Pretty sensationalist title for used furniture arbitrage.
I was hoping for some insight on capture and disposition of IP.
I would think failing gracefully involves reaching out to competitors (and customers and suppliers) for "mergers" so investors get some of the value of the company -- without somehow signaling that you're giving up (and can no longer be relied upon). What's the state of the art in that respect? It seems like a fantastically tricky process, which would mean high value for skilled practitioners.
(OTW (ahem) valuable employee stock goes to zero.)
It’s also not really a bay era specific phenomenon here. Any reasonably sized city has a retailer that buys up used office stock for whatever reason at auction and resells it. And it’s not just “failed companies”, anytime a company upgrades its furniture it usually liquidates in a similar fashion.
I don't know, silicon valley has had some interesting things for sale.
the pictures in this article aren't particularly compelling though.
I remember in the post-internet-bubble seeing almost-new aeron chairs sold in huge quantities. Now it is less of a big deal. The aeron chairs are less iconic nowadays.
When Weird Stuff Warehouse was still around, it was like computer geology viewing the strata. You could go deeper into the store and back in time to see expensive machines of a decade ago sold for nothing. I remember thinking - that server would make a good end table conversation piece! I also remember them selling brightly colored silicon graphics workstations.
Yeah. For a company going under, probably selling off furniture piecemeal is somewhere near the bottom of their priority list. There are companies specializing in this sort of thing. Unless you're will to do this for free at a startup, that probably isn't a good priority.
Like in any other business, anywhere else, there are companies who handle liquidating their assets. They have regular auctions. I've bought a ton of great equipment for my business from them. They have an online auction, you bid and win, if you win you go (often to the failed startup itself) and pick up yoir stuff at a predetermined meeting time. They often have very weird, very specific tech startup things like biotechnology lab equipment, etc. for much discounted prices.
In 2001 (or 02?) I remember visiting a clearance warehouse like this in Ottawa during the post-dot-com-boom crash and it was where all the west-end startups and network tech companies had dumped their furniture after either going completely out of business or emergency-downsizing.
It was wild, I have a picture somewhere of a high-school-gym-sized room just filled corner-to-corner with plastic-wrapped Aeron chairs...
I am currently sitting in a dot-com crash Aeron chair that I got for a very good price 25 years ago, behind the IKEA Jerker desk I bought at the same time. They are the best purchases I have ever made.
My Aeron chair is over 15yo and still as sturdy as the day I got it. It was the first step toward correcting an ergo nightmare that contributed to terrible back pain.
Adjustable displays and an adjustable standing desk were the other two. I had a standing desk at work and spent half my day standing. I later realized that my crappy office chair at work was why I needed to stand. With the Aeron and the desk adjusted to exactly the right height, I no longer experience chronic pain and feel no need to stand.
My Aeron lasted almost 20 years. After a warranty repair I gave up. But replaced it with a new identical one (with updated back support) during COVID with company discount because couldn't really check out showroom options and it's great.
I came here to say the same thing! I purchased an Aeron 16yrs ago, from a post-bankruptcy liquidation warehouse. The chair is as nice now as it was in 2008!
Sadly I don't remember the name of the business, but I'm sure something like it exists.. A quick web search doesn't show anything obvious of that scale or type though..
I think what was so interesting about that place was the homogeneous nature of the available furniture, since "fancy office furniture for tech companies" wasn't quite a thing yet, so everything was either Herman Miller, Steelcase and maybe a few others..
Hence the room full of hundreds of exactly the same chair..
I feel like today you'd have more of a mix of stuff since so many other companies got in on the action (and uniqueness/variety is more highly valued socially).
Years ago I was hired to do IT for a company that had just massacred like half its workforce. And when I say “just” I mean most of the people I interviewed with were gone when I got there - it happened just a few weeks after I interviewed.
It was so, so surreal. For one thing they decided to consolidate on the second floor of a two story building, so to get to work each day you had to head through the dark and empty part of the building. And it was just like everyone just got up one day and left, at least for a month or two u til we could get all the equipment and stuff off the desks and into storage.
Storage was what had been the gym (or was going to be? Not clear to me), and I just remember rows and rows of tower computers and monitors awaiting a company to come and take it all off our hands.
They had also bought a ton of expensive networking gear (Cisco routers and switches) that they now no longer needed, they just sat in boxes in the server room.
Labs still entirely stocked with gear and computers, meeting rooms with whiteboards still filled with meeting notes, it was all so unreal, almost post-apocalyptic.
Regularly attended the liquidations in Sunnyvale around 2002-2005 after I was laid off from my dot com but the only thing I could make any profit on was docking stations and the associated power adapters since at that time they were specific to each laptop model. I would think the overhead storing furniture is significant. A couple of times I got lucky such as when Casady and Greene closed down and I got a bunch of copies of Conflict Catcher 9 that was still in demand and when Apple closed down a TV studio in Cupertino and I bought the contents of the back storage room that had a bunch of valuable bits and pieces. Unfortunately reality TV was still in its infancy or I would have been a minor star:-)
There are warehouses like this in all big cites, and are open (ish) to the public!
I helped get some stuff for a small business earlier this year, and picked up an Aeron for myself while I was there. It was in a legitimately bad neighborhood and there were multiple layers of electronically controlled doors to go through, then you sign in and wait from someone to come down and get you, and you ride a massive freight elevator up to the floorspace.
VC Funding dried up in the Life Sciences space by late 2021/early 2022 because there was too much investment during 2018-20 due to the "precision medicine" hype cycle.
Same thing happened to cybersecurity in 2022-23 and will happen in the Generative AI space in a couple years.
There are always expansions and contractions in each sector.
I went to Brooks Bargain in Wilmington, MA, to get a used Aeron chair for about $500 if I remember right. They had a ton of different kinds of chairs to try on site. I went there torn between Aeron or SteelCase.
I’ve heard good things about Granite State Office Furniture too, if you don’t mind hoofing it up to Manchester NH.
Steelcase vs. Aeron is mostly about preference for fabric vs. mesh. Though Hermann Miller also has other models that are basically stripped down Aerons or don't require as much personal adjustment.
Just do a web search for "office furniture liquidator" and include your nearest big city.
