How COVID-19 Reshaped the Office Furniture Industry Overnight

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How COVID-19 Reshaped the Office Furniture Industry Overnight

As impending coronavirus lockdown orders dominated the news on February 18th, 2020, the bloodbath on Wall Street began. The traditional commercial office furniture manufacturing sector was one of the worst hit, and still slowest to recover, after shutting down factories, cutting salaries, and laying off thousands of workers.To get more news about Home furniture manufacturer, you can visit beour.com official website.

Stock values for these companies have been hammered as badly as the airlines, and far worse than the averages for the respective stock exchanges they belong to. Those with strong enough balance sheets will either weather the storm until things return back to “normal,” (whatever that’s going to be) while others will attempt to adapt to unprecedented tectonic shifts in their businesses.

One trend that is clear, is that sales of office furniture through their traditional “contract dealers” channel, which was already in slow decline well before the pandemic, has even more rapidly shifted towards direct-to-consumer (DTC) channels—a.k.a. e-commerce.

Many of the middle-market companies without the resources to acquire offsetting businesses or the ability to pivot quickly to e-commerce on their own are considering whether to fire sale their businesses or liquidate them, as many companies in the sector are reporting new orders down 35 -50 percent and struggling with negative cash flow. Even some publicly-traded manufacturers, like Inscape Corporation (INQ:TO), have been dealt a body blow after several years of decline before COVID-19 hit, with their stock trading well below a dollar now.

Let’s face it: Few organizations are currently thinking about major office expansion or remodeling projects; employers’ immediate focus is on getting all of their home-bound office workers as productive as possible, as quickly and inexpensively as possible. Most OEM manufacturers we spoke with in late Q4, 2020 have indicated that they have no major “project” orders in the pipeline for large enterprise expansion or remodeling projects in 2021; all have been shifted out to 2022 despite good news on the emergency vaccine approvals that came last week.
Many employers immediately started offering $200 – $2,000 expense reimbursements for any new equipment their workers will need to buy in order to become as productive working from home as they were in the office. The average reported stipend for home office upgrading appears to be around $1,000.

Employers are increasingly becoming cognizant of the fact that workers can’t be left to work from home on lousy, non-ergonomic desk setups for a year or more, as documented in this University of Cincinnati Ergonomics Department study of 843 staffers who were all ordered home back in the spring of 2020.

As a consequence, standing desk sales are brisker than ever — online. The thing is that few of these desks are being purchased from the traditional contract furniture manufacturers and dealers who likely outfitted the desk they used to sit at in the office.

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