/go/blog/ en http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/introducingthe-walkstation/ http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/introducingthe-walkstation/#When:15:41:00Z Ever thought of ways to burn calories at work? Nix the elevator and start taking the stairs…park at the end of the parking lot…walk at lunch…how about walking while you work? The Walkstation makes it really convenient to incorporate a little physical activity in our busy lives. The Walkstation is a treadmill with a height adjustable desk and a maximum speed of 2 mph (you can’t run even if you try) to keep you concentrated on work while incorporating physical activity into your work routine. The average person will burn about 100 calories per mph. Assume you walk 1 mph for 2 hours per day each work week for a year and that could equate to 15 lbs lost without dieting or leaving your office! Don’t think you can walk and work at the same time? Neither did I. I am definitely not the most coordinated person and may have stumbled once or twice, but you get the hang of it pretty quickly. As the Good Morning America clip indicates “It’s like walking and chewing gum at the same time.” If you are like me, you prefer to walk when you are on the phone…so for those all too frequent conference calls, you might as well be on burning some calories on the Walkstation. Put a few Walkstations together in a circle and find yourself talking and walking on the Walkstations rather than sitting in conference room. There are many ways to easily incorporate walking and working into your everyday routine. The Walkstation has been getting lots of press since its introduction. Here are a few more articles for you to peruse in your spare time. Wish you could be über productive and read this while working out? Sounds like you need a Walkstation… I put in 5 miles at the Office – New York Times – Sept 16, 2008 Cool Gadgets to make Staying Healthy Fun – CBS News – Sept 6, 2008 Treadmill Desk Heats Up Office Jobs – National Public Radio – Feb 12, 2008 Office of the Future: Walk While Working – ABC News – Nov 29, 2007 2008-11-18T15:41:00-05:00 http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/frustration-free-packaging/ http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/frustration-free-packaging/#When:12:03:00Z So how many of you have ever spent more time opening a toy package than you spent in assembling the toy afterwards? Or you find yourself with the kitchen steak knife in hand, the junk drawer scissors cast aside, as you piece, puncture and wrip at that dreaded plastic clamshell package, long past the point where you care whether you damage the product inside? That consumer frustration has lead to the introduction of numerous tools for opening packages without the frustration outlined above. There is the As See on TV Pyranna, the One Open-sezz-me Plastic Package Opener that claims it cures “wrap rage” or the abysmally rated Package Shark Pro Opener with Bonus Scissors. Then there’s the approach taken by Amazon.com: frustration free packaging. Like a good doctor that treats the cause rather than masking the symptoms, Amazon is going to the heart of the problem. As their FAQ says: We work directly with manufacturers to box products in Frustration-Free Packages right off the assembly lines, which reduces the overall amount of packing materials used. That means they are also not creating waste by throwing away the original packaging and re-packaging the items. And the scope of their plan is impressive: This is just the beginning of a multi-year initiative. It will take many years, but our vision is to offer our entire catalog of products in Frustration-Free Packaging. While I wouldn’t qualify Steelcase and the Steelcase Store as innovative when it comes to our packaging I do hope you’ll find our packaging to be “frustration free. Some strong hands or a basic utility knife will probably do the trick on your next Leap chair purchase. Although I admit that i just might have to add the Zibra-ZPCOPEN-OR to my Christmas wish list. 2008-11-14T12:03:00-05:00 http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/wonders-never-cease/ http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/wonders-never-cease/#When:13:23:00Z I stumbled across these two absolutely incredible devices from a company called Violet today. These things go heavily into the geeky part of my being but I’m OK with that. 1) The Nabaztag isn’t new, but is is worth bringing up again. If you haven’t seen this thing, it is rabbit. A rabbit? Well….“A Rabbit connected to the Internet that’ll bring you everything on the web and messages from your friends using coloured lights, the movements of his ears, spoken words, or songs. A Rabbit you can talk to and give orders to. A Rabbit you can ask for advice and entrust with messages to your friends. A Rabbit that reacts to and recognizes the objects that surrounds you…” 2) The Mir:ror – This came across my blog reading via the Boston Globe. The Mir:ror is basically a device that hooks to your computer via USB and then reads tiny RFID tags which you embed in your stuff and then Mir:ror reacts. So picture this: you walk in the door and you have an RFID sensor on your keys. The Mir:ror senses the RFID tag and starts reading your e-mail for you. Or, let’s say that it senses a toll pass and starts reading you the traffic report. How brilliant is that? More about Violet….. “Let all things be connectedViolet was inspired by a simple fact: the rift between the virtual world – everything happening on the other side of your computer screen – and the physical world we live in is growing, and growing fast.” On the other side of the screen, in the digital world we explore with the click of a mouse, everything is possible and accessible. On the web