Beautifully Easy
Designing a great workplace just got a lot easier.
Read 9 minutes
As companies look for spaces that feel bespoke, a designer’s job is getting harder. They’re spending many hours looking for inspiration, tracking down details from numerous manufacturers and scanning sites for unique statement pieces. Facilities and real estate teams are also spending increasing amounts of time trying to coordinate efforts across a wide range of manufacturers and schedules. Listening to designers and clients describe how time consuming these frustrations can become is what inspired a team of people at Steelcase to ask, “How can we leverage technology to provide easy access to diverse products and create a streamlined and reliable ordering and delivery process?” Their answer is Steelcase Marketplace, a new online platform for easily sourcing and specifying products from a curated collection of over 3,000 options from 50+ brands. Add the expertise of the Steelcase Operations team and complex projects just got a lot easier.
Introducing Steelcase Marketplace:
Create and Collaborate With Ease
Whether you’re looking for a few products or 200, Steelcase Marketplace can help you find just the right solutions to bring your vision to life. Designers can explore products from the Steelcase family of brands, as well as an ever-growing list, including household names such as West Elm and Blu Dot to smaller shops like LeadHead Glass, Anchal and The Skateroom. Once they’ve identified what they want, Steelcase Marketplace creates a single order, one delivery and even one punch list, eliminating the complexity that happens when you source products from multiple places.
Discover
Find what’s new and what’s next. Explore products from some of the best and most forward-thinking brands across a range of looks and prices — all in one place.
Discover
Find what’s new and what’s next. Explore products from some of the best and most forward-thinking brands across a range of looks and prices — all in one place.
“When we heard designers describe what their days can be like it was so overwhelming that we said, ‘We’ve got to do something to help,’” says Joel Schellhammer, vice president, growth, integration and value creation. “It’s not easy work and it requires access to the most innovative and unique solutions. Steelcase Marketplace was our response to this challenge,” he notes. “It streamlines the process and helps designers spend more time designing and less time weeding through paperwork, getting them back to doing the work they love.”
“We have been carefully curating a unique portfolio from some of the world’s most iconic and forward-thinking design brands,” says Rebecca Steketee, who leads the Marketplace team and other digital initiatives in an effort to give dealers, designers and clients a better way to create diverse spaces. “These partners offer a diverse and eclectic selection of innovative furnishings, lighting, rugs, wallcoverings and accessories without adding complexity because you can access everything with the ease and reliability of the Steelcase distribution network and a new online platform that saves time and money.”
Create
Save time and streamline even the most complex projects. We’ve made it easy to create project boards, compare and specify products, download Revit symbols and keep an eye on your budget.
Steelcase Marketplace helps reduce the manual work designers do and streamlines the development of project boards, cut sheets and spreadsheets for RFPs, leaving more time to focus on the more creative details. It also allows users to save product images and download Revit symbols, making it faster to pull design proposals together. “With just one click you can download symbols, export bid packages into Excel, approve product or request a quote,” says Steketee.
Designers are reaping the benefits. Justina Potoczak, Diekema Hamann Architecture, is very excited about using the tool to save time and make project specification easier. “Where has this been all my life?” asks Potoczak. “On previous projects, I’d spend days typing those product details in. I love how intuitive this is.”
Collaborate
Connecting designers, clients and dealers has never been easier. Project teams can share design feedback, get quotes and place orders simply.
Collaborate
Connecting designers, clients and dealers has never been easier. Project teams can share design feedback, get quotes and place orders simply.
Communication is also easier. Designers can invite team members, clients and Steelcase dealers to work on their projects, allowing collaboration and streamlining of the design and approval process. Clients can use Marketplace to browse products and gather ideas, making it easier than ever to share their taste and desired aesthetic with their designer.
This makes it easier for the client and designer to get a shared vision of the project.
Saving Customers Lots of Time and Headaches
One Customer’s Story
A 60-year-old, multi-billion dollar global energy company was looking to create a dramatically different and vibrant workplace to attract the best talent. Its design firm had developed a plan that added lots of diverse social and collaborative spaces as well as areas for focus and deep work. It looked amazing and delivered on everything the client needed.
The Hard Way
Finding, specifying, ordering and shipping a diverse range of products from multiple suppliers can feel like a game of Tetris. It takes hours of searching for inspiration, looking all over the internet for the right products, followed by a web of orders that all need to be tracked and managed individually.
