“New, mint condition furniture has just been taken to landfills,” he said.
So he created Reseat to help companies sell off furniture. The company uses an inventory management system that tracks the “life cycles” of items so it can quickly share furniture specifications, making it easier to sell the products. Given enough time, sellers can expect 20 cents on the dollar for their furniture, he said. Reseat, which has 14 employees, has worked with more than 100 companies and has sold more than eight million pounds of furniture.
“Our goal is to sell it on its feet,” said Ms. Susewitz. “Once it ends up in a warehouse, it loses value and ends up collecting dust.”
In December, Reseat was hired to liquidate more than 900 workstations, 96 office chairs, 40 workbenches, 24 sofas, and 84 filing cabinets at an office in Santa Clara, California. Analog Devices, the semiconductor company that had moved in, barely used the space during the pandemic. But Pure Storage, the moving data storage company, didn’t want those parts. Reseat had just four weeks to sell the items.
“It just ate me up from the inside out,” Susewitz said. That it found buyers in time was “a miracle,” he added.
Pure Storage said it was repurposing a “substantial” amount of Analog Devices furniture, including desk chairs and conference room items, but planned to refit its existing desks “to better accommodate the way Pure employees work in a more open office environment. A representative for Analog Devices declined to comment.
Ms. Susewitz was excited about the furniture at Sitecore because the company had contacted Reseat months before her move, setting her up to easily find a home for her products. In the Sitecore office, she showed how to identify the size of an Aeron chair. Each one has a set of plastic nubs hidden on its back. Two bumps indicate the most common size, a “B”.
There were 16 B-sizes around a wooden conference table that Sitecore had built out of wood from a houseboat in Sausalito, California. In the center, a basin filled with Legos was flanked by the universal emblems of the pandemic: a bottle of Purell and a packet of Clorox wipes.