You are probably going to want the least flashy of the results, as all that flash comes at an expense ;)
I know that there are at least 2 good ones in Chicago and another that sells used hotel furniture (which I am not sure that I would willingly go into, but apparently there is a market for such things...).
These places are very much business-focused; it's not like walking into an IKEA. You'll probably have to get buzzed in through many doors and then sign in, where you'll be asked for both your name and business. If you don't have a business they aren't going to throw you out or anything, but probably ask you to write something like "<First Name><Last Name> LLC" so they can put you in their system. You probably have to get escorted to the sales floor but are free to wander around. You have to pay in full for what you want, up front, but will get issued an invoice and bill of sale as if you are a business (from their point of view, they aren't selling anything to you, they are selling to the business you are representing).
There is an awesome one in Wilmington DE, its the goto for startups. Very sketchy warehouse off of 12th street (if you pass the prison, you’ve gone too far). But lots of clean stuff, like the last of office stuff from DuPont clearing out all their locations.
I'm not sure if that is the case, but if it were that's not really my problem :)
This is the place I generally use, but simply because it is most convenient for where I live (it's about 3 blocks south of I-290 at the Cicero Ave exit)
I don’t think this is really true. Kitchen supply is an example with stores that are open to regular people and there are still deals compared to consumer cookware.
If you go to a restaurant equipment liquidator you can find some good heavy-duty pots and pans, they likely won't be "attractive" as restaurant kitchens don't care about that. Be aware that most of the cooking equipment and appliances won't be usable in your home kitchen because your electrical circuits won't be adequate.
You can pick up beverage glasses and cups, plates, silverware.
There is of course quite a range between totally illiquid and totally liquid.
My best finds for second hand goods were found by intentionally searching obscure marketplaces. Telling a few ppl on HN probably wouldn’t make much of a difference, making a viral TikTok video about it might.
Been to one of those warehouses, back when it was Consolidated Office Distributors, Inc. in San Jose. BetterSource seems to have acquired them around 2005. One building filled an entire city block. I went there to furnish a shop, entered through the wrong door, and spent half an hour wandering around before I found the sales office. This was in the heyday of the Aeron chair and the carpet-faced cubicle wall. They had huge supplies of both.
Picked out desks, chairs, wastebaskets, shop tables, storage cabinets, shelving, a flammable-materials cabinet, etc. They delivered everything the next day. It's the place to go when you're starting up.
I once did some work for a business that operated in this field. I'll never forget the owner. He had done very well over the years and drove a Ferrari - an extremely rare sight in the industrial area. He spent all day selling very high end second hand and new office furniture to discerning clients - large contracts for whole buildings sometimes. But in his own office he sat on the very cheapest office chair that money can buy. One that he wouldn't have been able to source from any of his suppliers. Never could figure out if it was a contrived statement, or not.
Anyplace I've been with private offices pretty much had an open-door policy. If you weren't doing something that required privacy, you kept the door open or at some point someone would almost certainly comment.
My place of work is like that, but I'm allowed to keep my door mostly closed because they keep the place at subarctic temperatures and I keep a heater running all day. Gotta keep the heat in!
I don't envy the prospect of talking to a future employer when you work in a public space. Every day, you frequently respond, "uhhh no thanks" or, "maybe... Hold on I'll call you back" while you step outside the room suspiciously.
I've participated in a Chapter 10 bankruptcy sale at the software side.
Had to determine how to best part out a website (travel focused) that had a hotel inventory + flight planner that up-and-coming travel websites wanted to leverage to end their reliance on Expedia.
Tell us more! Was it a "highest bidder wins" thing, or just finding anyone interested was hard enough? Did you reach out to potential buyers or they came by themselves?
Yeah it did come down to highest bidders. I am not sure how they were found, since it was a bankruptsy with many debtors involved, there was a few consultant companies involved so I figured it was them.
We essentially took questions and generated a informational "guide" for the buyers, mainly what assets could be sold off individually (think things like domains, images, review data) vs systems which mainly came down to marketing site vs inventory management software.
Tech wise we dug into details like dev/test environments, tech debt, potential challenges with integration into another company. Mainly worked to setup the whole environment from scratch, which was a mess due to being mid migration to cloud + terraform from on prem.
Every major metropolitan area has something like this because the market for used office furniture is ubiquitous and not limited to a small geography of tech companies. If you need some sturdy training tables for projects or some metal bookshelves they can be had for next to nothing at these places.
The one thing that has become a bit harder to find are lab and assembly workbenches. That stuff used to similarly cheap 20 years ago.
Another fun one is the usually poorly named "electronics recycler" - the kind of stuff rolling through these can be astounding, and they usually have people earning minimum or close to minimum wage dealing with it all - which yields strange pricing (some great deals, some preposterous) and a lot of stuff just getting dismantled/crushed/shipped overseas.
Weird Stuff, Halted, Alltronics and Excess Solutions sold the electronics + misc. When I'd feel like I needed some inspiration, I'd often go and pick up some weird obscure failed (or prototype) project. Once I found a floppy disk carrier that belonged to a fellow employee (based on the handwritten label) from my first job, 20 years earlier.
Excess Solutions also sold more of the furniture stuff, workbenches, and, strangely, hotel surplus blankets, lighting fixtures and wall coverings. My $20 living room couch came from there - I think it was originally from Ikea but it's still pretty solid. The fabric is faded with a particular stripe and I imagine had spent it's previous life in the lobby of some software company where the sunlight would find it's way through some half broken blinds to mark the passage of time by fading this couch.
Weird Stuff I know didn't have their lease renewed by the property owner (google) and most of it's stock was scrapped as waste.
Losing Weird Stuff Warehouse was one of the bellwether signals for me to leave the Bay.
As I remember,Excess picked up a big chunk of Halted stock, but I heard the Excess location in San Jose closed (eBay store still open). Anyone know current status?
The one thing that has become a bit harder to find are lab and assembly workbenches.
I bought a 6' and 12' assembly benches, complete with overhead lights, when Hayes Micro went under 30 years ago or so. Paid less than us$200 for them. Still going strong in my shop.
Next to nothing is an overstatement, er, understatement.
Be prepared to pay like 50% of retail +/-25% depending on what the product is. You pay a lot for the convenience of them holding inventory so you can just walk in and buy things on any given day.
