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- [00:03]
A
Hi, I'm Joshua Christensen, executive producer of Ink Podcasts. And today we have a special episode for you where I interview Thierry on Day, who's the managing director of Room. Now, Room is a company that produces a series of modular office pods. They are either two seaters where you can have a one on one meeting. They have some larger booths for multiple people, and they even have telephone booth styles for deep focus work. We've actually been using Room booths for INC Podcasts for a few years now. We have a Room booth on the floor of the Inc 5000 conference every year where I record interviews for our your Next move podcast. So we are genuinely fans of the product here at Ink. For this conversation, Tiri and I talked about how Room is rethinking office design, how they are pursuing sustainability and their products, and what the workplace of the future can and should look like. All right, here is that conversation. Enjoy. Thierry, thanks so much for being here.
- [01:09]
B
Yeah, thank you for having me.
- [01:11]
A
So we here at both Fast Co. And Inc. I work for the podcast team here, have been working with Room for I believe the last three, three years now at our events and podcasting in your booth. So I'm really excited about this conversation because I do genuinely use and enjoy the product. But I want to go back to first principles with Room. So Room was born out of the idea that we can build better workspaces for modern work. How would you describe that mission today and how has it evolved?
- [01:43]
B
Yeah, so the mission has evolved a lot, but we stay true to the founding principles. It started seven years ago ago, and that was with a very simple observation. Open floor plan workspaces were very noisy, were lacking privacy, and often negatively impacting the productivity and the well being of employees. And Art's job ever since has been to help our customers fix that. Simple as that. So the mission has evolved. Of course, now it's more about providing an answer to this ever growing need for flexibility. Businesses have been increasingly looking for flexibility at a lot of levels. If we try to define what that means in our opinion at Room is the access to shorter lease agreements, the access to talent beyond the location of where your office or where your offices are, but also a lot more flexibility and Versat when it comes to the setup of the workspace.
- [02:52]
A
Yeah, I think a trend ever since the pandemic really that we've been seeing and covering in our design section and in our work life section at Fast Company, our sister company, and also on the inside as well, is this desire for more of a homey feel in the office. I think that makes sense with a hybrid work model. People coming back from working in their living rooms for a few years. How has your design aesthetic or your design principles kind of evolved in the past few years? And how do you keep ahead of.
- [03:27]
B
The curve so we make room for people? It's been our motto since the very beginning. So what does it mean? We design beautiful products. I know I'm a little bit biased here, but with a sleek design and products that stand out if you want them to stand out, and products that blend in at the same time. If I try to summarize the core attributes or for design principles, we pay a lot of attention at making sure that the products are very flexible, very versatile, very easy to install, to disassemble, to move around in the workspace, reinstall. And of course, that's sustainability. Everything that we create is either using recycled materials or recyclable materials. All our products ship flats. And a lot of our products, of course, can replace construction. So that's the main principles that we have been adhering to since we started.
- [04:34]
A
How do you balance that? Because I imagine there is, in terms of what the needs of your customers are, there's a balance between aesthetic and functionality. How do you think about that, if that makes sense?
- [04:46]
B
What I'm going to say is that designing simplicity is a very complex process, but I believe we have achieved that goal. So our ethos around that again from day one has been, of course, to design products that look beautiful with this minimalist, understated look. Products that are very appealing also to the users, but that are also very functional. And that's where designing simplicity was complex, is that basically we want something that is easy to transport from A to B with the lowest footprint possible, and something that you can assemble quickly. Because assembling products in the workspaces, costing money and using up resources that you can disassemble and move around, because flexibility and the ability to reconfigure your workspace quickly was also something important. So, yeah, I think when we listen to our customers and to the people who are using our products every day, you, Josh being one of them, I think we have accomplish that goal.
- [06:02]
A
That being said, I have a laundry list of new ideas for you to implement. But speaking of customer feedback, do you have any examples of like, specific feedback you've gotten that has helped you develop your product further?
