How are Canadian contract furniture manufacturers coping with the pandemic? Better than expected. From May to July, they were shut down as “non-essential services” by the Ontario government’s Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act; the government offered compensatory aid. Since then, they’ve found imaginative ways to turn the massive economic disruption to advantage, even having fun along the way.
We interviewed the presidents of three Toronto-area firms: ergoCentric’s Terry Cassaday, Nienkamper’s Klaus Nienkamper and Teknion’s David Feldberg, asking the following questions:
>How has the pandemic effected your business overall?
>What part of your product range has been hit hardest?
>Have you introduced new product directly inspired by the pandemic?
>Have you adapted existing product to pandemic conditions, and if so, how?
>Have some niches you serve shrunk while others expanded, because of the pandemic?
>Are collaborative benching furniture systems dead for now because they’re premised on seating workers close together?
>Do you find that the US has become more protectionist and “Buy America” oriented. Is opening a factory in the US key to overcoming that?
>Are you battening down the hatches and pausing product development?
>One of the biggest casualties of the pandemic is international travel. Does this affect your supply chain? Have you had to reinvent it to rely more on domestic subcontractors and less on slow boats from Asia?
ergoCentric
Pandemic pain barely registers at ergoCentric, a manufacturer of ergonomic task chairs, factory and healthcare seating and height-adjustable desks. “We wear masks, we haven’t yet had a case of Covid-19, touch wood,” says Terry Cassaday, head and founder of his privately held company of about 175 employees.
Two months ago, he opened a second Toronto store and showroom at upscale Yorkdale Shopping Centre, among the most successful shopping centres in the world, with annual sales per square foot exceeding $2,000. [SOURCE: Oxford Properties’ website]
Still, ergoCentric’s sales are down nine percent from 2019. “We’ve weathered the storm pretty well, but I’ve never had more uncertainty in my life as to what next year may look like,”
“When the pandemic hit, I realized how well-positioned we were. The situation was almost made for us because we do a mass-customization manufacturing process; we fit customers with an ergonomically correct chair, one at a time if we have to.
“We offered all our major customers a work-from-home program; this was our main pivot.”
He pursued companies who were willing to buy their employees a chair for their home office. “It’s the same body at home as in the office. They need the same chair.”
Some orders came from the usual facility manager channel, others came from employees themselves, in onesies and twosies. “Large orders have pretty well stopped. Our overall revenue is down, but the number of orders is up by 25 percent. We’re selling about the same number as before, but now it’s one at a time. It was a logistics exercise to figure out how to do that milk run every day. Delivering a chair to a home is not easy, normally. But now, people are always home. So that reduced the risk there. And, at the beginning of the pandemic, there wasn’t much highway traffic. It was easier than we had thought.”
While task chairs are moving out the factory door more quickly than ever, “What’s not selling anymore is guest and conference and boardroom seating. All that just stopped.”
One unexpectedly bright spot for ergoCentric is healtHcentric, the firm’s healthcare-furniture arm, which Cassady started after pondering the lessons of the 2003 SARS pandemic.
Ever wonder why waiting-room chairs in clinics and emergency rooms often look grungy? With the rise in infection-control standards, the seating gets cleaned more often, with harsher disinfectants. Cleaning staff, evidently, don’t wipe chairs completely dry after each cleaning. This allows the harsh chemicals to pool on the seats, degrade the vinyl coating and ultimately crack the vinyl.
The process triggers a vicious cycle. “You can’t clean seats that are cracked,” he says. “Hospitals now have an absolutely bizarre, uncleanable situation caused by the need for more cleaning. The seating doesn’t last anywhere near as long as expected and there’s no budget to buy new seating.”
To the rescue comes IC+™ Upholstery Solution, seven years and two patents in the making. The proprietary spray-on treatment for ergoCentric’s healthcare fabrics creates a durable, cleanable and impermeable medical-grade surface.
“It’s the only thing that holds up in these environments,” he says. “We’re breaking through because the need is very acute. Hospitals are searching for infection-control solutions. This product was practically made for the pandemic.”
He has no direct knowledge of an increase in American protectionism. “If someone really wants to ‘Buy America,’ we may not ever hear from them. Our sales into the US are down, but the whole market is down.” In any case, ergoCentric’s recently opened warehouse and assembly plant in St. Louis, MO ensures entrée into the American market.
Product development is “full steam ahead,” including a new chair for nursing stations and hospitals by Miles Keller of Toronto industrial design firm Dystil.
As a company with a supply chain based in North America, ergoCentric didn’t suffer from the slowdown in boats from China. “We started pulling back from Asia quite a few years ago, mostly for quality reasons, but also because we ship within two weeks as part of our business model.
Peering into the crystal ball, he declares, “Companies will have difficulty hiring people if they’re inflexible and say, ‘You have to come here five days a week, nine to five.’ They won’t get away with that anymore. This is fundamental change.”
Nienkamper
“Our staff are very disciplined with respect to Covid-19 procedures,” says Klaus Nienkämper, founder and CEO of Nienkämper. “They wear masks, we take their temperature before entering the building etc.”
“Buy America” has never affected Nienkämper, and its 130 employees,” says Mr. Nienkämper. “Day-to-day business is down somewhat, but our projects are as strong as ever, particularly in law office. We have several in New York and Philadelphia with completion deadlines by the end of the year. The outer office has changed, but the lawyer’s private office, when you close the door, hasn’t.”
Law firms are a steady market niche for Nienkämper because wood executive furniture confers status and Nienkamper is one of the few remaining upmarket office-furniture makers building in wood. Indeed, their wood presses are so busy that the company will buy more in the new year.
