Office furniture resale company opens Danbury store, capitalizes on pandemic ‘work from home’
DANBURY — Right after droves of staff ended up abruptly explained to they’d be performing from dwelling indefinitely two many years in the past, Russell Castro’s telephone started to ring.
Rather of large firms calling to buy high-conclude business office furnishings from his office liquidation and re-sale business enterprise, he was obtaining inquiries from persons hunting for an reasonably priced way to furnish their new — and typically makeshift — house workplaces.
Desire modified so considerably that he started wanting into smaller sized retail stores to meet unique clients’ requires, rather than the regular huge office buildings. Based mostly in North Brunswick, N.J., OFIS Home furniture, LLC started out hosting pop-up retail areas in Long Island, Pennsylvania, and New York, and opened a long lasting retail area in Florida. And on the initial cold weekend in March, Russell Castro opened a second retail area in Danbury with the enable of his brother, Rick Castro, who now manages the keep.
“They’re knowing that they’re heading to be operating from household a whole lot for a longer time now or completely, and they want to ‘up’ their office environment home furniture for their residence,” Russell Castro, president of OFIS Furnishings, LLC, defined. “It was really tens of millions of staff that had been functioning from household in the entire tri-point out spot, so our marketplace pool was significantly bigger now. But we ended up only carrying out a person chair at a time.”
Rick Castro life in New Fairfield and operates various modest firms in the place. He knew the retail landscape and thought Danbury would be a primary place for a retail workplace.
“It’s actually operating out effectively amongst us from equally our ordeals, from my getting in the exterior retail environment to cope with these kinds of spots and with his know-how with the home furniture and the requires that he sees out there,” Rick Castro claimed. “I feel we’re a great team together in that respect.”
Vehicles make the two-hour trek from New Jersey to Danbury after a week, hauling the items acquired in the city’s latest home furnishings store.
“We pull from Hartford, we pull from Stamford, Norwalk. People coming from all in excess of Connecticut,” Rick Castro claimed of the location and its clientele.
Without a doubt, the retailer, positioned in Plumtrees Plaza, draws buyers from all across Fairfield and Litchfield Counties.
Rick Castro often asks persons stopping in exactly where they arrived from due to the fact he constantly receives diverse responses. So much, he’s met shoppers from Westport, Darien, Hartford, East Hartford and Simsbury.
Russell Castro said that most people who arrive into the retail retailer or get to out to OFIS have “done their homework” and know what they are on the lookout for. That’s element of the motive persons are prepared to push so much.
He’s had a good deal of requests for “soft seating”— a new phrase Rick learned, that refers to waiting space home furnishings — for equally new office areas and their individual properties.
“They’ll drive an hour when your chair is $350 in the shop,” Russell Castro said.
People today appear in satisfied, and they wander out delighted, Rick Castro explained.
Acquiring a market
OFIS satisfies a pretty particular need to have in a put up-pandemic entire world: self-sourced, charge-successful place of work furniture.
“The issue with that is they get sticker shock,” Russell Castro explained, of staff members trying to furnish a correct house office environment.
Anyone might want the exact chair they ended up applying at their business, only to understand it charges thousands of dollars. Which is where by OFIS comes in. They can get that $1,200 chair for $350, Castro explained.
OFIS has also capitalized on global source chain struggles as people today head back into operate and re-envision business office areas. Two years into the pandemic, some corporations have downsized or created satellite places of work. Some have scrapped personal workplace layouts for open meeting rooms. And given that OFIS resources all its very own household furniture from liquidating workplaces, customers really don’t have to hold out for months on close to get their fingers on the home furnishings.
The firm title really practically serves as an acronym for what they assure: “Office Furniture In Inventory.”
“The household furniture is going to be 6 months, eight months, 10 months out, and which is been a major dilemma for a good deal of folks furnishing offices. That’s why they’re also flocking to us, mainly because we are possess source chain — I clear out all these buildings, I have all the home furniture in inventory,” Russell Castro reported. “We’re capable to fill that void, as very well, for people today to get in into their offices, get them furnished promptly.”
OFIS has thousands of chairs, cubicles, convention space furniture, and reception area furniture ready to discover a new house. Correct now, they’re clearing out all 49 floors of Deutsche Bank’s Manhattan places of work.
You can only envision how a lot of 1000’s and thousands of chairs and private offices and cubicles that is, Russell Castro claimed.
When he goals of just one working day growing OFIS to develop into a residence name with franchises across the tri-condition region and broader United States, Russell Castro is concentrated on receiving the Danbury site up and running with his brother.
“We suit a need,” he described, “helping persons get out of their dining home chair, their 18-backs, and putting them into the ideal home furniture, and [it’s] definitely affordable.”