information can be customized for each user’s needs: you can set preferences on any given page, information can be targeted and updated in real time. You can gather news from different sources, mix personal and professional, fun and utilitarian aspects in a single place. In virtual worlds such as Second Life, in computer games, in instant messaging and chat-rooms, you can become whoever you want, take on any guise you like, meet strange and nonsensical creatures. In a world of bytes, everything can be recombined, everything is flexible. Everything can be wondrous and magical. Unfortunately, we were born on the wrong side of the screen. We are not made of bytes, but of flesh, blood and atoms. We spend the greater part of our life in a physical world that is tough, unfair, inflexible and devoid of magic. The objects that surround us have reduced, rigid, limited functions; they are unaware of our presence and are unable to adapt to us or to other objects. We can seldom define “preferences” or “options” in the real world, unlike what we are used to in most software. You can visit Amazon.com twice and it will recognize you and provide relevant and personalized advice. You can live in the same house for all your life and you will always be a “foreigner.” So Violet proposes two questions that I think we all ask ourselves - “Can we really go on living with such a rift, increasingly looking at the world through screens?” - “Must we stay trapped in a kind of submarine, forever doomed to contemplate idyllic worlds through the periscope?” Indeed 2008-11-10T13:23:00-05:00 http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/new-features-at-the-steelcase-store/ http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/new-features-at-the-steelcase-store/#When:15:55:00Z Below is our most recent email to our newsletter subscriber list announcing some cool new features to the Steelcase Store site (including our blog, Pivot). To receive the latest and greatest information about what’s going on at the Steelcase Store, sign-up for our newsletter here. Great products are just the start of what you’ll find at the Steelcase Store. New features on Steelcase Store – Pivot, Ideas and Floorplanner A quick click takes you straight to our blog, Pivot, for some thoughts and tidbits about the working world along with links to articles and sites that can help your business grow. Click on the tab we call Ideas. Filled with photos (ours and yours), it’s just the thing to spur some new thinking about creating places where people love to work. Browse through some great workspaces and submit photos to share yours too. Or start sketching out your latest ideas with our handy new floorplanner now displaying your layout in both two and three dimensional form. Create a room configuration using your dimensions, select the products you are intersted in adding to your workspace and get a visual of what they layout could look like. It’s that easy! 2008-11-04T15:55:00-05:00 http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/real-deal/ http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/real-deal/#When:12:00:00Z Since I came from a non-office-furniture background, I find the terminology around office furniture very confusing. I have actually found a lot of people outside our industry who have a similar dilemma. Why don’t you just call it what it is? Well, when we were asked to create the Steelcase Store, that is just what we did. We call a chair a chair, a table a table, etc (how novel). However, I wanted to use this blog entry to translate office furniture language into everyday language so that everyone can start getting along. Yes, there will be a quiz at the end (seriously): - Worksurface – Dictionary.com finds no entries for such a word, so it must not exist in the typical lexicon of everyday people. What is a worksurface? It is the surface where your computer sits and where you typically do your work. Here on the Store, we have decided to call these what they are – tables and desks…because that is what you call them. By my thinking, if we were to apply the office furniture lingo to everyday life, then I would eat dinner at the ‘eatsurface’ rather than my kitchen table. - Ped - Ped is short for pedestal. Still not helping? Hmmmm….well, a pedestal is a small storage box with drawers that is usually made out of metal or wood. Peds can be mobile (i.e. wheels) or stationary, in which case it is usually bolted to your desk. I am trying to start a movement by calling these ‘storage boxes,’ but I’m not having much luck. Peds are further broken down using an arcane language: B/F = Box/File Ped – Box and file refer to the type of drawers that are located on the ped. A Box/File Ped consists of 1 shallow and 1 deep drawer. You would think that the box drawer would be the deeper drawer but you’d be wrong. The box drawer is the shallow drawer and the file drawer is the deeper file that you put your files and file folders in. B/B/F = Box/Box/File Ped – This ped is similar to the B/F ped but has an extra box-style drawer. So Box/Box/File ped has 2 shallow drawers and 1 deep drawer F/F = File/File Ped – This ped has 0 shallow drawers and 2 deep drawers, for those of you who like to file away a lot of material away so you don’t have to look at it O/B/F = Open/Box/File – This is a late entry. The Open/Box/File ped is similar to the B/B/F ped, but instead of having a shallow drawer at the top, it has an open slot (thus the ‘open’ in Open/Box/File). - Cable Manager – This is not the person you hire to help you sort out your cable bill and manage the cable company for you. No, this is what you are looking for when you ask “where am I supposed to put all these ugly computer cords?” Unfortunately, science has not given us a good solution to this problem. Wireless mice