Circular Furniture Design

During the Re-think Circular Economy Forum Milan 2022 event, Valentina Cerolini, co-founder of Deesup, started her speech by presenting their reality. Deesup is a startup with its own interpretation of the value of Circular Economy (CE). They started the company some years ago while following their intuition, they found a gap in the market and they decided to fill it out.

Cerolini stressed the fact that when they talk about market, they are talking about the luxury second-hand furniture market, which at that time was already huge in terms of size. At the moment, the estimates say that by 2025, the value of this market will reach about $16 billion, however, they already knew that the combination of CE model and the resale system they were adopting was becoming somehow mainstream. This is what happened as in many successful use cases, especially in the fashion industry such as for the famous acquisition of Depop from the American base Etsy.

Deesup: circular design

Zooming on furniture, Deesup characteristic, it is important to understand that this is the right moment for that and to offer the value through authenticity.

Their team of expert curators select all the iconic second-hand items that arrive in the platform that helped also in creating a community of design lovers. With their work and innovation, they were able to build a community of about 30,000 users consisting of design lovers, architects, interior designers, gallerists that are interested in the platform products because they see the value of the circularity in this app as well as a secure payment. Deesup plays the role of the mediator between buyers and sellers ensuring them a very smooth process for selling and buying furniture items.

From 2020, Cerolini continued, the startup experienced interesting booming years because people went through the pandemic and the houses became the main place to be. Moreover, the pandemic pushed them to a major commitment to the planet and to the society as well. Looking at data, 10 million tons of furniture are thrown away every year in Europe due to the linear economy system.

Circular design: Deesup and sustainability

Deesup is the marketplace that is innovating the consumption model of design furniture towards the implementation of CE principles, enabling the online resale of furniture throughout Europe. Like any revolution system, Deesup has also drawn up its sustainability manifesto, the springboard to make its business even more sustainable. In order to do that, they decided to become a benefit company as a starting point for an inclusive and innovative business to renew the consumption model of design furniture that has an intrinsic value made of precious materials that can last over time.

The goal is to make sure that those resources do not go to waste. To date, thousands of design pieces have been given a second life thanks to the work of the platform, avoiding excess production and the environmental costs of eventual disposal. However, it is not enough, there are still some environmental impacts that must be minimized, such as: carbon neutral deliveries and website; the possibility to locally pick up products directly from the seller and finally, eco-friendly packaging which are their primary objectives for supporting the green revolution and growing the community of design lovers by 10 times more than today by raising awareness towards a sustainable world. To differ from the competitors, they decided to manage all the process of acquisition of products, promotion and selling by focusing on each step of the process, especially with a major attention on the curation phase.

Deesup and the furniture sector

This lets them build up a unique marketplace where users can buy and sell in confidence all the selected icons. The reason why such focus of circular principles application is on the furniture sector is the durability of the items, which is the answer. The quality of those manufacturing makes things possible to last for longer time. In addition to durability, there is information as main reason to the question why furniture, because people are now aware about how to use certain items, how to repair them, how to treat them and to use them more responsibly. Moreover, there is also a solid demand of second-hand products with which people are getting more comfortable with.

According to them, the speaker concluded, the real power of the platform is its community with who they create daily guidelines and tips in order to educate people in behaving in a more responsible way and make them aware of their choices.

For further details you can watch the recording in English here or consult the final report of Re-think Milan 2022. To find out more about circular economy, visit Tondo’s blog!