Changemakers: RESEAT

By anchoring RESEAT in digital IDs and close partnerships with dealers, Brandi Susewitz shows how second life furniture can become the default rather than the exception. And profitable. 

“Commercial furniture is built to last – decades and decades and decades – yet most of what ends up in landfills is less than 10 years old.”

Interview #14 in the Changemakers series

Drawing on the power of transparency and early-stage data tracking, Susewitz’s RESEAT reveals how circularity becomes real as companies understand their furniture assets - and their impacts - from the beginning.

This is the 14th in our Changemakers series – interviews with leaders in sustainable, circular and regenerative approaches in the furniture industry. Our aim is to uncover the nuts and bolts of how each leader is driving change, the potential it holds, and why it matters to the industry.

Brandi Susewitz, Founder & CEO of RESEAT

mebl: Hi Brandi! Tell us about yourself and how you landed in the sustainability world?

Brandi Susewitz: As a kid, I really liked arranging my own space - hanging wallpaper, trying different layouts and finding items I thought would look good in my room. After high school, I enrolled at Cañada Community College in Redwood City, California to pursue an interior design certificate. 

A few years later, I landed  an internship sorting the library at a commercial furniture dealership in the Bay Area. Eventually, I was promoted to sales, where I really flourished. I liked the reward of generating new business.

Most of my clients were budget-conscious startups seeking furniture, and they’d often ask, “Do you have anything used?” I started keeping a little Excel spreadsheet. I’d jot down notes like, 'Company A needs 50 chairs and 50 tables, budget $200.' Then, when another company called to offload furniture, I’d make the connection. It became this fun process of matchmaking, pairing people and resources that otherwise would’ve gone to waste. 

mebl: What happened next?

Susewitz: In 2000, I developed this into RWA, my first business. The name stood for Russell Williams, my grandfather, who I really looked up to. RWA was a boutique dealership. For 14 years we bought and sold second-life commercial furniture inventory from companies in the Bay Area going out of business or downsizing. 

Running RWA taught me so much about the secondary furniture market, reverse logistics, and most importantly, the massive amount of furniture that ends up discarded. 

By 2014, my husband and I were looking for greater financial stability, so we both returned to working for a furniture dealership. When the pandemic suddenly hit, in 2020, offices went dark. All of our experience came together – matchmaking, reselling, understanding client needs, and awareness of waste. It felt like the right moment to build a scalable solution. That’s what led to RESEAT.

mebl: What is RESEAT and how did it start?

Susewitz: RESEAT is an online, centralized platform. We are seeking to redefine how companies track, repurpose, and resell office furniture -- by creating a seamless second-life marketplace that prioritizes circularity, sustainability, and efficiency.

March 2020 landed us – all of us! –  in uncertainty, trying to make sense of the state of the world. I started thinking about all the furniture out there in suddenly empty buildings. 

From an already huge furniture waste problem – I couldn't help but wonder how much huge-er that had suddenly become! I spoke with many people in the know, including  the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  

Our discovery? In the US, 98% of all contract furniture ends up in the landfill. Less than 2% is recycled or moves to a second life. Hearing those statistics, I knew right away – that, in our landfills, there’s both a multi-billion dollar untapped revenue stream AND an enormous barely-tapped opportunity for positive environmental impact.

Where most see waste, RESEAT sees inventory.

mebl: What came next?

Susewitz: I went on YouTube, taught myself how to build an online marketplace catering to commercial furniture. Clear Office launched four months later. To my surprise, people in the industry started reaching out, wanting to learn more. I began making sustainability presentations to major design teams eager to better understand the potential for reuse in their projects.

Five months in, I got a call from an editor at CNBC. The day after their story ran, we woke up to global press coverage, over 300 orders in our inbox, and new orders coming in every 30 seconds. For weeks! 

That’s when we knew we were onto something -- people are willing to search for and buy second-life furniture sight-unseen.

mebl: Why did second-life become more appealing to buyers? 

Susewitz: When I launched Clear Office, it really bothered me how poorly used furniture was presented online. If you searched “used office furniture” …   outdated, uninviting images would fill the screen! A great piece, for example, like a Herman Miller Aeron chair, would be photographed in a dusty warehouse with tons of clutter. And you had to call for a price quote. That’s no longer how people shop! 

So, attractive presentation was one of the first things we focused on. Today, listings on our site always feature a clean, white-sweeped front-facing image of the furniture piece. Further images provide closeups and detail. We also have a strong vetting process.

mebl: Were you up against a perception issue?

