It shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg to furnish your office, especially when it’s in your home.
That’s how the founder of Office Furniture Liquidations feels, anyway.
“A lot of businesses shouldn’t afford a Herman Miller Aeron chair,” said founder Erik Darmstetter. “I saw a lot of that in the 2000–01 tech crash. You had all these startups in major debt but all their furniture was incredible.”
In 2014, Darmstetter began selling used office furniture – starting with his own after closing the business growth consulting company he owned.
“I had so much fun doing it that I went home and found stuff from the corners around my house that I didn’t care about or like or whatever … and sold it the next day,” he said. “All of a sudden I was getting excited about transactional sales.”
Since then, Darmstetter has made it his mission to source quality desks and chairs and cabinets from business owners going out of business or downsizing, or from landlords clearing out left-behind items, and has grown his venture into a 45,000-square-foot showroom specializing in gently used office furniture.
Occasionally, his inventory will expand unexpectedly to include items not often seen in the office, such as hundreds of high-dollar vacuum cleaners, which he sold at bargain-basement prices, and once, the remaining stock of a prosthetic limb maker.
But, this year, the hot sellers were desks of all sizes and desk chairs.
Since May, Darmstetter has seen sales skyrocket as people turn their bedrooms and dining rooms into remote offices and classrooms and as industries experiencing growth during the coronavirus pandemic, such as health care, establish new office space. Home office sales are up 500 percent this year over 2019, he said.
Due to the pandemic, he also was able to stock his store, located at 6838 Bandera Road, with a lot of furniture that has never been used.
“Business startups that happened six months prior to COVID are liquidating their assets so that I’m either buying or consigning their assets,” Darmstetter said. “We were getting stuff that hasn’t been used. … People haven’t even been hired yet so everything’s set up, ready to hire, and then they [closed down].”
“It used to be that things would be 2, 5, 10, 20 years old and the market has now dramatically changed for new stuff coming.”
Most of it comes from within the state, he said, because shipping is less costly for him. He takes about 10 calls a day, he said, with requests to consign excess furniture.
“Some [calls] are from brokers that need a space cleared in their office building because somebody stopped paying a rent and got locked out, or they just abandoned their rent or left their items in there after their lease was up,” he said. “A lot of people are not renewing their leases, and they’re going to work from home, or they are downsizing.”
But the furniture has to be good quality or he doesn’t want it, he said. While he once found a half-eaten sandwich in a desk drawer, the store offers only good-quality furniture, repaired and touched up if necessary, at a range of prices.
In the air-conditioned showroom, there are desks starting at $99, a selection of chairs that fills 5,000 square feet of the store, as well as some supplies and electronics, such as whiteboards and a basic printer. Everything is sanitized and this year, because of concerns over COVID-19, the company began handling furniture moves itself rather than through a third-party company.
The store recently launched a brand of high-end pieces called OFL|Luxe, displaying what Darmstetter calls the “Ferraris” of office furniture, in 1,500 square feet of space on the showroom floor apart from the bargain finds.
“The bulk audience is frugal and they’re not coming here to buy a $1,000 chair,” Darmstetter said. “So a lot of what we do is educate.”
Customers often don’t realize that a good office chair at his store could cost $200 or more because they are also shocked to learn the chair used in a cubicle at USAA or Valero cost the company $900 to $1,200, he said. “We’ve got a lot of ‘Ferraris’ for pennies on the dollar.”
Not all companies want to sell or consign their castoffs. For businesses that want to donate the furniture, Darmstetter is affiliated with a local nonprofit that receives the consignment payment when an item sells. Some items are donated directly to an organization that needs them.
Overall furniture sales plummeted in March and April when many stores across the country closed their doors. But the segment recovered rapidly and is up nearly 6 percent over last year at this time, according to the National Retail Federation. And it’s not all due to home office furniture purchases.
Business is good on the commercial end as well, with Darmstetter recently providing furniture for businesses not only in San Antonio, Austin, and Waco but also as far away as Anchorage, Alaska.
“They came to us and we outfitted their San Antonio office and they were very happy and asked us to outfit their Alaskan office,” Darmstetter said. Prior to that, his farthest client was based in Birmingham, Alabama.
Dennis Thompson, director of operations for the San Antonio office of AKI, a government services company, said he spent $10,000 on furniture for the local office and $30,000 for the Anchorage office.
Thompson estimated saving at least 50 percent buying through Office Furniture Liquidations versus other stores where he shopped, even with the added shipping costs across North America.
Last year at this time, the store received a shipment of 500 vacuums and carpet cleaning equipment valued at $150 to $200, most of them brand new. Darmstetter sold them for $29 each.
“The typical person might say we could make a lot more money than that, but what our goal is is to get them moving as fast as we can, and that’s how we operate with most of our stuff,” he said. “I believe that the speed at which we can move an item frees up the real estate for more [product].”
The store has a loyal following that keeps the product moving, he added. They watch the store’s daily videos featuring new inventory and they either visit the showroom to make their purchase or buy it online.
“Nothing sits here very long,” Darmstetter said, with some exceptions. “If it does, it’s usually ugly. It can be a really nice chair, a $400 chair, and I’ll [price] it at $9.99, but it won’t sell. It’s crazy.”
But most of what’s on the showroom floor are the standard fixtures in the sedate color palettes of a modern workplace. Several years ago, Darmstetter added hotel furniture liquidations to his inventory to bring in some variety.
“There’s only so many file cabinets you can get where you’re just bored. And I’m a little bit high-strung, so I like to keep things interesting,” he said.
