Nov 12, 2024 19:00:00

A business selling office furniture from collapsed startups at discount prices is booming

In recent years, many startups have gone bankrupt or cut staff due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors. In the midst of this, much of the office furniture that is no longer needed is being discarded, and according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as of 2018, 12.1 million tons of furniture were

disposed of annually. On the other hand, there are businesses that take back unwanted office furniture and sell it at a discount.

The $20 million business of gutting failed Bay Area tech companies
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/better-source-cheap-bay-area-office-furniture-19897542.php

Better Source , a used office furniture dealer founded in the early 2000s, has multiple locations in Hayward, Silicon Valley and San Mateo and has worked with companies that have cut jobs, including Pinterest, Google and Facebook, to sell their products.

According to Darryl Denny, CEO of Hayward Outlet, which operates Better Source, the idea for Better Source came to him around 2000, when startups were booming in Silicon Valley.

At the time, many companies were actively investing in hundreds of startups, but eventually they ran out of money and many of them closed down, leaving a mountain of used office furniture on the market with nowhere to go.

Seeing this as an opportunity, Denny opened Better Source, which has grown into a company worth about $20 million at the time of writing.

'I salvaged office furniture from companies like

Silicon Graphics , WebTV and Sun Microsystems when they went bankrupt in 2006, and I'll never forget finding family photos and cold coffee left behind. It was pretty creepy,' Denny said.

At Better Source, when a company closes its office, our sister company Greener Source goes in and settles the office furniture. Depending on the condition of the office furniture, Greener Source decides whether to donate it to a non-profit organization or sell it at Better Source. This is how the used office furniture is lined up in Better Source's warehouse.

Better Source sells the office furniture it has taken over at a discount, with chairs that normally sell for $1,900 (about 290,000 yen) to $3,500 (about 537,000 yen) being

sold for just $995 (about 152,000 yen) at Better Source .

According to Jose Mendoza, who has worked as a warehouse manager at Better Source for about 20 years, about 65% of the inventory was taken from closed tech companies. In particular, Better Source was booming during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many offices were closed to switch to remote work, and many remote workers bought the office furniture they had taken over.

In recent years, office furniture like privacy booths have become more popular, while older products like office partitions have become outdated. 'What will happen to these unsold products? Walking the aisles of Better Source is a sad, lonely experience, like the embodiment of many a startup's broken dreams,' said Ariana Vindman of SFGate, a foreign media outlet that interviewed Better Source.