- [06:19]
B
Yeah, so I think I have a couple of interesting examples. One is that when we noticed very early on that many customers were telling us that their employees with diverse Needs. As an example, neurodivergent employees were really praising the room products. They were spending a lot of time in a phone booth or in a meeting room. And they were also telling their employers that they were much happier about coming more often to the office because they know that they could sit in one of the room products and do focus work and be more productive in the workplace. At the time, we had not designed our products with this consideration in mind. But of course, in our subsequent developments, we realized that we could take a lot of this feedback into the design process. So that was great because that was directly using customer feedback that we were not expecting. If you look at another example, more recently, we launched a new range of products called the Room Collection. And these products all have ADA compliant versions. And the easy route, even though my engineering team was telling us it's not that easy, the easy route would be to design products that are compliant with ADA specifications. Of course, it's a requirement. But what we did was also taking account the feedback from the customers to design not only a product that was EDA compliant, but that was making sure that everything, not only in the aesthetics, but in the usability of the switch, when you want to dim the light, when you want to move around, if you're in a wheelchair, etc. Was really, really optimized for customers. So it's been something that was not intentional at the beginning, but that over the years we have made more intentional in our process.
- [08:18]
A
You brought up sustainability a little bit earlier, and I'd like to touch on that a bit more. Supply chains have not gotten simpler to navigate right now. So sourcing materials, I'm sure you have decently long supply chains. How do you manage that and the increased burden of that, the increased cost of that, with maintaining your principles around sustainability.
- [08:40]
B
So, first of all, our products are manufactured in the United States and in Indiana in Hunting Berg, and there is a very big network of suppliers, meaning that we are able to source the majority of our product within a fairly limited radius. That gives us a lot more flexibility to achieve that goal. And beyond that, when we look at what does sustainability mean? Exactly. So of course we're using materials that are recyclable. We're using also a lot of recycled material. As an example, for the soundproofing, we use foam that is made of recycled plastic bottles. I should check that again. I've lost count about, you know, how many millions of millions of plastic bottles that we have recycled at that stage. But I think we need to look at sustainability beyond that as well, one of the learnings we had in the recent years is that a lot of companies are now looking at, how can I go away from construction? Construction is extremely wasteful. We have seen, I don't know how many customers who were setting up a brand new workspace, building drywalls, building meeting rooms, and then three, four years later, they needed to tear that down because it was not meeting their needs anymore. So I think that's where also probably sustainability as the biggest impact.
- [10:12]
A
Yeah. And also with that, I think it's a cost balance for your clients and for your customers. I mean, this is a premium product. It's an investment. It's an investment for sure.
- [10:23]
B
Absolutely.
- [10:23]
A
So when you think about your price point, who you're trying to market to, and then balancing that cost, are you finding that that is an easier conversation with clients because of that construction cost factor in, or how are you marketing such a luxury premium product when companies are scraping by in some cases, but do have these needs?
- [10:46]
B
Yeah. So it's definitely a point where when I look at it three, four years ago, we needed to do a lot of education explaining to customers that, yeah, it's a premium product, there's a cost to it. But if you look at the money that you would spend on doing construction, as an example, and how long this investment would, would last, customers were realizing that, yeah, of course, it's not that expensive in comparison, actually, where we had a lot of situations where customers were saving on average 30% by using, you know, modular products instead of construction. Very interestingly so is that more recently there is a lot of awareness. It's not, you know, it used to be a pitch, if you want, that we were doing. Right now we do not need to pitch that anymore because there's really an awareness that construction is very expensive. Construction is not very flexible. This discussion has become much, much easier.
- [11:42]
A
Basically with that evolution. I'm sure the you're working with a lot of buildings and building management where these offices take place. I'm sure that was a hurdle early on with, you know, make fire codes and other, you know, buildings being like, what is this that you're putting into my building? How has that conversation evolved?
- [12:02]
B
So compliance, building code and is of course a big topic. And it has become recently in the last two years an even bigger topic, especially in certain jurisdictions where there is a very strict code. And also, interestingly now we see more and more building inspectors who are very familiar with our products. So basically, they know it's very easy now to understand what can I do? What am I not allowed to do in a workspace? We have also solutions to connect sprinklers as an example. So things that make it a little bit, that make it a little bit easier and that remove also the obstacle that could remain for going modular instead of construction.
