As employees return to office post Covid, demand for ‘home-like’ office furniture is on the rise

As more employees return to office in a post-Covid world and the traditional image of an office undergoing a transition, office spaces as rooms full of chairs and tables are becoming a thing of the past.

With an emphasis on the need to feel more like ‘at home’, workspaces today call for soft sofas, audio solutions, walking spaces, private spaces and more, said Sameer Joshi, Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing, B2B, Interio, Godrej Enterprise Group.

During and after Covid, people working from home got used to a certain home-like atmosphere. This is being replicated in offices now, he told businessline.

There is a lot of technology integration at work space with video conferencing becoming a norm, which wasn’t there earlier. The workspace design needs to be changed accordingly. Now, in addition to visual privacy, acoustic privacy is also required, he said.

Versatility factor

How can a meeting room get converted into a learning training room and then become a party area in the evening? These are some of the changes that have happened post Covid, he said.

Joshi said that the current market size of the institutional furniture industry in India is estimated to be ₹50,000–₹60,000 crore within the broader furniture segment. Godrej Interio in the institutional furniture segment (pan India) has a 15 per cent market share.

Joshi said GI’s projected revenue fiscal ending March 31, 2025, is expected to be ₹3,500 crore, with the B2B segment accounting for about 70 per cent. “We are present in the office, healthcare and education segments. We are continuously trying to grow our business from these three verticals,” he added.

He also cited examples of two kinds of patented chairs that the company has come up with to address the new ways of work.

The perfect chair

One is the motion chair, which is designed to make users move and enables them to adopt dynamic, three-dimensional body movements, while the other one is the ‘Posture Perfect’ that tracks the movement of the human spine and gives complete back support in every position of recline, he said. “We have patents for both Motion and Posture Perfect chairs,” he said. Nearly 70 products have design registrations and nine have patents, he added.

In Tamil Nadu, Joshi said the market has been muted at 5-7 per cent growth, but the company hopes to double this rate. Prospects for Tamil Nadu are good with various real estate consultants projecting that nearly 12 million sq ft of space is getting added between 2025 and 2026, he said.

The company has a manufacturing plant in Kalahar near Mumbai; at Shirwal near Pune, at Haridwar, and an export unit inside the Madras Export Processing Zone in Chennai, he said. “We export our products to 36 countries,” he added.