Office furniture resale company opens Danbury store, capitalizes on pandemic ‘work from home’
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DANBURY — After millions of personnel have been abruptly informed they’d be working from property indefinitely two several years back, Russell Castro’s cellphone began to ring.
Rather of massive corporations contacting to obtain higher-end office furnishings from his place of work liquidation and resale business enterprise, he was acquiring inquiries from men and women seeking for an inexpensive way to furnish their new — and typically makeshift — household places of work.
With the alter in need, he started off searching into more compact retail suppliers to meet up with unique clients’ requires.
Dependent in North Brunswick, N.J., OFIS Furniture started hosting pop-up retail locations in Long Island, Pennsylvania, and New York, and opened a lasting retail location in Florida. On the first chilly weekend in March, Russell Castro opened a 2nd retail spot in Danbury with the enable of his brother, Rick Castro, who manages the shop.
“They’re acknowledging that they are going to be working from household a large amount lengthier now or completely, and they want to ‘up’ their workplace home furnishings for their property,” Russell Castro, president of OFIS Home furnishings said. “It was essentially hundreds of thousands of employees that have been doing the job from house in the whole tri-condition location, so our market place pool was significantly more substantial now. But we had been only accomplishing one chair at a time.”
Rick Castro life in New Fairfield and operates tiny organizations in the space. He understood the retail landscape and assumed Danbury would be a prime site for a retail office.
“It’s really functioning out very well amongst us from both our ordeals, from my getting in the outside retail globe to manage these sorts of locations and with his knowledge with the home furniture and the demands that he sees out there,” Rick Castro said. “I believe we’re a great staff alongside one another in that regard.”
Trucks make the two-hour trek from New Jersey to Danbury after a week, hauling the products bought in the city’s most recent furniture store.
“We pull from Hartford, we pull from Stamford, Norwalk. Folks coming from all over Connecticut,” Rick Castro mentioned.
The retail outlet, situated in Plumtrees Plaza, attracts shoppers from Fairfield, Hartford and Litchfield counties.
Rick Castro often asks people stopping in the place they arrived from for the reason that he usually receives distinct responses. So considerably, he’s achieved clients from Westport, Darien, Hartford, East Hartford and Simsbury.
Russell Castro mentioned that most folks who appear into the retail shop or attain out to OFIS have “done their homework” and know what they are hunting for. That is section of the purpose persons are keen to drive so significantly.
He’s had a large amount of requests for “soft seating”— a new time period Rick uncovered, that refers to waiting around place furniture — for both new place of work spaces and their have residences.
“They’ll travel an hour when your chair is $350 in the store,” Russell Castro claimed.
Persons occur in delighted, and they walk out happy, Rick Castro said.
Getting a market
OFIS satisfies a really certain need to have in a write-up-pandemic earth: self-sourced, price tag-efficient place of work household furniture.
“The trouble with that is they get sticker shock,” Russell Castro stated, of personnel hoping to furnish a right household business office.
An individual could want the exact same chair they had been working with at their business, only to recognize it fees hundreds of dollars. That is the place OFIS comes in. They can get that $1,200 chair for $350, Castro said.
OFIS has also capitalized on global supply chain struggles as persons head back again into work and re-envision office environment areas. Two a long time into the pandemic, some corporations have downsized or made satellite offices. Some have scrapped personal business layouts for open up meeting rooms. Because OFIS resources all its individual furnishings from liquidating offices, consumers don’t have to wait around for weeks on finish to get their fingers on the furniture.
The firm name fairly virtually serves as an acronym for what they assure: “Office Furnishings In Inventory.”
“The household furniture is likely to be 6 months, eight months, 10 months out, and that is been a large trouble for a good deal of persons furnishing offices. Which is why they are also flocking to us, mainly because we are own provide chain — I cleanse out all these structures, I have all the home furniture in inventory,” Russell Castro claimed. “We’re capable to fill that void, as nicely, for folks to get in into their workplaces, get them furnished immediately.”
OFIS has thousands of chairs, cubicles, convention room furniture, and reception space furniture prepared to obtain a new household. These times, they’re clearing out all 49 flooring of Deutsche Bank’s Manhattan offices.
You can only visualize how a lot of thousands and countless numbers of chairs and personal offices and cubicles that is, Russell Castro stated.
Although he dreams of one working day increasing OFIS to become a residence name with franchises across the tri-point out location and broader United States, Russell Castro is concentrated on obtaining the Danbury area up and working with his brother.
“We in shape a need,” he reported, “helping folks get out of their eating room chair, their aching backs, and putting them into the proper home furniture, and [it’s] definitely cost-effective.”
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