t: (888) 264 2253 | f: (630) 665 3063 | 501 South Gary Ave M – F 8:30am to 5pm 1954 S Stoughton Rd. 1575 N. Barker Road 444 N. Orleans Street, Suite 200 Affordable Office Interiors (AOI) is a full service office interiors firm providing new, recycled and remanufactured office furniture. We have a 200,000 S.F. warehouse full of savings for our clients. We specialize in used and remanufactured Haworth systems furniture in addition to carrying used Herman Miller and Steelcase systems. Furthermore, we offer a large selection of new furniture lines such as AIS, Global, Hon, National and OFS. Additionally, we offer project management, space planning and finish selection assistance. In addition to providing full service furniture installations, our staff of trained installers will afford service and warranty follow-up. Moreover, we can help with any existing furniture our clients have by evaluating a fair trade-in value towards the purchase of their office furniture.
Affordable Office Interiors will optimize our client’s furniture selections, by maximizing their office furniture budget.Create a Space that Brings Out Your Best Your furniture is an asset. A chair isn’t simply a place to sit, and a desk isn’t just a work surface. The right selection today can create a sense of place, enhance productivity, and improve employee satisfaction, engagement, and retention far into the future. Get to know us Interior Investments Gets "Schooled" Interior Investments heads to Herman Miller's Boot Camp for 3 days of training, networking and fun. A well-designed space can breathe life back into your workplace. Achieve more with a Living Office. Discover the future of work It isn’t just something we value—it’s how we think. We commit to environmentally sustainable practices as an extension of our goal to be a responsible corporate citizen. Meet the remastered Aeron Chair The telescoping wall system by Muraflex allows you to use what you have to...
See more architectural solutions Our process begins with you: our partner. We take into account every step that’s... It’s worth investing in your workplace. Interior Investments creates dynamic...ZEELAND — In a new lawsuit, a West Michigan office furniture manufacturer accuses a Canadian company of producing and selling knock offs of one of the industry’s iconic designs. Herman Miller Inc. (Nasdaq: MLHR) has sued Gold Leaf Holding Ltd. of British Columbia over the company’s intentional violation of trademark law in selling, distributing and advertising several products marketed under the Eames moniker, according to court documents. The designs of Charles and Ray Eames for decades have been a part of the Herman Miller collection, dating back to the late 1940s. But in the lawsuit filed in August in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, the Zeeland-based Herman Miller alleges that Gold Leaf, which does business as Rove Concepts, sold “design reproductions” of six classic Eames products, including the Eames Lounge Chair, Molded Plywood Dining Chair and two version of the designers’ Office Chair.
Herman Miller says Rove Concepts’ actions were “intentional and with knowledge of the considerable reputation, goodwill, and fame associated with and represented by Herman Miller’s registered trademarks,” according to court documents. “Indeed, Rove Concepts’ express business model is to duplicate Herman Miller’s designs as closely as possible,” according to the filing. Prior to filing the lawsuit, Herman Miller sent cease and desist notices to the Canadian company “on numerous occasions.” For Herman Miller, the lawsuit comes as a part of the company’s overall strategy to police and curtail unlawful use of its trademarks. The company is being represented in the case by Grand Rapids-based law firm Varnum LLP. “We have a vigorous program in place to protect our brand,” a company representative said in an emailed statement to MiBiz declining to comment on the ongoing litigation. “By defending our intellectual property and products, we protect our customers, designers, and workers both here in America and around the globe.”
In fact, the Zeeland manufacturer has sued other companies in the past over the use of the Eames name and designs. Herman Miller filed lawsuits against California-based Modernica Inc. in 2014 and New American Inc. of Toronto in 2012 over imitation Eames products. More recently, the company settled a 2015 trademark lawsuit with New York-based Madison Seating LLC over its selling of used Herman Miller chairs without labeling them as being pre-owned. According to the new case, Herman Miller alleges that Rove Concepts “engaged in a number of delay tactics to avoid responding to Herman Miller’s demands, including switching law firms on at least three different occasions.” The lawsuit contends that Rove Concepts did agree to remove the trademarked content from its website and marketing materials, but Herman Miller said the company failed to do so in entirety. “Despite its repeated representations that it would remove all Herman Miller trademarked content from its website and social media materials, Rove Concepts continues to unlawfully use Herman Miller trademarks and trade dress,” according to court documents.
