Working from home has led to retail success for new Berkhamsted business

With over 70 new enquiries every day and a waiting list of customers, one new Berkhamsted business is bucking the retail trend.

The company, fittingly called Trend Office Furniture, based in Northbridge Road, is being led by three local female entrepreneurs.

Jo O’Neill, the company’s Operations Manager, said: “We recognised that with more and more people working from home there would be a huge demand for specialised office chairs and workstations for whatever room they have now adapted into their office.”

Together with fellow Hertfordshire residents Sianne Plenderleith and Bex Cassidy, the group put this theory to the test and were quickly proved correct - selling over 100 items a week purely by word of mouth and through Ebay.

“Executives are realising that they will not be going back to the office five days a week and at best they will be hot-desking from home for at least one or two days.

"Many companies are now paying their employees to kit out their home studies,” Sianne, Trend’s Marketing Director, commented, adding that they are working with local osteopaths who have noticed a huge rise in back and neck problems due to inadequate workstations.

Their approach also has an ethical basis as every single piece of office furniture sold has been prevented from going to landfill.

Jo said: “Second-user furniture is at the core of what we do. Our eco-friendly service is a model for what a modern business should look like – environmentally conscious, dynamic and with customers at our heart.”

Many of the items on sale from Trend are almost brand new because of the speed with which offices were forced to shut last March due to the Covid-19 lockdown, and home-workers will now be able to buy high-end office furniture at a fraction of the original cost.

Bex, Trend’s Product Manager, added: “With so many corporate offices downsizing or closing down altogether due to the pandemic, this is the ideal time for people to snap up top-quality office equipment to make working from home in the future so much more comfortable – and in turn productive.”

Trend is based in Northbridge Road, Berkhamsted. items can be bought at the Trend Office Furniture website, then delivered free within a 25-mile radius or collected from its storage headquarters.