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Covid has certainly rocked the contract interiors industry, but something that we ALL need to be thinking about regardless of how everything rebounds is sustainability. It took the downtime that Covid offered for Brandi Susewitz to do more research on the subject but when she did she was shocked.

More than 17,000,000,000 pounds of office furniture have been dumped into U.S. landfills. In fact it makes up about 25% of all materials in a landfill with another 25% consisting of construction materials. 

This is a shocking number and one that should be on the radar of every manufacturer, dealer, designer, and broker. Unfortunately however, it’s not. So Brandi set out to do something about it. 

She has created the very first online marketplace where people can buy and sell used office furniture. It’s called ClearOffice and their mission is to reduce the amount of materials going into the landfill each year. 

Other furniture manufacturers have done the same but the difference is the way office furniture is built versus big box and home furniture. Office furniture is built to last. That means that it’s much less likely to break down over time which keeps our landfills full and represents an untapped source of reusable materials. 

Listen in to learn more about how you can become a part of the sustainability conversation and why it is increasingly becoming an important topic in our industry.

In this episode:

[03:31] Welcome to the show, Brandi!

[03:46] Brandi shares her background in the industry, meeting her husband and starting their first business together.

[07:52] She noticed that the used furniture system is broken.

[08:50] Listen as Brandi discusses what happened when COVID hit and the depression she went through.

[11:20] She took the downtime to revisit her idea of repurposing used furniture that usually ended up in a landfill.

[14:12] Her new company ClearOffice is the first online marketplace where people can buy and sell their used office furniture.

[16:25] The ClearOffice site was launched on October 5, 2020, and she immediately knew that they had something special.

[17:21] Brandi discusses how both buyers and sellers can use their website.

[22:15] Ikea has launched a used furniture division of their company to be more sustainable.

[23:12] How people can use their platform to see and design their offices with used office furniture.

[27:07] Times like this is when the greatest companies are born.

[31:04] Brandi, thank you for being on the show!

Links and Resources: 

Connect with Brandi Susewitz

ClearOffice

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The Trend Report introduction music is provided by Werq by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4616-werq License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/