NEW TAKES ON WORK SPACE dealers seeing strong sales

It’s been nearly three years since the COVID-19 pandemic upended o ce markets around the country, including in Michigan.

As landlords generally have been seeing tenants downsize their footprints or put blocks of space up for sublease, one segment of the o ce ecosystem has been rebounding since the scary early days of the global health crisis: Furniture dealers.

Companies upgrading their ex- isting o ces as incentives to get employees to reduce their time working from home, even if they are smaller footprints, has been an unanticipated boost, some said. Others have seen steady business in other sectors, such as education and health care, helping blunt the blow. And yet many are even outpacing pre-pandemic rev- enue gures, as painful as the rst weeks and months were. ere was good reason for the nervousness.

“In 2020, when everything was happening, we were nervous about what our industry was going to do and where it was going to go,” said Natalie Flora, chief creative o cer for Interior Environments, which sells Allsteel, Gunlocke and HBF furniture, among others. It has o ces in Novi, as well as Denver and Boise.

According to Grand Rapids-based Business and Institution- al Furniture Manufacturers Association, the American o ce furniture market dropped 12.2 percent to $12.94 billion in 2020, down from $14.74 billion in 2019. It was $14.09 billion in 2018 before it jumped 4.6 percent the following year.

In the Detroit area, o ce usage largely stopped in its tracks as workers were told to work from home to prevent the disease’s spread. e effects of the WFH mandate are still being felt today, and likely will be well into the future.