One of the most profound changes to the office in recent years is the use of conference rooms and spaces. Offices aren’t just for heads-down work anymore. In fact, collaboration is the top reason employees give for wanting to return to the office.
But they don’t want to sit in the same old meeting rooms. They demand flexibility in their work and their workspaces.
Enter Ghent GRVT (pronounced like gravity), a product designed to bring the conference space to the user, not the user to the space.
It is touted as the first mobile collaboration hub combining a table, writing surface, seating and power, all in one. GRVT is designed to work indoors or out, meaning meetings can be held anywhere in the office and even outside on a patio area.
Designed by Ghent’s in-house team, there’s never been a product quite like it. Each side of the table portion of the product can fold up, creating a glassboard-like mobile writing surface. When the sides are folded down, it creates a mobile desking unit, with square block poufs that store in the center and can be used for mobile seating. The entire product is on wheels to make it easy to move where it is needed.
It’s impossible to talk about GRVT without first discussing Preserve, an outdoor furniture line launched three years ago that includes shelters and meeting space designed for collaboration beyond the four walls of the office. It was Ghent’s first foray into outdoor furniture and has become a popular product for the brand, which is part of Cincinnati-based GMi.
Kevin Johnson said to make outdoor space truly intentional as a workspace, more was needed beyond the shelter provided by Preserve.
“In order to truly activate and be intentional about using outdoor space, you have to provide tools for people to use it,” said Kevin Johnson, vice president of sales. “We have a picnic table outside, but no one’s going to really go out and use the picnic table intentionally for meeting. That was one of the reasons why we were started exploring GRVT, because some of the feedback that we got was like, ‘Man, this is great. Preserve is great, but once you put it there, it’s there. And so there’s really nothing else we can do with it.’ That got our wheels turning with GRVT.”
There are fewer and smaller conference rooms being designed for office space, so there is a need for flexible meeting products. A product like GRVT brings the conference room to the worker. Johnson said even in the company’s own plants, when people in the factory are called into a meeting in a formal conference room, it can make them uncomfortable. They aren’t used to the space and its formality. Bringing GRVT to them makes meetings much more relaxed.
GRVT also works well in offices that have untethered workspaces, said Susan Claus, director of marketing. While it works great as a mobile glassboard, it also works equally as well as a table.
“We have one person right now who’s working on GRVT because we don’t have a desk for him at the moment. So he is using that as his desk,” she said. “We also have one in our break room so we can fold it out and use it for seating. In our showroom, people were eating lunch around it. So it really is this easy to use piece of furniture that can go everywhere with a level of design that you would expect to see in the nicest office spaces.”
It is an interesting product and part of a much bigger, bolder move by GMi Companies. GMi and its brands — Ghent, Waddell and VividBoard — have supported the workplace by making glassboards and space division products, GRVT is its first true piece of furniture that it has built.
“This is us very boldly stepping into that furniture space,” said Claus. “That was the feeling that we were trying to give people when they walked in to think of Ghent as a furniture company and thinking about Ghent in terms of incorporating our products to finish your space because they can really make a lobby come alive or really make that brainstorming area come alive or even a private office come alive and really complete those spaces.”
The shift from trusted glassboard and space division company to furniture maker is not for the faint of heart. It has been a challenging story for Ghent to tell, not just for positioning in the architecture and design community, but with its own dealers and reps as well. Some want Ghent to stay in its own lane.
Johnson said it is not the company’s intention to confuse the marketplace or step on the toes of its reps.
“Our three (guiding) words are communicate, collaborate, and learn,” he said. “A comment one of our competitors made to us at NeoCon was, ‘So you guys are making tables now.’ And that’s not necessarily what we’re going for. This is a product that truly solves a problem from a communication and collaboration standpoint. It still has the glass and its writeable. It’s starting to integrate some of our electric, our batteries, which we’re starting to integrate into some of our other products. And it just so happens that we’re also going to put seating around it just because it makes sense to do that.”
GRVT is a product that gives workers a reason to come back into the office since it supports collaboration. And it is a product that is changing the marketplace for Ghent and the GMi Companies as they continue to push the envelope when it comes to collaboration tools.