If you want real savings auctions and classifieds are where they're to be found but obviously there's tons of overpriced stuff there too.
You will find different economies by the product, the two I listed are specifically ones that tend to be available for well below what you are saying. For instance, a new steel bookcase from Hon or Sandusky is $400-$800 depending on dimensions and you undergo a lot of stress dealing with shipping contractors probably damaging it. If you roll up in a pickup, or with a trailer or moving truck you can get them yourself for $25-50 in my metro area. Training tables are a similar affair, too heavy and awkward to sell widely but universally available and great to repurpose for shop use. Someone else mentioned cubicles, those tend to be way sub-priced even from name brands like Herman Miller because they are "out of style" -- if you have a large space it is a bargain entry for a high end office set.
If you want something desirable to a wide swath of people like a Herman Miller Aeron chair, yeah expect to pay for it. But if you are flexible, you can find deals. I got Steelcase Leaps for my workspaces when they were not well known for $200 and think they are a better chair than the more recognizable Herman Miller ones..
Auctions are great but they are by nature hit or miss. Preview access is sometimes limited so it's more of a gamble than even a used retail purchase and you may need to take and figure out what to do with a bunch of something when you wanted a smaller quantity.
When I did YC back in 2011 their Mountain View office was just down the street from Desk Depot, who were in the same line of business as this article.
We bought a desk and two chairs from there and it was fascinating. The warehouse was basically a condensed history of Silicon Valley office trends - we asked about Aeron chairs and the chap showed us his collection ordered by year.
He'd say things like "that corner's Yahoo!, over there is Sun Microsystems". He also had an excellent cat.
I love the Desk Depot! The chap who runs it is really nice and helpful, too. So we'd call him the Desk Despot since it was so inappropriately slanderous. I got a huge desk for home there in 1990 when I worked at Sun. It's been opened since 1976!
I wonder what the record is for the number of times a piece of office furniture has gone through Desk Depot.
For a small startup, possibly. As you grow, like many things, it doesn't really scale well once you have to start paying people full-time to manage the whole process.
Totally, After a certain point it gets silly to have a bunch of mismatched office furniture that is inevitably in various states of disrepair.
You can save yourself heaps of money by buying used Macbooks off of e-bay for a startup, but it becomes a nightmare at scale when you get an IT department that needs to manage it all with uniform security updates, and lifecycles.
Buying them off eBay is one thing, but for my own money I've had just stellar success with Apple's Refurbished selection, which comes with a warranty and one can purchase Apple Care for them <https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished> Regrettably I don't know if they're compatible with Apple's MDM but I couldn't imagine why not
For yourself, it's totally an individual decision based on your personal priorities and risk calculus. I'm a bit skeptical about purchasing refurb computer equipment in general because the support window is ticking down but certainly I have nothing against used and refurb goods for the home in general.
For companies, there's a lot to be said for standardization though, for my last job, I just used my own phones and computer gear anyway so it was what I wanted and I controlled it (other than MDM latterly on the phone).
But by then you also aren't buying one chair at a time. Or you might just have a standard rate agreed with your favorite supplier, and you'll just give them a call every other month.
And you know the retail price is probably double or more what the original owner was paid when they liquidated them. I wonder if these places are willing to haggle on price.
Conversely, the demand for other people's home furnishings is pretty low. That's why estate sales are mostly held just to get rid of the stuff and not really to make any money.
An old friend of mine passed away recently. She had probably a hundred grand of stuff in expensive furniture, silverware, china and clothes and whatever.
Her family organized an estate sale, and netted $5000, most of which was for a couple items.
The rest went to goodwill.
If you browse goodwill, most of it looks like estate stuff.
All those collectors' items you have? They are worth nothing.
Yeah I just meant the markup is on the resale of the used items.
If the bankrupt startup had an office chair that they bought new for $1,000, they got paid maybe $100 for it in the liquidation, now the liquidator asks what? At least $200. That's 100% gross profit. Maybe $500? More?
Seems there would be room to negotate deals especially if you're buying a whole office-load of furniture.
Running a business is very expensive. Pay the employees (movers), a huge truck, fuel, a huge warehouse, HVAC to keep it decent inside, more employees (sales and business), advertising and marketing. If you consider all those costs, it's not such a bad markup.
You can't ignore the costs associated with transporting the furniture, sorting, inspecting, cleaning and storing the furniture. Then you need to have sales staff, finance staff, etc to help with sales. A lot of office furniture is builky, so you're looking at high transportation costs since how many desks can you fit in a box truck?
I'd guess if it's a $1,000 item new, they buy at $100 and sell for $500 with $200-300 going towards operating costs and $100 of it to profit (so 20% of the price it's sold for).
You're right, but your numbers are a bit optimistic. $1000 retail price means $500 wholesale, and no way the liquidator is going to be able sell at $500.
I buy stuff from pawn shops and thrift stores, and you can buy expensive stuff for a song.
That's a typical margin for a reseller (and it's gross margin, not gross profit). Back in the 80s, I was horrified that the mail order houses demanded a wholesale price that was half of retail. But I learned that's how things work.
Businesses have a lot of expenses. People who start one often think if they buy X for $10, and sell it for $20, they're counting the money they'll make. The reality is you gotta pay for everything else before you can count the profit.
I bought my home office chair and under-desk cabinet from abettersource. Easy to work with. Equipment worked great. Prices were great. Very large variety too. Only thing was I had to load it myself into my car and I was lucky to have a hatchback big enough for it.
These kinds of stores are great. I'm sitting on the legacy of some old tech company right now, actually. I paid $250 for this very fancy office chair. I don't care if it's pre-sat!
Wonder if businesses trading in used mining gear existed in the gold boom era. I'm sure it did.
Surprising how reckless these dotcoms used to spend just because money was cheap. Have lived thru that era seen some of it first hand. Almost like burn it or you'll lose it.
>Wonder if businesses trading in used mining gear existed in the gold boom era. I'm sure it did.
Shore did, pardner!
Picks 'n shovels goin', real cheap! Walk up, walk up, walk up.
>Surprising how reckless these dotcoms used to spend just because money was cheap. Have lived thru that era seen some of it first hand. Almost like burn it or you'll lose it.