Not surprisingly, the pandemic has seen a surge in sales of video-conferencing furniture, such as the Metronome table by Toronto’s Fig40. “The IT people are much more demanding in what they want in those tables, such as enormous troughs for wires. I always say to designers, ‘Just make sure that the IT people don’t start designing our furniture.’”
Nienkämper’s brand-new Hex series of hexagonal workstations with glass panels, is “a direct answer to the current problem,” Mr. Nienkamper says, “though its good looks will ensure that it has ‘legs’.”
An intriguing Nienkämper product designed especially for the Covid-era workplace has a tail-wagging-the-dog back story. Longtime collaborator Charles Godbout of Montreal-based Topo Design had created a successful product, the Nomad screen, which, with its table-height slot, resembles an elongated, squared-off letter “c”. Mr. Nienkämper asked Godbout to design a companion Nomad collaborative benching worktable to exploit the social-distancing aspect of the screen.
Still, Mr. Nienkämper doesn’t want to bet the farm on new product aimed at assuaging Covid-19 fears. “Clients say that by the middle of 2021, nobody will want to hear about Covid-19 anymore. They said, ‘Don’t spend a lot of time designing furniture to address this thing that’s going away.’”
Nienkämper manufactures its products in-house and has been largely untouched by the slowdown in global travel. “It’s only affected our personal travel. We can’t visit our showrooms and jobs we’re doing in the States because every time you come back you have to quarantine for 14 days and who can afford that? Perhaps I could return as the trucker’s assistant,” he says with his familiar booming bass-baritone laugh.
Teknion
While preparing a presentation to an investment firm whose executives played in a band, David Feldberg, CEO of office-furniture giant Teknion, and his team decided to include social-distancing floor decals with musical references. Their decals’ lyrics presaged stern Covid-era warnings, such as “American woman, stay away from me” (the Guess Who), “Don’t stand so, don’t stand so close to me” (the Police), “Dancing with myself” (Billy Idol) and “Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged” (the Beatles). “The client loved it,” Mr. Feldberg says.
As its pandemic war-effort contribution, Teknion reconfigured a seating plant to cut and sew isolation gowns—400,000 and counting—for healthcare workers.
How has the pandemic affected Teknion’s business overall? “It could have been a lot worse,” he says. “We’ve seen a decline in our business generally, in line with the overall industry. The latest BIFMA figure is 18 percent down through September. Unfortunately, we had to right-size a little, but not significantly. Like every company, you have to adjust.
“The good news is that there’s a lot of activity in the market. Some of the projects we were working on were cancelled or delayed, but new projects continue to move forward. We’re cautiously optimistic.
“At the beginning, everyone was thinking, how do we retrofit our existing spaces to provide a safer and healthier environment? We’ve been very busy with screen partitions. The demand for glass architectural walls has been tremendous; they’re a nice way to divide space in an office while allowing light through, and they’re cleanable. We did our fair share of that product and developed different types and sizes of screens that could adapt to various workplaces. There was probably a run on Plexiglas and washable surfaces around the world.
“We’ve developed various spines that work to both create space and provide power to the workspace.”
“We’re a vertically integrated company, which comes in handy at this time. We manufacture the vast majority of what we sell. The expertise and ownership of that capability allows us to be very flexible. We call it Creative Collaboration, where, even in regular times, we work with our clients to create different takes on existing products. In some cases, we’ll create something entirely new.
“It’ll take time to adjust because it’s been such a lengthy and surreal experience. Once the vaccine gets to the general population, I think there’ll be changes going forward. Work from home will continue to exist in some fashion along with flexible work. With proper safeguards, workstations will still be important as an efficient way to divide space.”
He offers a vigorous defense of benching. “The workbench is still a pretty efficient way for people to work. There’s a future for such products with modifications—more divisions within the bench and higher screens—to make people feel safer than working at just an open bench with nothing in between. A workbench is still a good touchdown space for ad hoc meetings.
“Our Luum Textiles business has grown through the pandemic. We’ve developed high-performance vinyl fabrics such as Decoy, with great durability, cleanability and moisture-resistance for high-traffic areas.
“Studio TK, our collaborative furniture-studio division, is flat compared to 2019 sales, which makes sense. If companies aren’t redoing a whole floor of workstations, they might pick and choose some areas for collaboration and social spaces. Studio TK’s lounge offerings and single workplace elements provide some separation and isolation, making employees feel comfortable.
“Many companies were pleased that they were able to turn to work from home quickly when they had to, including our company. We developed an online store several years ago with products delivered to homes in a couple of days, and it has grown during this period. It’s available to the public as well as existing customers.
“Some of our major clients are thinking of downsizing their real estate footprint if work from home continues; I don’t think it’ll be dominant. These clients are talking about investing more in their existing space to make it more appealing, enticing, memorable and effective, to give employees a good reason to come to the office. That’s an interesting development.
“We really haven’t seen ‘Buy America.’ We have a big footprint in the US. We manufacture there; we have distribution centers, warehouses and showrooms across the country. The supply chain is integrated. A lot of the raw materials and inputs for our products come from the US.
“We have a lot of development going on. We introduced new products last September and you’ll see launches in January, May and September.
There are very good reasons, both from a business point of view and a personal and social point of view, to have an office. We’re social beings. Human nature craves social interaction, even on a personal level. My gut feeling is that people will always want to be in the workplace to feel the buzz and have spontaneous interactions and serendipitous meetings. That’s the purpose of the office. An office helps the culture of a company. It’s hard to convey that in a video call. The office is here to stay.”