Rove Concepts did not respond to a request for comment at the time this story went to press. Get Coupon Codes and Online Deals delivered straight to your inbox"Buy low, sell high. That’s the other guy’s problem." - Louis Winthorpe III, Trading Places (1983)Here’s a story about the time we made $300 in profit buying used Aeron Chairs on Craigslist and reselling them to our Y Combinator classmates at marked up prices. Basically, we were experimenting if we could make a business out of arbitraging used goods. In short, we learned that lugging furniture around the Bay Area didn’t seem to be an especially scalable business model.For a little back story, Priceonomics is building the price guide for everything. Just like Kelly Blue Book creates price reports for cars, we do the same for bicycles, computers, phones, tablets, cars, and much more. We are participating in Y Combinator’s upcoming Winter 2012 batch and we decided to launch one week before the term started (about a minute after we had a minimum viable product).
Our immediate aim is to figure out fair price estimates for every product ever built. Our longer term goal is also to some day make money (Rohin went to business school and he vaguely remembered learning that was important). As a result, we try to run various “business model experiments” to figure out how one day we’ll make money. Our first experiment we dubbed “Craigslist Arbitrage.” To do this, we would identify products with steady demand but high price variance. We could then buy items that were posted at bargain prices and later sell them at the market price. Also, much of our team takes particular delight in Craigslist scavenging. Michael furnished most of his apartment from the free section of Craigslist. Rohin once bought a bike for $300 on Craigslist which he then resold for $900 a week later after realizing he didn’t like it. So basically Michael and Rohin were looking for an excuse to do what they like - buy and sell stuff on Craigslist. Trek 5000 bike Rohin bought and resold on Craigslist.Perhaps because we were sitting on extremely uncomfortable chairs at the time, we decided to focus on Herman Miller Aeron Chairs.
There’s a fairly steady demand for these chairs in the Bay Area, particularly among web startups. Whether Aeron chairs are good chairs or are worth the money is perhaps best discussed by others. We fired off an email to our YC batch with a simple proposition:Subject: Aeron Chairs for $450 from Priceonomics Delivered to YouFor the first few companies that email me back, Priceonomics will help source and deliver to your office used Herman Miller Aeron Chairs for the price of $450 per chair.New Aerons are $869 on Amazon [price updated from original]. The median price for good-to-excellent quality Aerons on Craigslist in the bay area is $450 according to our Priceonomics data [price updated from original]. You need to sift through a lot of spam just to find those ones!We’re dog-fooding our data to try to cherry pick the underpriced chairs that are listed on Craigslist or eBay. We suspect we can use this method to source them for around $400, netting us a tidy profit of $50 per chair.
We’ll take 100% of this profit and put it in a beer fund for all to enjoy.If your company is interested, just email me how many chairs you need and I’ll follow up to confirm sizes with you.Within an hour we got orders for 5 chairs and about 50 other emails protesting that true hackers practiced stark asceticism which did not include sitting on the same chairs investment bankers used. We shrugged off the ascetics and heartily got to work sourcing some chairs from Craigslist.At this stage, Priceonomics could answer “what’s a fair price for this Aeron Chair” but not quite “find me the lowest priced Aeron chair near me and make sure this is not spam.” So to find the chairs, we just kept our eyes on Craigslist through conventional means like RSS alerts or checking the site manually.Our Priceonomics estimate for the Aeron Chair Size B was $450 with a range of $349 to $549. In practice we found the range to be more like $400 to $600 in San Francisco. Since we weren’t time constrained, our plan was to only look at listings that we could reasonably expect to purchase for $375 to $400 (netting a profit of $50 to $75 per chair).
Almost right away we hit Craigslist gold. A video editing company was moving out of their office in the Mission and they had 23 chairs available for $400 each. Before we could jump at this awesome opportunity, we had to get around the fact that none of us owned a car. Luckily, one quick call to a supportive girlfriend and we were on our way to buy some chairs.Here’s where things got less than scalable:1. We came to a room filled with 23 chairs and had little idea as to which were in proper functioning order. We spent about an hour sitting on the chairs and testing the various levers.2. We negotiated with the seller and eventually got him down to $375 per chair. He was only willing to sell us four chairs because he wanted to keep the rest for the new office. Doh, now we need to find another source to buy that 5th chair! Out of pocket, we had to write a check for $1500 (which is kind of a lot of money).3. Aeron chairs are extremely heavy! As Michael noted as he attempted to lift a chair in to the car, “I’m glad I have a desk job.”