- [12:48]
A
I want to switch gears a little bit and talk a little bit about leadership from your perspective in this space, as a leader at this company. What have you learned from the beginning of your time at Room to now about leading a company in the design space like this?
- [13:06]
B
So I think that one of the key learnings for me has been the importance of really staying true to the purpose that we serve. What does that mean? That means that we do not want to over design our products. You know, Room has become a very successful business in the space. There's a lot of brand recognition, so that would be like an easy bias to say, yeah, our brand is highly recognized in the space, so we are going to overdo it a little bit. So that's something that we have really learned to avoid. Remain very, very true to the purpose that we serve and that we want to do it well. There are other things like we want to make sure that our products really facilitate technology. So especially with collaboration, video conferencing and things like that, so that you have the ideal setup to do. But we do not want our product to be stuffed with too much built in technology that could very quickly become a distraction or become even gimmick technology, if I may say so. And it's hard, it's really hard because of course you want to embrace the new gadget that is out there. And I think it's hard to resist, but we resisted that. So that we want to make sure that we try to be the best at serving this purpose. That you need privacy, you need to do focused work, you need to do it in the best possible environment. That's what we do best and that's what we want to try to continue to do best.
- [14:39]
A
At the same time, you know, you can't get left behind by the technology and the new things that are coming along. Obviously, you know, there's a lot of talk right now, are we in an AI bubble? What's happening with this embracement? How are you thinking about technology? Whether that's, you know, a customer's experience on site or in terms of customer service going forward, how are you employing new technologies?
- [15:02]
B
So here there are two main directions that we are going into. One is that if you are a small or medium sized business, you do not necessarily have access to A designer, you probably don't have an architect or an in house designer who can help you create a new space if you open a new location, if you sign a new lease agreement. So here where we are leveraging technologies to make sure that through the website, the Room website, we want to make it as easy as possible, even if you don't have like the technical knowledge that an architect would have, to make it very easy to design, select the products needed for your workspace and then procure all these products very easily. So I think here that technology makes it very easy. Ideally you come with your, with your floor plan, you answer a couple of questions, et cetera, and then you get all the help that you need. The other direction where we see the importance of innovation is in our products, with our customers having a look at how can we make it very, very easy to bring new products to the market that remain extremely flexible and that help you Also. I'm coming back a little bit to this point of ideally completely replacing construction. We are not completely there yet, but I think within a few years we'll be very, very close to the stage where we have innovated enough in our products that basically you can set up a whole workspace without having to use any construction.
- [16:43]
A
That might answer my next question, but I'm going to ask it anyways. And what do you see as the next opportunity for Room? Maybe beyond that construction replacement point you just made.
- [16:54]
B
So very short term, we have just launched a new series of products called the Room Collect, which is a series of modular products of different sizes, products that are very configurable and that really are offering this serious alternative to traditional construction. And in the longer term is to help companies probably more SMBs, to really be able to very, very easily go through the whole process of creating a new workspace without having any specific competence.
- [17:31]
A
For it beyond maybe even beyond Room itself, what do you see as maybe a new trend or something that you're seeing on the horizon in terms of workplace design more broadly?
- [17:46]
B
So that something that has intensified, especially post Pandemic, for a very, very long time. The OFI space has been a space of constant connectivity. A little bit like my status on Slack that I always forget to update. I'm constantly available, even if I have in meeting and then I complain that I have 200 notifications that I have not replied to. So I think I would describe it a little bit like that. And I think that we could all benefit from a, a much more intentional collaboration in the workspace. Collaboration that gives space for each individual to more deep and focused work, collaboration that fosters meaningful interactions instead of having this culture of constant connectivity.
- [18:39]
A
Well, Thierry, this was great. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.
- [18:42]
B
Thank you very much for having me. Josh. Panoply.