Mateusz Sikora, Co-Founder of Rebench startup has talked to Property Forum about the life cycle of the office furniture, the importance of the circularity and the implementation of the ESG principles in the Polish property market.
Why is it that furniture in today's offices is often a ‘disposable’ product and often ends up in landfills when changing tenants?
Statistics from the European Union are merciless - more than 10 million tonnes of furniture end up in European landfills yearly, almost as much as is produced annually. Of course, the lion's share results from excessive consumerism and ‘fast furniture’ products. However, it can be estimated that around 20% of the waste is associated with so-called “business furniture”. Although office furniture is an essential resource for any company, linked more to a pure business need, it is now often becoming a ‘plastic bag’ in the office life cycle. And the reason is several.
Firstly, companies treat them as a one-off cost without considering their long-term value. Not surprisingly, they don't - it's hard to lease or rent such items, and few furniture solutions are designed with circularity in mind. When you add shorter lease lengths and the growing demand for flexible rental, what you have here is a conflict of needs and quite a market problem.
Secondly, there is a lack of effective systems to manage and identify furniture in office spaces - tenants often do not know exactly what furniture they have and how to manage it at the end of their lease. Every downsizing or moving keeps administration teams awake at night due to the workload, and there is often simply not enough time to wisely take care of the second life of the equipment they own.
There are not many after-sale solutions on the market - once the guarantee expires, furniture manufacturers are not responsible for the products sold. As a result, as the simplest solution, furniture is disposed of or ends up in warehouses and building basements for what is known as ‘eternal never’ - even though they could still serve other companies or employees. We still have dreams about the furniture ‘graveyard’ we found in an office building in Kraków - more than 3,000 dusty items left behind by a large tenant, at least half of which could easily be used for another 10 years.
What kind of savings for the owners of office buildings and their tenants can be achieved by introducing the principles of the circular economy into the management of office equipment?
Specific figures are hard to estimate, but one has already heard of ‘less waste’ office projects, where reusing items and purchasing second-hand items has resulted in savings of 40-50% in the furniture scope. And this seems true, as the prices of second-hand items - and equally valuable ones - on our marketplace are on average 50% cheaper than new ones.
We can give the example of one large corporate client in Poland, which was downsizing its office space. A traditional approach with disposal would have cost about 30% more and generated more than 30,000 kg more waste than the circular process carried out by Rebench. An efficient inventory in a digital tool, the transfer of some items to another client location, and a furniture resale campaign for employees via QR codes via the app reduced disposal costs and gave additional revenue for the client from sold items. Not to mention good PR.
We stand behind the sentence that the circular economy is the most beneficial system - for companies and the planet. However, there is still a long way to go, as ‘system’ is the keyword.
Rebench - what is this solution about and what audiences is it aimed at?
Rebench is a technological circular platform for managing, reselling, and purchasing corporate furniture. We combine an online marketplace with an inventory application, helping companies reduce costs and waste. We want to connect multiple players in the market, so our solution targets three main audiences.
Furniture manufacturers and dealers working with us can extend responsibility for their products with ‘circular passports’ and offer after-sales services including digital inventory for the customer.
Office tenants can effectively manage their furniture and resell it when moving. Medium and smaller companies that are often looking to save money can find cheaper, full-price premium furniture on our sales platform.
Building owners and operators of flex spaces and coworking spaces, thanks to the Rebench Inventory App, can better manage furnishings across locations and create closed circular marketplaces for their communities.
In addition, our solution is also a potential source of furnishing items for architects and interior designers, who can more easily plan office furnishings with the inclusion of second-hand furniture.
Besides buying and selling furniture, what other functionalities does your platform offer?
The basis of our business is the inventory and identification of items using QR codes - including the digitalization of office furnishing data. Without this, there is no long-term thinking and smart management of the second loop. More data, more manufacturers, more partners, and more tenants, will allow us to build a complete digital database of commercial furniture and help automate the most difficult first step - i.e. the inventory.
The app's capabilities also allow us to organize sales or furniture donation campaigns for employees or create closed circular marketplaces and campaigns for the tenant community. Our plans also include an option to donate materials to public institutions and NGO's for social causes.
For each client, we also offer benchmarking of the impact on CO2 reduction resulting from the production of new furniture when buying or selling.
In which countries of the CEE region are you present? What development plans does Rebench have for the next 12 months?
We are currently focusing on finding a product-market fit in the Polish market while expanding into further CEE countries and Germany is also in our plans.
Above all, we intend to improve the process of reselling and purchasing furniture on our platform and further automate the inventory process through the app. This will allow us to increase the number of customers, and the community around our business and stronger marketing efforts to promote items for medium and smaller businesses.
It is crucial for us to further develop our partnerships with furniture manufacturers and distributors - we believe our role starts at the very beginning of the commercial furniture sales process - the more time we have to plan for the second life of the furnishings, the greater the chance of success.
How do you assess the environmental awareness of Polish office tenants? Are they prepared to pay extra to rent a ‘green’ office? Or, however, is ESG for them a ‘necessary evil’ from which there is no turning back?
The environmental awareness of Polish office tenants is gradually growing, although it is currently being pushed mainly by legislative requirements and the ‘ESG’ already known to everyone. That's right, seemingly everyone has heard about this ESG, but from experience, we see that administration teams and business owners have a big problem with understanding these requirements and thus taking real action. The first step in ESG is data collection, which is why we have a rash of startups offering digital tools to measure environmental data - we, on the other hand, want to act on the visible problem of resource redistribution.
A ‘green’ office is made up of many amenities, including the ones that are offered by the building itself - and those biggest tenants with the deepest pockets will not so much want but need to care about sustainability, this is the new status quo of the market. In Poland, we have fantastic office buildings with an impressive number of green certificates. However, what proportion of the market is made up of these top-class spaces in the most ‘green’ buildings? For smaller companies, cost is a key factor - after all, it's a business - and for us, the word ‘sustainable’ applies to both the environmental and cost aspects.
Privately, I would say that we need to address environmental issues uncompromisingly, change our mindset, and devote all possible resources to fighting climate change and transforming the economy into a circular one. But the reality is different, the world is very complex. Companies that can balance environmental and economic objectives will have a competitive advantage in the future. And we want to help them do so by building the right technological tools and processes.