But the design included 128 different products from 50 companies, making it a complex project where many things could go wrong. Every time an additional manufacturer (not to mention 50) was added to the mix there was a greater potential for damage, larger offloading costs and the expense of double-handling product. List prices, warranties and lead times were all different. And since most deliveries come in partial loads, products from different manufacturers would need to be shipped to a distribution warehouse first where they are off-loading and then reloaded onto another truck headed to the project site. This increases the risk that the product would miss an installation window. With construction labor in such high demand, one delay could quickly snowball and set the entire project behind.
The Hard Way
Multiple trucks from multiple vendors arrive at different times. What could possibly go wrong?
The Hard Way
Multiple trucks from multiple vendors arrive at different times. What could possibly go wrong?
1 Truck, 0 Headaches
McCoy-Rockford, a Houston-based Steelcase dealer, had a better idea. They used Marketplace to realize the designer’s vision while eliminating the complexity of managing 50 different suppliers. “It was clear going from 50 brands to one family of brands would save our customer time and money and mitigate risk. Plus, we were able to bring their design to life down to the very last detail and make it easy,” says Ken Beaver, president and CEO, McCoy-Rockford.
Since all products came from a Steelcase brand or partner, everything shipped together and arrived at the same time, color coded by floor and sent directly from the truck to where it would be installed. The estimated savings in time and money totalled $1 million.
The estimated savings in time and money totalled $1 million.
So, how did they do that?
The client was located in a very remote area and to execute a large scale project required significant behind-the-scenes coordination. “Our infrastructure allows dealers to order and schedule partner products just like they do Steelcase products,” says Brad Vernier, vice president, Steelcase global order fulfillment.
Before any orders are entered, teams capture key data like packaging information, dimensions and weight in addition to pick-up and delivery information. They also need site information such as the availability of a loading dock and other equipment. Each piece of data is crucial and any gaps in information can mean delays. When it came time to deliver, an operations team tracked weather, traffic and news events from its nerve center to solve problems before they might happen. This attention to detail allows Steelcase to deliver more than 150,000 products daily with a complete order rate of 99.8%.
“We were able to deliver on every promise we made when it came to this project, which is something we could not have done a few years ago,” says Beaver. “We saved the client time, money and a lot of headaches and they got their new workplace just the way they wanted.”
The Easy Way
Steelcase Marketplace, combined with the Steelcase distribution network, simplifies and streamlines the entire process by using one online portal to access thousands of products, and enables collaboration between client and designer. It makes the whole process faster, easier and more reliable — saving time and money. What’s not to love about that?
Easy
3,000+ products
1 delivery
50+ brands
Accurate
99% of orders shipped on time
Saves Money
fewer hours + less complexity + reduced freight =
$1,000,000 of savings*
*Actual savings vary based on project size
Concierge Team Offers Human Touch
We’ve all experienced it. We run into a problem with a product or service and we call an 800 number for help. What happens next is often anything but helpful. A series of automated messages take you through a maze of options that often end without a solution or a real person to speak to.
Making it easy for designers to get the information they need when they need it was the objective behind the creation of the Design Portfolios Concierge Team. Along with our Design Portfolios sales consultants in the field, the Concierge team works directly with interior designers and architects to help them realize their designs when specifying products from Steelcase, Coalesse, Turnstone, Orangebox and Steelcase partners such as West Elm, Bolia, Viccarbe and Carl Hansen & Son.
“Our expert Concierge team’s rapid response to requests speeds up the design specification process, saving designer’s valuable time,” says Design Portfolios VP of Customer Experience, Lisa Clark. This team of product experts and project managers think outside the box and go above and beyond the day-to-day to solve any challenge faced by a customer.
What services does the Concierge Team offer?
Concierge provides customers with expertise around complex specifying and buying processes, including diverse COM assistance, product customization and project management. This service turns complicated, time-consuming processes into simple experiences for the specifier.
Who is on the Concierge Team?
The Concierge Team is made up of very knowledgeable team members with an average of 15 years of experience. The Coalesse Concierge Specials Team is another critical part of this group who provides specials quotes for RFQs, consults on specials requests, and recommends alternate products when needed for our Coalesse brand.
How does Concierge work with architects and designers during the design process?
Partnering with A+D and Sales through specifying and ordering, Concierge strives to navigate the complexities of processes and paperwork that can accompany specifications. In addition, we can facilitate discussions on surface materials, product options, models, lead times and check pricing.
