The Furniture Hustlers of Silicon Valley

“Perfectly good, brand-new furniture is just being carted off to landfills,” she said.

So she created Reseat to help businesses liquidate furniture. The company uses an inventory management system that tracks the items’ “life cycles” so it can quickly share the specifications for the furniture, making the goods easier to sell. Given enough time, sellers can expect 20 cents on the dollar for their furniture, she said. Reseat, which has 14 employees, has worked with more than 100 companies and sold more than eight million pounds of furniture.

“Our goal is to sell it standing,” Ms. Susewitz said. “Once it ends up in a warehouse, it loses value and ends up collecting dust.”

In December, Reseat was hired to liquidate more than 900 work stations, 96 office chairs, 40 work benches, 24 sofas and 84 file cabinets at an office in Santa Clara, Calif. Analog Devices, the semiconductor company that had moved out, hardly used the space during the pandemic. But Pure Storage, the data storage company moving in, didn’t want those pieces. Reseat had just four weeks to sell the items.

“It just ate me up inside,” Ms. Susewitz said. That she found buyers in time was “a miracle,” she added.

Pure Storage said it was reusing a “substantial” amount of Analog Devices’ furniture, including desk chairs and conference room items, but it planned to install its existing desks “to better suit how Pure employees work in a more open office environment.” An Analog Devices representative declined to comment.

Ms. Susewitz was excited about the furniture at Sitecore because the company had contacted Reseat months ahead of its move, setting it up to easily find a home for its goods. At Sitecore’s office, she showed off how to identify the size of an Aeron chair. Each one has a set of plastic bumps hidden on its back. Two bumps indicate the most common size, a “B.”

There were 16 size Bs around a wooden conference table that Sitecore had built using wood from a houseboat that was in Sausalito, Calif. In the center, a basin filled with Legos was flanked by the universal emblems of the pandemic: a bottle of Purell and a package of Clorox wipes.