Hi Sib! What's your background, and what are you currently working on?



My name is Sib, and I’m co-founder and head of product/growth at Branch Office Furniture (Branch), an NYC-based startup with the mission of making it easy for growing companies to create an office their teams will love.



We sell our own line of office essentials: desks, chairs, conference tables, lounge furniture, and accessories. Then we handle everything from office design to delivery and installation. As you grow, move or needs change, we help you update your space plan or trade your furniture in for credit toward your next purchase.



For those who haven’t furnished an office before, reviewing the status quo might help illuminate why we’re different: growing companies typically face two bad options when it comes time to buy office furniture.



On the one hand, you can go with “fast furniture” from Ikea or Office Depot, solutions that are cheap and fast but lack quality and service that scales to the needs of an enterprise (try asking Ikea to negotiate with your landlord about freight elevator access or union labor). On the other hand are “contract furniture” solutions like Herman Miller, which make wonderful physical products but sell through middlemen dealers that require you to navigate an opaque sales process, wait 6-12 weeks for delivery, and pay markups of up to 50%. With either solution, when you outgrow your space, you’re stuck with the furniture: most people just throw it out, which means 17 billion pounds of office furniture in the trash each year.



A photo I took in NYC a few months ago - part of the problem we’re trying to solve!





With Branch, outfitting your team with a standing desk, ergonomic chair, and filing cabinet costs as much as a single chair might cost from a high-end furniture dealer, with transparency, flexibility and full service included.





What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I’ve always been interested in starting a business. Beyond the financial upside, the variety of work, the (relative) agency of being your own boss and the satisfaction in bringing something new into the world appeal to me. I’m also fascinated by systems and organizational design. If the first act of a strong executive team is building a product or service that customers love, the second act is building the culture, processes, and team that enable sustained excellence in executing on that mission. Building a great culture is the only durable competitive advantage, and it seemed like a fascinating challenge.



But it took me a while to develop the conviction to do something on my own. I spent the first few years of my career at a real estate tech startup called Redfin, working on special projects and incubating new businesses within the company.



I had an incredibly cool job as a generalist at a fast-growing startup and learned a ton about products and startups from my mentors at Redfin. I wouldn’t change my first chapter for anything, but three years into the job, I was convinced it was time to strike out on my own. I had saved up some money, with few liabilities, and wanted to take a swing with my risk tolerance at its peak.



So I quit my job without knowing quite what I wanted to build...and began a two-year journey to figure it out. I spent part of that time traveling the world and consulting on growth with a variety of startups to make money and learn about different organizational styles and markets (also to have fun).



Then I moved to NYC (where I’m from) and co-founded a pre-idea incubator for interesting people in tech working on their next thing. In hindsight, I’d recommend spending more time validating a thesis before quitting your job, but there’s value in open-ended exploration as well if you can swing it.



I ended up as an EIR at a small venture fund in NYC and decided to spend one last summer working on ideas. That’s when I got introduced to my now co-founder Greg. He also came from the real estate tech world, and a mutual friend introduced us; I knew nothing about office furniture when we had our first meeting. Greg had spent the past two years running real estate operations for a flexible office space company, where he encountered the issues with buying office furniture firsthand. When he spelled out the problems with incumbents, and the opportunity to create a 21st-century experience in a huge market, I was ready to hear more. Two months later, in September 2018, we incorporated the company.





How did you build Branch?



The first order of business was figuring out our actual product: our initial line of workstation furniture. Right after starting the business, we raised a little money from friends, family and a few angels. At this point, we had little more than a deck and a few dozen customer interviews. We needed the funding to head over to develop our first furniture products; if you’re building a software business, you might not have to raise right away.



Though we wanted to manufacture in the US where we are based, we realized that small-batch manufacturing domestically would be prohibitively expensive for the time being. After researching a half dozen countries, we settled on China due to its exceptional value and quality for price in manufacturing durable goods, even with tariffs; many of our high-end competitors manufacture in China as well.



In October 2018 my co-founder Greg flew to China, hired a translator, and began visiting factories. We ultimately found two manufacturing partners who agreed to take a risk--many high-quality vendors are as selective with their partnerships as their retail partners are--and produce a test run of furniture for us. We ended up kicking off with an adjustable height desk, standard desk, open office benching, and an ergonomic chair, striking the balance between a lean line and a complete solution.



In the process of building our sample run of furniture.





While Greg was finalizing our initial line, I was working on building our digital presence. We decided to launch on Shopify because of its robust infrastructure and selection of apps, found an off-the-shelf theme and customized it to our needs. Once we received our samples, we hired a photographer and took our first photos; great photography is paramount for a visual product like ours. In February 2019, we officially launched.



Our first website (under our old brand, Bureau)





This was one of the more stressful phases of building the business: the two of us and our third co-founder Verity were paying ourselves little to nothing, and encountering new questions every day on everything from international freight forwarding to furniture design.