2579 CE: The 97th AI Winter has just begun. The migration of the office furniture back to its warehouses begins, to await a new dawn when someone tries to make metaverses happen again in a year or so. 5% of the planet's usable land area now warehouses startup office furniture. No-one has made new office furniture for 300 years; no-one even knows how. Not even the chatbots know how.
(Slightly) more seriously, I wonder how much repeat business they get. Have some items been in and out multiple times? Do they keep a database of the history of each item? In the future, will there be a collector's market for Aerons with interesting pedigrees?
> John noticed a mark under the faded asset tag. Pulling it back, he found strange runes under the adhesive. As he ran his finger over it, he could see the runes glow in the darkened warehouse.
> The runes burned with what looked like fire, but were cold to the touch. John felt a growing attraction to the chair, it MUST be his, he MUST keep it, it came to him! His all, his … PRECIOUS.
This reminds me of a GoPro I borrowed from a friend.
He got a new GoPro and mounted it on his bicycle. That first trip he took with it he was hit by a car.
As he was recovering, I borrowed it for a motorcycle trip I was about to go on. Mounted it on the bike, and ended up lowsiding on a mountain pass. I'm sure it was the GoPro and not my fault at all.
There were only two recordings that GoPro ever recorded and both ended in injuries for the rider. I don't think it was ever used again.
> when someone tries to make metaverses happen again
While web3/metaverse as a branding concept flopped, the incumbents (roblox, fortnite, minecraft, gta creator mode) are growing strong with roblox leading the pack
Strange name, really, considering that people that inhabit metaverse realities by and large (of course there are outliers and corner cases) have no primary life. Should be called mylife or reallife or getalife or something more like that.
Is this a PR piece? Skimming the article doesn’t reveal anything remarkable about the business.
The $20 million business “that could only exist in the bay area” seems to exist pretty much everywhere outside of it since companies giving up offices is actually also a thing in the rest of the world.
There is a company in the big cities here called オフィスバスターズ(Office Busters) that sells used office furniture. I got an amazing chair from them for about 40% of the retail price.
biodegradable office furniture should be more of a thing. open source furniture design for an office and having staff contribute to building it could influence the culture in a positive way.
I think making your tech company staff make furniture is about as sensible as if the people who make furniture were also building their own software.
But as to open source furniture design ... I thought furniture was basically in the same position as fashion, where you can protect trademarks etc and particular patentable innovations, but that designs in general are not protected.
Hah, reminds me of 1990 Sun where I was handed several boxes of parts and told to make a sun4 VME workstation and bootstrap it from
tape. I think it was part hazing, part can this person ask for help when they get stuck and partly where is our documentation lacking. (Sun had excellent docs at the end)
I use a wooden chair for my home office and I find it more comfortable than office chairs, although it may not be a fair comparison since I spend most of the time squatting on it.
I do have an Aeron in my office. But since I largely stopped having video calls I confess I mostly work at my kitchen/dining room table in a wooden chair.
Pretty sensationalist title for used furniture arbitrage.
I was hoping for some insight on capture and disposition of IP.
I would think failing gracefully involves reaching out to competitors (and customers and suppliers) for "mergers" so investors get some of the value of the company -- without somehow signaling that you're giving up (and can no longer be relied upon). What's the state of the art in that respect? It seems like a fantastically tricky process, which would mean high value for skilled practitioners.
(OTW (ahem) valuable employee stock goes to zero.)
It’s also not really a bay era specific phenomenon here. Any reasonably sized city has a retailer that buys up used office stock for whatever reason at auction and resells it. And it’s not just “failed companies”, anytime a company upgrades its furniture it usually liquidates in a similar fashion.
I don't know, silicon valley has had some interesting things for sale.
the pictures in this article aren't particularly compelling though.
I remember in the post-internet-bubble seeing almost-new aeron chairs sold in huge quantities. Now it is less of a big deal. The aeron chairs are less iconic nowadays.
When Weird Stuff Warehouse was still around, it was like computer geology viewing the strata. You could go deeper into the store and back in time to see expensive machines of a decade ago sold for nothing. I remember thinking - that server would make a good end table conversation piece! I also remember them selling brightly colored silicon graphics workstations.
Yeah. For a company going under, probably selling off furniture piecemeal is somewhere near the bottom of their priority list. There are companies specializing in this sort of thing. Unless you're will to do this for free at a startup, that probably isn't a good priority.
Like in any other business, anywhere else, there are companies who handle liquidating their assets. They have regular auctions. I've bought a ton of great equipment for my business from them. They have an online auction, you bid and win, if you win you go (often to the failed startup itself) and pick up yoir stuff at a predetermined meeting time. They often have very weird, very specific tech startup things like biotechnology lab equipment, etc. for much discounted prices.
In 2001 (or 02?) I remember visiting a clearance warehouse like this in Ottawa during the post-dot-com-boom crash and it was where all the west-end startups and network tech companies had dumped their furniture after either going completely out of business or emergency-downsizing.
It was wild, I have a picture somewhere of a high-school-gym-sized room just filled corner-to-corner with plastic-wrapped Aeron chairs...
I am currently sitting in a dot-com crash Aeron chair that I got for a very good price 25 years ago, behind the IKEA Jerker desk I bought at the same time. They are the best purchases I have ever made.
My Aeron chair is over 15yo and still as sturdy as the day I got it. It was the first step toward correcting an ergo nightmare that contributed to terrible back pain.
Adjustable displays and an adjustable standing desk were the other two. I had a standing desk at work and spent half my day standing. I later realized that my crappy office chair at work was why I needed to stand. With the Aeron and the desk adjusted to exactly the right height, I no longer experience chronic pain and feel no need to stand.
My Aeron lasted almost 20 years. After a warranty repair I gave up. But replaced it with a new identical one (with updated back support) during COVID with company discount because couldn't really check out showroom options and it's great.
I came here to say the same thing! I purchased an Aeron 16yrs ago, from a post-bankruptcy liquidation warehouse. The chair is as nice now as it was in 2008!
I threw out all my SGI and Sun hardware, and couldn't wait to ditch my 21" monitors I picked up back then, but I still have my Aeron
That's incredible. I wonder if that business still exists. Quite a few tech companies starting and busting in Ottawa still.