Susewitz: Commercial furniture is built to last – decades and decades and decades – and most is not even seeing one decade. When many people think of used office furniture, they think of 1970s olive green with some coffee-stained chairs. But, in reality, most furniture in landfills is less than 10 years old. That reflects typical furniture lease lengths of five to seven years. 

mebl: What’s the change that you saw unfold?

Susewitz: When the CNBC article ran, people called to ask, "We have buildings worth of furniture that we need to sell. We're not coming back to the office. Can you help us?" 

After 14 years running RWA, I knew how to connect buyers and sellers of second-life furniture inventory. Yet, I couldn't help these companies. They were reacting without a plan. Most were Fortune 500 companies that didn’t even have an inventory of their own furniture.  

mebl: So the commercial-furniture industry had sown the seeds of its own big problem?

Susewitz: That was my 'AH-HA! moment'.

While operating at enormous scale, the commercial furniture industry was not setting up its customers for success. I realized – we're selling all this furniture with no way to manage it. 

That there is so much commercial-furniture waste NOT because the furniture doesn't have any value or no one wants it. 

Rather, it’s because companies don’t have the proper information to communicate what they have. Most companies only had tiny thumbnail photos and a random description of their furniture. This is not enough information to work with! 

We changed our entire company concept: we became a front-facing marketplace and shifted our strategy to partnering with furniture dealers across the nation. We started developing RESEAT as a solution to an inventory problem.

mebl: Tell us more about RESEAT – and Digital Product Passports and the RESEATID. 

Susewitz: A digital product passport contains everything you need to know about a piece of  furniture in order to do anything with it in the future - including manufacturer name, size, color, location, area, quantity on site, pricing, and CO2 details. We get a SIF (Simple Interchange Format) file from our dealers – that they originally used to place the order with the manufacturers – and we upload it to our platform. This generates digital product passports!

By tagging each product with a QR code, you can scan, say, a chair on the app and it connects directly to our circular marketplace. You can renew products through reupholstering, refinishing, and/or cleaning – or you can send the furniture to be taken apart and its pieces truly recycled. Via our platform, all we're doing is connecting vendors to the dealers they already work with locally. 

A screenshot of the RESEAT platform showing the full set of actions users can take on their inventory.

mebl: What’s a surprising contributor to our massive furniture-waste problem?

Susewitz: Very few people know the warranty on a specific furniture product. I can't tell you how many companies, for example, throw away chairs because of broken arm caps, not realizing the manufacturer can replace those arm caps! 

mebl: How do dealers respond to RESEAT’s business model, especially those with a traditional focus on selling new furniture?

Susewitz: Great question! There's a core misconception about profit margins on selling new versus used furniture. When I left the dealership, we would see an 18 -20% gross profit margin on sales of new furniture. With used furniture, we're working at a 45% profit margin. This is because most clients have already written off their furniture purchase after 7 years and they don't want to see it end up in landfill or have to pay for removal. 

Dealers also like our business proposition because it helps them stay connected to their clients. If you can tell your clients what they own and where it is, you become a lot more valuable to them – instead of just selling them furniture as a commodity. 

Every time a dealer registers its projects with a digital product passport – and then a customer goes to resell that furniture on our marketplace - we share the profits with the dealer.  We want the dealer in the driver's seat because we need their data and their order information. We get the biggest bang for our buck in circularity if we start tracking items from the very beginning of purchase. 

We are also able to provide dealerships with a report on what was moved, what was sold, what was donated, and what went to landfill. Having that data allows them to improve their numbers. 

Through RESEAT, this company furnished its office using 100% second-life furniture.

mebl: What needs to change big-time to truly advance circularity through tools like RESEAT and RESEATID?

Susewitz: Change in behavior. We’ve received great feedback on RESEAT so far. But if people don’t actually use it, it's not going to make any difference. It really requires a mindset shift: to think about the end from the very beginning.

That’s something I’ve been talking about a lot with firms, including giants like Gensler, the design firm. They’re designing incredible spaces with beautiful products and finishes, but within ten years, that furniture is often gone because the client moves or does a refresh. Yet almost all of it still has considerable value!

That’s why the push for digital product passports is so important. In the European Union, manufacturers will soon be required to include passports on every product. That will make it so much easier to track furniture ‘from cradle to cradle’ and to connect all the players in the ecosystem. 

The real circular economy begins when transparency and accountability are built in from day one.

mebl:  We can’t wait to see what comes next!

READ more Changemaker Interviews here.

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