Relieve Furniture
Why Relieve Group and office furniture?
10.7 million tons of office furniture (42 million items) are sent to landfills every year in Europe. For such a ubiquitous industry, the figures are alarming. Of all discarded office furniture, only 2% is successfully repurposed or recycled. From all this waste, next to none of it is reused or recycled properly. This represents a clear and quantifiable place for climate impact. In Belgium, the volume represents 1 million items per year, 90% of which are incinerated.
Yet the vast majority of these items are still in pristine condition even as thousands of potential recipients struggle to find this type of quality office equipment at an affordable price.
Expertise and ambition
With a heritage of expertise that has already enabled the transfer of 25,000 office items to non-profit organizations and schools in collaboration with a hundred large companies (PWC, Nestlé, Lenovo, Ogilvy, etc.), Relieve Group srl wishes to continue its innovative deployment in an accelerated and sustained manner.
Ambition
The Marketplace currently has nearly 5,000 members, mostly made up of schools and non-profit organizations. Since January 1, 2022, the platform has welcomed other players such as companies, start-ups, public institutions, architect’s offices, freelancers, seduced by the circular "Relieve Community" and ready to contribute to the deployment of the circular wave to generate a meaningful impact together.
How is our solution innovative?
Relieve is at the crossroads of two needs. On the one hand, that of large companies that are unable to organize a second life for their furniture in order to meet their pressing CSR objectives. And on the other, that of non-profit organizations, schools and young and/or transitioning companies wishing to fit out their office spaces in order to work in the best conditions, avoiding "fast furniture" and therefore with quality, professional products at accessible prices while limiting their carbon footprint at entry.
Relieve offers an accessible and innovative way to meet these furniture needs.
Like other players before it (Opalis, Waio, etc.) Relieve believes in the digitization of exchanges via platforms in order to optimize reuse. However, there is currently no digital platform for the exchange of professional furniture or with sufficient critical mass to be attractive.
The Relieve platform is a Marketplace, so it is intended to be intuitive and adaptable to all scenarios in terms of supply and demand in order to streamline reuse and second-hand traffic.
On both sides, Relieve also responds to the need to reduce the environmental impact linked to the act of purchase by extending the life of quality furniture (which offers the ability to be reused).
Differentiation
Relieve offers a series of added values that make it possible to dissociate its offer from those of the competitors:
• Relieve offers an intuitive digital platform. Offering all the facilities for a complete and fast transaction from the online posting to the recovery of the furniture for the beneficiary
• Relieve offers donors the possibility of obtaining an estimate of the carbon impact avoided by taking back the volume of furniture they offer on the platform
• Relieve systematizes the contribution to associations on the amount of the transaction, so it is not an option as is the case elsewhere
• Relieve targets furniture of a sufficiently high quality and in an acceptable condition to guarantee a second life over time
• Relieve can also rely on an already large network of donors and beneficiaries. About 140 large companies and 5,000 non-profit organizations and schools are already connected to Relieve via its partner Hu-Bu