Sadly I don't remember the name of the business, but I'm sure something like it exists.. A quick web search doesn't show anything obvious of that scale or type though..
I think what was so interesting about that place was the homogeneous nature of the available furniture, since "fancy office furniture for tech companies" wasn't quite a thing yet, so everything was either Herman Miller, Steelcase and maybe a few others..
Hence the room full of hundreds of exactly the same chair..
I feel like today you'd have more of a mix of stuff since so many other companies got in on the action (and uniqueness/variety is more highly valued socially).
Are there more companies with high quality chairs, or just more at effectively the bottom end?
That's a very good question
Years ago I was hired to do IT for a company that had just massacred like half its workforce. And when I say “just” I mean most of the people I interviewed with were gone when I got there - it happened just a few weeks after I interviewed.
It was so, so surreal. For one thing they decided to consolidate on the second floor of a two story building, so to get to work each day you had to head through the dark and empty part of the building. And it was just like everyone just got up one day and left, at least for a month or two u til we could get all the equipment and stuff off the desks and into storage.
Storage was what had been the gym (or was going to be? Not clear to me), and I just remember rows and rows of tower computers and monitors awaiting a company to come and take it all off our hands.
They had also bought a ton of expensive networking gear (Cisco routers and switches) that they now no longer needed, they just sat in boxes in the server room.
Labs still entirely stocked with gear and computers, meeting rooms with whiteboards still filled with meeting notes, it was all so unreal, almost post-apocalyptic.
Regularly attended the liquidations in Sunnyvale around 2002-2005 after I was laid off from my dot com but the only thing I could make any profit on was docking stations and the associated power adapters since at that time they were specific to each laptop model. I would think the overhead storing furniture is significant. A couple of times I got lucky such as when Casady and Greene closed down and I got a bunch of copies of Conflict Catcher 9 that was still in demand and when Apple closed down a TV studio in Cupertino and I bought the contents of the back storage room that had a bunch of valuable bits and pieces. Unfortunately reality TV was still in its infancy or I would have been a minor star:-)
There are warehouses like this in all big cites, and are open (ish) to the public!
I helped get some stuff for a small business earlier this year, and picked up an Aeron for myself while I was there. It was in a legitimately bad neighborhood and there were multiple layers of electronically controlled doors to go through, then you sign in and wait from someone to come down and get you, and you ride a massive freight elevator up to the floorspace.
Which one would you recommend for the greater Boston area?
They're about to get loaded with a bunch of furniture from all the biotech firms downsizing
Why are Boston biotech firms downsizing?
VC Funding dried up in the Life Sciences space by late 2021/early 2022 because there was too much investment during 2018-20 due to the "precision medicine" hype cycle.
Same thing happened to cybersecurity in 2022-23 and will happen in the Generative AI space in a couple years.
There are always expansions and contractions in each sector.
Didnt it dry up due to the interest rates hike? No more cheap money.
The interest rate hikes are just the cherry on top in this particular space.
Interest rates played a role but not significantly.
Renewables (IRA), Battery Tech (IRA), Hardware (CHIPS), Defense (CHIPS), and AI/ML became better investments in the 20-21 period.
Ooooh that’s going to be some cool lab stuff!
Don't know about Boston per se but I've bought some file cabinets from a place in downtown Worcester in the past. Might be Northeast Office Solutions.
I went to Brooks Bargain in Wilmington, MA, to get a used Aeron chair for about $500 if I remember right. They had a ton of different kinds of chairs to try on site. I went there torn between Aeron or SteelCase.
I’ve heard good things about Granite State Office Furniture too, if you don’t mind hoofing it up to Manchester NH.
Steelcase vs. Aeron is mostly about preference for fabric vs. mesh. Though Hermann Miller also has other models that are basically stripped down Aerons or don't require as much personal adjustment.
There's always the MIT Furniture Exchange! [Note to non-Boston folks: this is a joke.]
Is there a way to find out where the nearest one is?
Just do a web search for "office furniture liquidator" and include your nearest big city.
You are probably going to want the least flashy of the results, as all that flash comes at an expense ;)
I know that there are at least 2 good ones in Chicago and another that sells used hotel furniture (which I am not sure that I would willingly go into, but apparently there is a market for such things...).
These places are very much business-focused; it's not like walking into an IKEA. You'll probably have to get buzzed in through many doors and then sign in, where you'll be asked for both your name and business. If you don't have a business they aren't going to throw you out or anything, but probably ask you to write something like "<First Name><Last Name> LLC" so they can put you in their system. You probably have to get escorted to the sales floor but are free to wander around. You have to pay in full for what you want, up front, but will get issued an invoice and bill of sale as if you are a business (from their point of view, they aren't selling anything to you, they are selling to the business you are representing).
There is an awesome one in Wilmington DE, its the goto for startups. Very sketchy warehouse off of 12th street (if you pass the prison, you’ve gone too far). But lots of clean stuff, like the last of office stuff from DuPont clearing out all their locations.
Please share the names!
These opportunities exist due to an inefficient illiquid market, widely sharing them will ruin that.
I'm not sure if that is the case, but if it were that's not really my problem :)
This is the place I generally use, but simply because it is most convenient for where I live (it's about 3 blocks south of I-290 at the Cicero Ave exit)
https://www.officefurniturecenter.com
Nice, thanks for the link. I'm in the western exurbs, so I'll have to make the trek on in!
I don’t think this is really true. Kitchen supply is an example with stores that are open to regular people and there are still deals compared to consumer cookware.
If you go to a restaurant equipment liquidator you can find some good heavy-duty pots and pans, they likely won't be "attractive" as restaurant kitchens don't care about that. Be aware that most of the cooking equipment and appliances won't be usable in your home kitchen because your electrical circuits won't be adequate.
You can pick up beverage glasses and cups, plates, silverware.
There is of course quite a range between totally illiquid and totally liquid.
My best finds for second hand goods were found by intentionally searching obscure marketplaces. Telling a few ppl on HN probably wouldn’t make much of a difference, making a viral TikTok video about it might.
Try craigslist... search for office chair or desk.
To add to this, you're searching CL for those terms so that it brings up a liquidator with a brick and mortar store.
