Office furniture firms join forces

CNY Business Journal (1996+), Feb 14, 2003 by Yunich, Rob

LIVERPOOL Hurbson WorkPlace Furnishings, Inc. and Roberts Office Furniture Concepts have formed a strategic alliance. Under the agreement, Hurbson will market and distribute office furniture remanufactured by Roberts to customers around upstate New York.

"We're appointing Hurbson to work for us as the dealer for the Central New York trading area. That gives them all the rights and privileges for marketing the products that Roberts remanufactures and makes available to the office-furniture community," says Robert "Bob" Barcza, founder and president of Roberts. "We're tickled to have them as a member of our family. We have looked at opportunities in Syracuse for a long time."

Barcza and his son, Scott, the current vice president and treasurer, founded Roberts in 1990. The company, based in an 80,000-square-foot plant in Liverpool, remanufactures office furniture, meaning they acquire used furniture, disassemble it, and totally rebuild it.

"We apply the same processes and procedures in remanufacturing as [were] deployed initially when a product was manufactured," the elder Barcza says. "We maintain a specification that's approximately 98 to 99 percent of what it was originally when it came to market. Along with that, we've also tried to preserve the specifications as it relates to the work surfaces."

Roberts obtains the furniture from a network of companies around the United States and Canada. It keeps approximately $30 million in inventory at any one time, including 25,000 panels and related office-furniture components. The company does manufacture conference tabletops of all surfaces. Overall, 20 percent of its annual business stems from manufacturing new products.

"We were looking to expand the visibility of Roberts and its products," Barcza says. "When we first started having conversations with Hurbson, we felt that there was a good mutual fit in our marketing capabilities, and it offered Hurbson an entree into a new availability of product that they currently don't have, and that is, the distribution of a remanufactured product that was of a major manufacturer's name."

Branching out

Prior to this agreement, finalized in early February, Hurbson only sold new furniture. The company, founded in 1935 and now headquartered on Tarbell Road in Syracuse, is affiliated with WorkPlace Furnishings (WPF), a network of 140 licensed locations in 36 states. Hurbson first affiliated with WPF in 1996. Roberts and Hurbson plan to expand their alliance to the rest of the WPF network.

"Hopefully this can be an entree whereby Roberts can work through the Workplace organization and have these firms all over the country and a few in Canada," says Donald A. Greeson, Hurbson's executive vice president. "It hopefully will have a very good impact locally ... because it gives us an opportunity to offer more value, it puts us into an additional niche that we're not in right now, and remanufactured furniture allows us to provide top-quality lines with the potential for savings to the customer."

The biggest benefit of remanufactured furniture, Greeson and Barcza say, is that the customer will save 20 percent to 50 percent off normal retail price. Barcza adds that custom orders for offices take about three to five weeks.

Roberts already has similar affiliate agreements with companies throughout most of the United States. On the east coast, those companies include Brooks Office Interiors in Boston, Office Interiors in New Jersey, ITI Group in Buffalo, and Johnson's Office Furniture in New Hampshire.

"This is a very value-oriented market that exists today and the hope [is that] it gives our clientele more options, a greater variety of price ranges and, the ability to utilize so-called 'A grade' products," Greeson says. "Businesses are lean and mean, looking to minimize costs. This hopefully helps, among other things, to reduce costs, and deliver a quality product."

"Sometimes spending money on a new office environment can be very productive - a better utilization of space, [increased] employee moral, increased production," Greeson adds. "Maybe something like this can encourage businesses to make investments in office productivity."

Environmentally friendly

Remanufacturing furniture is a "green" business that is beneficial to the environment. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that businesses discard approximately three million tons of furniture each year, incurring disposal costs of nearly $100 million.

"Through this strategic alliance, we'd like to generate more business for Roberts, obviously for ourselves as well, [and] offer a greater variety to our client base... hopefully developing a much larger geographic distribution for Workplace Furnishings," Greeson says.

"I think the winners of this alliance are the customers of Central New York," Barcza says. "They can benefit pretty significantly through the purchasing of our product as marketed through Hurbson. But more importantly, it offers Hurbson a much broader product offering to their client-base, and ultimately, the [customer] is the one that's rewarded by that."