HOME OFFICE

A personal view from Dennis North, Managing Director of Mauser Interiors (UK) Ltd.

As everybody knows (?) this is the "coming market" with even the European Commission forecasting that by the end of the year 2000 there will something like 10,000,000 Home Office workers in one form or another in the EU!

This is a big number and therefore a big opportunity?

But the issues are "IN ONE FORM OR ANOTHER" and DISTRIBUTION!

In the last few years I have very reluctantly become computer illiterate! I say "illiterate" as it means I can switch it on, do a bit in Word and Excel but not enough to use the word "literate"!

Anyway, last summer I decided to set up a Home Office and spent a lot of time with my wife traipsing around various DIY and more specialised stores for some furniture. But nearly everything I saw was to put it mildly rubbish! The quality was appalling, with low grade chipboard that would not last 2 seconds in the hands of my Grandchildren and chairs so small that to cope with my sylph like posterior I would need two!

I then searched some of the better-known home interior and life style journals (which was an eye opener in itself!) but I found the exact opposite! Everything seemed to cost an absolute fortune and require a slightly larger version of Buckingham Palace to have enough space!

My amateurish research seemed to show that Home Office furniture is either cheap and cheerful or is targeted at Rockerfeller. Therefore, on the basis that there are a lot like me out there in the market that want a good quality product, that was highly functional, that fitted into a relatively small space and did not cost the earth, I did not actually "buy the Company" but decided to design my own furniture.

So have at look at formations, and let me know what you think.

It is not cheap, around £2,000 to kit out a room, but having tested it for 6 months I can tell you it works very well and requiring only around 3.5 square metres (6' x 6' in old money) it will fit into virtually any box bedroom or be relative inconspicuous in the corner of a living/dining room.

I particularly like the allavoro chair, see OPERATIONAL SEATING. It is a modern version of the sheriffs' swivel chair you see in Westerns, but with a very comfortable (and ergonomically correct) synchronous swivel/tilt action, and it does not visually dominate a home office environment. It is also very robust as I discovered when Luke and Garry, two of my Grandchildren, tried to see who could spin the other around fastest and played chariot races up and down the hall!

If you have not fallen asleep yet, this is where I come to "in one form or another".

It seems that as with most things there is a wide variety of requirements, from the permanent home working based person, through the professional or self employed who are out and about quite a lot, but do all their admin from home, to those like me who do a bit at home in the evenings and weekends and lots in between. I do not include the domestic PC user, as that is what the cheap and cheerful products are targeting.

Several years ago at a Trade Association meeting we discussed the impact of Home Working on the office furniture manufacturing industry. It was all doom and gloom because it was felt that the market for furniture in offices would reduce and be replaced by poor quality/low cost furniture for the home. This of course has not happened. Most of the Home Office furniture required is not replacing the office but is additional! Like me, most have an office or are at least desk sharing, plus a Home Office! And many people are only just beginning to appreciate the necessary increase in quality required by office furniture when compared to domestic furniture.

Incidentally, it is worth remembering that if an employer provides Home Office facilities or requires Home Working using a VDU, the EU Directive and H & S E Regulations apply and the employer is required to ensure compliance!

Then we come to the BIG problem of DISTRIBUTION!

It is not actually a distribution problem but a cost problem.

If you are Rockerfeller and are furnishing a palatial study, the manufacturer can afford for someone to visit your home, get all the relevant dimensions, design and plan the layout (and make changes!), and then send in a crew of fitters to assemble and install the furniture. If you employ reasonably well-paid and capable people, that represents about £800 of cost before you start actually making and supplying anything!

This makes it clearly out of reach for someone like me with a modest budget, even if the employer is paying for it.

Just to deliver a chair to a domestic site costs anywhere from £40 to £60!

The answer? I don't know! Sorry, but I would not tell you if I did as all my competitors would copy it! Maybe it is in a network of office furniture retailers who can undertake local distribution and installation? Maybe it's a web solution, by downloading simple space planning and ordering facilities? Or do it remotely by identifying the key information on the web, e-mailing it to the manufacturer, who can then provide the plan, specification and cost for ordering?

Whatever the answer, it is probably an IT solution as everything else seems to be!

Incidentally, I haven't quite mastered spell check yet so please forgive any of the above errors.