"cubicle" may be better... and "workrite" or similar
Hibid has some of the auctions.
plenty of businesses like this operate online too - had my aeron shipped from a Parisian startup liquidator
Do you happen to have the name of the place you found it ? I'm in France, and I wasn't really able to find anything with a quick google search
https://www.adopteunbureau.fr/
was the one I used
My french google-fu isnt great but bureau and restockage seem to turn up a few, eg buroways.fr
> mobilier de bureau d'occasion
Aka second hand office furniture.
This should help in your search tbh. It is on the front page of that website. And don't forget to put the `hl=fr&` in your url search.
Been to one of those warehouses, back when it was Consolidated Office Distributors, Inc. in San Jose. BetterSource seems to have acquired them around 2005. One building filled an entire city block. I went there to furnish a shop, entered through the wrong door, and spent half an hour wandering around before I found the sales office. This was in the heyday of the Aeron chair and the carpet-faced cubicle wall. They had huge supplies of both.
Picked out desks, chairs, wastebaskets, shop tables, storage cabinets, shelving, a flammable-materials cabinet, etc. They delivered everything the next day. It's the place to go when you're starting up.
I once did some work for a business that operated in this field. I'll never forget the owner. He had done very well over the years and drove a Ferrari - an extremely rare sight in the industrial area. He spent all day selling very high end second hand and new office furniture to discerning clients - large contracts for whole buildings sometimes. But in his own office he sat on the very cheapest office chair that money can buy. One that he wouldn't have been able to source from any of his suppliers. Never could figure out if it was a contrived statement, or not.
Seeing those privacy phone booths makes me so envious. Why must we have these open office hellscapes? Let me shut out the endless racket.
Those things are fart boxes, and they get unusable by lunch time.
And mad thermal.
Think about it from the perspective of outside the box.
Would you prefer people pop into the boxes to fart privately, or fart publically in the shared space?
At least using them for hotboxing covers up the smell of the farts.
They're supposed to have fans in them.
Some do have fans on top of them but they don't work that well because no one wants a noisy fan blasting in the office..
Anyplace I've been with private offices pretty much had an open-door policy. If you weren't doing something that required privacy, you kept the door open or at some point someone would almost certainly comment.
My place of work is like that, but I'm allowed to keep my door mostly closed because they keep the place at subarctic temperatures and I keep a heater running all day. Gotta keep the heat in!
I don't envy the prospect of talking to a future employer when you work in a public space. Every day, you frequently respond, "uhhh no thanks" or, "maybe... Hold on I'll call you back" while you step outside the room suspiciously.
It's not such a big deal. You can always blow cover smoke by saying you were talking with your doctor, or a family member about a medical issue.
I've participated in a Chapter 10 bankruptcy sale at the software side.
Had to determine how to best part out a website (travel focused) that had a hotel inventory + flight planner that up-and-coming travel websites wanted to leverage to end their reliance on Expedia.
Tell us more! Was it a "highest bidder wins" thing, or just finding anyone interested was hard enough? Did you reach out to potential buyers or they came by themselves?
Yeah it did come down to highest bidders. I am not sure how they were found, since it was a bankruptsy with many debtors involved, there was a few consultant companies involved so I figured it was them.
We essentially took questions and generated a informational "guide" for the buyers, mainly what assets could be sold off individually (think things like domains, images, review data) vs systems which mainly came down to marketing site vs inventory management software.
Tech wise we dug into details like dev/test environments, tech debt, potential challenges with integration into another company. Mainly worked to setup the whole environment from scratch, which was a mess due to being mid migration to cloud + terraform from on prem.
Every major metropolitan area has something like this because the market for used office furniture is ubiquitous and not limited to a small geography of tech companies. If you need some sturdy training tables for projects or some metal bookshelves they can be had for next to nothing at these places.
The one thing that has become a bit harder to find are lab and assembly workbenches. That stuff used to similarly cheap 20 years ago.
Another fun one is the usually poorly named "electronics recycler" - the kind of stuff rolling through these can be astounding, and they usually have people earning minimum or close to minimum wage dealing with it all - which yields strange pricing (some great deals, some preposterous) and a lot of stuff just getting dismantled/crushed/shipped overseas.
Weird Stuff, Halted, Alltronics and Excess Solutions sold the electronics + misc. When I'd feel like I needed some inspiration, I'd often go and pick up some weird obscure failed (or prototype) project. Once I found a floppy disk carrier that belonged to a fellow employee (based on the handwritten label) from my first job, 20 years earlier.
Excess Solutions also sold more of the furniture stuff, workbenches, and, strangely, hotel surplus blankets, lighting fixtures and wall coverings. My $20 living room couch came from there - I think it was originally from Ikea but it's still pretty solid. The fabric is faded with a particular stripe and I imagine had spent it's previous life in the lobby of some software company where the sunlight would find it's way through some half broken blinds to mark the passage of time by fading this couch.
Weird Stuff I know didn't have their lease renewed by the property owner (google) and most of it's stock was scrapped as waste.
Losing Weird Stuff Warehouse was one of the bellwether signals for me to leave the Bay.
As I remember,Excess picked up a big chunk of Halted stock, but I heard the Excess location in San Jose closed (eBay store still open). Anyone know current status?
University surplus stores are always fun to browse. Lab equipment, machine tools, great stuff.
These are great for vintage lab gear too. In college I got an old flammable chemicals cabinet, which we refinished into a liquor cabinet.
A lot of that stuff is posted on govdeals.com as well.
The one thing that has become a bit harder to find are lab and assembly workbenches.
I bought a 6' and 12' assembly benches, complete with overhead lights, when Hayes Micro went under 30 years ago or so. Paid less than us$200 for them. Still going strong in my shop.
Next to nothing is an overstatement, er, understatement.
Be prepared to pay like 50% of retail +/-25% depending on what the product is. You pay a lot for the convenience of them holding inventory so you can just walk in and buy things on any given day.
If you want real savings auctions and classifieds are where they're to be found but obviously there's tons of overpriced stuff there too.
