendy new builds strive to emulate the look of heavy-timber post-and-beam construction with load-bearing brick walls, 14-feet-tall ceilings, tall operable arched windows punctuating the walls on either side, and timber ceiling decks and hardwood floors; Koho snared the real thing.
“When you want a space for innovation, freedom and trust, a regular-looking office with fluorescent lights [in a dropped ceiling] will not create that feeling,” saidLibi Berenson, Koho’s Director of Operations, during a recent tour of their 12,000-square-foot facility. “That’s why we took our time to find the right space.”
After spending enough time with Koho to understand their corporate culture, Roberts took his client to the Three Hshowroom, located a few blocks from Koho’s current digs.
“Three H makes a Goldilocks product that offers comparable quality and flexibility to Teknion’s,but at half the price,” Roberts said. And laminate tops are laminate tops: there are only four or five manufacturers.” (Three H’s Woodstock system, designed by former Nienkamper design chief Mark Muller, won Best of NeoCon Gold and Interior Design HiP awards last year.)
For Koho’s new space, Roberts specified 70 Three H freestanding UpSide sit-to-stand desks. Work surfaces feature a custom rounded double-arc configuration more in keeping with Koho’s free, innovative spirit than Three H’s stock hard-edged rectangular top. He also devised a custom pedestal to accommodate employee’s carry-ins, whether backpack or purse.
“We delivered the desks at night and came back the next day to assemble them,” Roberts recalled. “But when we got there, most of them had already been put in place by Koho staff. The plan called for pods of four desks facing each other, but the employees had changed that configuration for something better suited to their style of collaboration. We still had work to do, to check all the desks and make sure they were working right.”
“Our remarketing team, for example, wanted to sit together as a group and combine all their desks instead of separating into small pods,” Ms. Berenson recounted. “That’s their thing to do.”
The entire order was for identical desks, which facilitates Koho’s practice of shaking things up periodically in a way that evokes the title of actress Lilli Palmer’s 1974 memoir Change Lobsters and Dance (which in turn borrows from The Lobster Quadrillepoem in Alice In Wonderland.)
“Every few months, we ask people to change places to make sure they collaborate and get to know each other,” said Ms. Berenson. “It’s a good best practice. We appreciate the product’s flexibility.”
David Lasker is President of David Lasker Communications in Toronto and Associate Editor of Canadian Interiors. He can be reached at david@davidlaskercommunications.com.