You will find different economies by the product, the two I listed are specifically ones that tend to be available for well below what you are saying. For instance, a new steel bookcase from Hon or Sandusky is $400-$800 depending on dimensions and you undergo a lot of stress dealing with shipping contractors probably damaging it. If you roll up in a pickup, or with a trailer or moving truck you can get them yourself for $25-50 in my metro area. Training tables are a similar affair, too heavy and awkward to sell widely but universally available and great to repurpose for shop use. Someone else mentioned cubicles, those tend to be way sub-priced even from name brands like Herman Miller because they are "out of style" -- if you have a large space it is a bargain entry for a high end office set.
If you want something desirable to a wide swath of people like a Herman Miller Aeron chair, yeah expect to pay for it. But if you are flexible, you can find deals. I got Steelcase Leaps for my workspaces when they were not well known for $200 and think they are a better chair than the more recognizable Herman Miller ones..
Auctions are great but they are by nature hit or miss. Preview access is sometimes limited so it's more of a gamble than even a used retail purchase and you may need to take and figure out what to do with a bunch of something when you wanted a smaller quantity.
When I did YC back in 2011 their Mountain View office was just down the street from Desk Depot, who were in the same line of business as this article.
We bought a desk and two chairs from there and it was fascinating. The warehouse was basically a condensed history of Silicon Valley office trends - we asked about Aeron chairs and the chap showed us his collection ordered by year.
He'd say things like "that corner's Yahoo!, over there is Sun Microsystems". He also had an excellent cat.
It looks like Desk Depot is still in business today: https://deskdepot.net/
I love the Desk Depot! The chap who runs it is really nice and helpful, too. So we'd call him the Desk Despot since it was so inappropriately slanderous. I got a huge desk for home there in 1990 when I worked at Sun. It's been opened since 1976!
I wonder what the record is for the number of times a piece of office furniture has gone through Desk Depot.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12759801
I feel like any (edit: small) company not outfitting their offices largely from cast-offs like this is failing their fiduciary duty.
For a small startup, possibly. As you grow, like many things, it doesn't really scale well once you have to start paying people full-time to manage the whole process.
Totally, After a certain point it gets silly to have a bunch of mismatched office furniture that is inevitably in various states of disrepair.
You can save yourself heaps of money by buying used Macbooks off of e-bay for a startup, but it becomes a nightmare at scale when you get an IT department that needs to manage it all with uniform security updates, and lifecycles.
Buying them off eBay is one thing, but for my own money I've had just stellar success with Apple's Refurbished selection, which comes with a warranty and one can purchase Apple Care for them <https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished> Regrettably I don't know if they're compatible with Apple's MDM but I couldn't imagine why not
> Regrettably I don't know if they're compatible with Apple's MDM but I couldn't imagine why not
I doubt they'll ship you pre-MDMed devices from the refurb store, but you should still be able to add them to your account manually:
https://it-training.apple.com/tutorials/deployment/dm060/
For yourself, it's totally an individual decision based on your personal priorities and risk calculus. I'm a bit skeptical about purchasing refurb computer equipment in general because the support window is ticking down but certainly I have nothing against used and refurb goods for the home in general.
For companies, there's a lot to be said for standardization though, for my last job, I just used my own phones and computer gear anyway so it was what I wanted and I controlled it (other than MDM latterly on the phone).
But by then you also aren't buying one chair at a time. Or you might just have a standard rate agreed with your favorite supplier, and you'll just give them a call every other month.
Buying isn't that hard.
And you know the retail price is probably double or more what the original owner was paid when they liquidated them. I wonder if these places are willing to haggle on price.
The original owner is going to get paid a lot less than half. Liquidating things may get you 10 cents on the dollar.
A typical estate valuation of the contents of a home is around $900.
All the stuff you paid $$$ for in your home is worth next to nothing.
Home goods are not a commodity to the buyer. Office furniture mostly is. You can't compare them like that.
Conversely, the demand for other people's home furnishings is pretty low. That's why estate sales are mostly held just to get rid of the stuff and not really to make any money.
An old friend of mine passed away recently. She had probably a hundred grand of stuff in expensive furniture, silverware, china and clothes and whatever.
Her family organized an estate sale, and netted $5000, most of which was for a couple items.
The rest went to goodwill.
If you browse goodwill, most of it looks like estate stuff.
All those collectors' items you have? They are worth nothing.
Yeah I just meant the markup is on the resale of the used items.
If the bankrupt startup had an office chair that they bought new for $1,000, they got paid maybe $100 for it in the liquidation, now the liquidator asks what? At least $200. That's 100% gross profit. Maybe $500? More?
Seems there would be room to negotate deals especially if you're buying a whole office-load of furniture.
Running a business is very expensive. Pay the employees (movers), a huge truck, fuel, a huge warehouse, HVAC to keep it decent inside, more employees (sales and business), advertising and marketing. If you consider all those costs, it's not such a bad markup.
You can't ignore the costs associated with transporting the furniture, sorting, inspecting, cleaning and storing the furniture. Then you need to have sales staff, finance staff, etc to help with sales. A lot of office furniture is builky, so you're looking at high transportation costs since how many desks can you fit in a box truck?
I'd guess if it's a $1,000 item new, they buy at $100 and sell for $500 with $200-300 going towards operating costs and $100 of it to profit (so 20% of the price it's sold for).
You're right, but your numbers are a bit optimistic. $1000 retail price means $500 wholesale, and no way the liquidator is going to be able sell at $500.
I buy stuff from pawn shops and thrift stores, and you can buy expensive stuff for a song.
I was thinking more of a liquidator was doing retail as well.
A liquidator selling wholesale to retailers is going to sell for less but would also avoid the expenses of retail sales.
> That's 100% gross profit.
That's a typical margin for a reseller (and it's gross margin, not gross profit). Back in the 80s, I was horrified that the mail order houses demanded a wholesale price that was half of retail. But I learned that's how things work.
Businesses have a lot of expenses. People who start one often think if they buy X for $10, and sell it for $20, they're counting the money they'll make. The reality is you gotta pay for everything else before you can count the profit.
That sounds high. The chair that I use in my WFH setup was around $800 new when I bought it at an office furniture liquidator for $75.
Every startup I’ve worked at has bought furniture through one of these businesses.
The better website for Bay Area tech company dissolution is https://svdisposition.com/ which gets actual high-tech equipment...
I bought my home office chair and under-desk cabinet from abettersource. Easy to work with. Equipment worked great. Prices were great. Very large variety too. Only thing was I had to load it myself into my car and I was lucky to have a hatchback big enough for it.
These kinds of stores are great. I'm sitting on the legacy of some old tech company right now, actually. I paid $250 for this very fancy office chair. I don't care if it's pre-sat!
Wonder if businesses trading in used mining gear existed in the gold boom era. I'm sure it did.
Surprising how reckless these dotcoms used to spend just because money was cheap. Have lived thru that era seen some of it first hand. Almost like burn it or you'll lose it.
>Wonder if businesses trading in used mining gear existed in the gold boom era. I'm sure it did.
Shore did, pardner!
Picks 'n shovels goin', real cheap! Walk up, walk up, walk up.
>Surprising how reckless these dotcoms used to spend just because money was cheap. Have lived thru that era seen some of it first hand. Almost like burn it or you'll lose it.
Lived (and was burned) through it too.
I knew it would be about Aeron chairs when I saw the title.
Checked out one of these in Alameda a few years back. Expansive warehouse - was fascinating to spend a few hours walking around.
Must be good business!
Like selling shovels and pick axes to gold rushers.
Man sfgate is a scummy web site. Traps you so back button does not work and litters the page w obnoxious ads. Note to self, don't follow sfgate links.
The back button trapping is something browsers should fix. Chrome has so far refused to do so which is frustrating.
Turn off JS.I do and have neither problem.
I should have to cripple by browser, but maybe it will come to that someday.
2579 CE: The 97th AI Winter has just begun. The migration of the office furniture back to its warehouses begins, to await a new dawn when someone tries to make metaverses happen again in a year or so. 5% of the planet's usable land area now warehouses startup office furniture. No-one has made new office furniture for 300 years; no-one even knows how. Not even the chatbots know how.
(Slightly) more seriously, I wonder how much repeat business they get. Have some items been in and out multiple times? Do they keep a database of the history of each item? In the future, will there be a collector's market for Aerons with interesting pedigrees?
Whether or not they track it there's zero chance the long term employees haven't identified some cursed items that are correlated with failure.
> John noticed a mark under the faded asset tag. Pulling it back, he found strange runes under the adhesive. As he ran his finger over it, he could see the runes glow in the darkened warehouse.
> The runes burned with what looked like fire, but were cold to the touch. John felt a growing attraction to the chair, it MUST be his, he MUST keep it, it came to him! His all, his … PRECIOUS.
This reminds me of a GoPro I borrowed from a friend.
He got a new GoPro and mounted it on his bicycle. That first trip he took with it he was hit by a car.
As he was recovering, I borrowed it for a motorcycle trip I was about to go on. Mounted it on the bike, and ended up lowsiding on a mountain pass. I'm sure it was the GoPro and not my fault at all.
There were only two recordings that GoPro ever recorded and both ended in injuries for the rider. I don't think it was ever used again.
I worked at a startup in the UK and the dev team started with second hand (but very new) MacBook Pros from a recently-deceased startup.
>to await a new dawn when someone tries to make metaverses happen again
Japan is still trying to make metaverse a thing.
> office furniture
What's an "office"?
It's a area you sit in to do work things.
> when someone tries to make metaverses happen again
While web3/metaverse as a branding concept flopped, the incumbents (roblox, fortnite, minecraft, gta creator mode) are growing strong with roblox leading the pack
Somehow when people say "the metaverse", they mean something like those games, but boring.
I am aware that statement is essentially a joke, but it seems to be true.
Back in the day this was called Second Life
Strange name, really, considering that people that inhabit metaverse realities by and large (of course there are outliers and corner cases) have no primary life. Should be called mylife or reallife or getalife or something more like that.
Way ahead of you on that joke. "Get a First Life" (2007):
https://web.archive.org/web/20070124113808/http://www.getafi...
Is this a PR piece? Skimming the article doesn’t reveal anything remarkable about the business.
The $20 million business “that could only exist in the bay area” seems to exist pretty much everywhere outside of it since companies giving up offices is actually also a thing in the rest of the world.
They even say in the article it's the biggest one "west of the Mississippi", implying larger ones exist on the East Coast well away from the bay area.
There is a company in the big cities here called オフィスバスターズ(Office Busters) that sells used office furniture. I got an amazing chair from them for about 40% of the retail price.
biodegradable office furniture should be more of a thing. open source furniture design for an office and having staff contribute to building it could influence the culture in a positive way.
I think making your tech company staff make furniture is about as sensible as if the people who make furniture were also building their own software.
But as to open source furniture design ... I thought furniture was basically in the same position as fashion, where you can protect trademarks etc and particular patentable innovations, but that designs in general are not protected.
Tell that to Bezos https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nB25pTM7Ytw
> open source furniture design for an office and having staff contribute to building it could influence the culture in a positive way.
Found Ron Swanson's hackernews account.
I worked briefly for a startup. The new guys all were handed parts and were expected to build their own computer. It was fun.
Hah, reminds me of 1990 Sun where I was handed several boxes of parts and told to make a sun4 VME workstation and bootstrap it from tape. I think it was part hazing, part can this person ask for help when they get stuck and partly where is our documentation lacking. (Sun had excellent docs at the end)
You can always opt out for a simple wooden chair instead of aeron. Just plain wood, no plastic, no fabric.
My home office chair is what might be called a "jury chair." Simple wood armchair, similar to these:
https://www.kpetersen.com/jurychairs.htm
Solid, easy to clean, nothing really to break or wear out or fail, and reminds you to get up and walk around every so often :)
I encourage you to try sitting in a wooden chair for 8 hours a day every day and reconsider
I do! I genuinely find it much more comfortable than any office chair I ever had.
I use a wooden chair for my home office and I find it more comfortable than office chairs, although it may not be a fair comparison since I spend most of the time squatting on it.
I do have an Aeron in my office. But since I largely stopped having video calls I confess I mostly work at my kitchen/dining room table in a wooden chair.
Up until say 70 years ago, wooden chairs were probably the norm everywhere.
Have you forgotten what primary and secondary school was like?
> having staff contribute to building it could influence the culture in a positive way
I hate this idea. That is not my job
as mentioned, it could influence the culture in a positive way.
At the expense of your insurance premiums and general staff whininess.
Do not touch used office furniture . Failure is contagious ..