are a good first step, but I need a place for my printer cord, power cord, monitor cord, speaker cord, USB hub cord, and my cable modem cord. - System Furniture – Guess what this is? I actually am not sure, but I know it revolves around the cubicles that people sit in every day. I don’t know where the term came from but I am looking. Systems furniture relates to high cubes, low cubes, powered cubes, glass cubes and Rubix cubes (OK, maybe not the last one). But anything to with office ‘walls’ that surround you….high or low…that is systems furniture Now for the quiz: Match up the following terms with their pictures below: 1) B/B/F ped, 2) B/F ped, 3) O/B/F ped, 4) Worksurface, 5) System 2008-10-30T12:00:00-05:00 http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/green-power/ http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/green-power/#When:13:57:00Z Which city in the US do you think has the most LEED-certified buildings per capita? Portland? San Francisco? Maybe Boston?. Nope…its Grand Rapids, MI. Where is Grand Rapids you might ask? Grand Rapids is about 2 hours northwest of Detroit, and is the home for some of the largest office furniture manufacturers in the world including yours truly…Steelcase. As you’ll see in this article by Fast Company, Steelcase has been instrumental at shaping the environmental movement in Grand Rapids which has caught on throughout the city. Here in Grand Rapids you will find the world’s first LEED-certified art museum along with LEED-certified manufacturing facilities, office buildings, restaurants, a bus station and a hospital. You will also see Steelcase’s commitment to the environment evidenced in many of our most popular product offerings: Leap, our flagship product is Silver Cradle to Cradle Certified; made of up to 32% recycled content; is up to 94% recyclable and is Indoor Advantage Certified. Think, our most eco-friendly product is Silver Cradle to Cradle Certified; made of up to 37% recycled content; is up to 98% recyclable and is Gold Indoor Advantage Certified. Amia, our newest edition to the Steelcase family, is Silver Cradle to Cradle Certified; made of up to 32% recycled content; is up to 97% recyclable and is Gold Indoor Advantage Certified. Since its inception, Steelcase has been finding ways to reduce its impact on the environment. We hope that you will do what you can as well… 2008-10-24T13:57:00-05:00 http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/new-item-soho-office/ http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/new-item-soho-office/#When:18:00:00Z Is your home office in need of a makeover? Mine is! Well, if you too are in dire need of a new home office, check out our newest configuration that encompasses everything that you will need in your office including the desk, two (2) storage units and the chair. Choose the size that works best for your office and the laminate and fabric color of your preference and you are all set. Where else can you find all these pieces and Steelcase quality for only $1599? Oh yeah, did I mention that this includes free white glove delivery & installation? No need to worry about putting it together either! 2008-10-22T18:00:00-05:00 http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/a-second-life/ http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/a-second-life/#When:12:48:00Z Have you ever had a glimpse of an idea, told it to your boss who tells you to run with it, and then it turns into a life of its own. This is my case with Second Life. I tried to impress my boss at the time by showing him that I read Business Week, so I brought in an article on this futuristic video-game/alternate reality/buzz creator called Second Life. Not only was my boss not impressed, but he told me not to work on it. I did it anyway. What is Second Life? According to its site…….. Second Life® is a 3-D virtual world created by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe. * From the moment you enter the World you’ll discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. Once you’ve explored a bit, perhaps you’ll find a perfect parcel of land to build your house or business. * You’ll also be surrounded by the Creations of your fellow Residents. Because Residents retain intellectual property rights in their digital creations, they can buy, sell and trade with other Residents. * The Marketplace currently supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. This commerce is handled with the inworld unit of trade, the Linden™ dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online Linden dollar exchanges. Fast Company magazine recently wrote an article on the resurgence of Second Life and how to more effectively market in this virtual world. It is a well written article discussing some of the marketing failures in Second Life and what the most effective way to market is today. From the article: “Second Life is not a place to make sales. It’s also a venue where large companies don’t have to spend $3 million to build an elaborate island when $10,000 to $100,000, usedjudiciously, can have a much larger impact. Linden Labs concurs. “New marketers often try to imitate another medium,” says Ginsu Yoon, Linden’s VP of business affairs. “Second Life isn’t TV or radio or even the Internet, all of which push information out one way.” “ Our original goal in Second Life was to create buzz. We found a partner and created a small little showroom in Second Life. However, nobody ever showed up, mostly because nobody knew we were there. So obviously Second Life is not place where “if you build it, they will come.” So we changed our strategy and decided to become part of the community. One of the lessons we learned is the Second Life community doesn’t want to be bombarded with your product. The inhabitants of Second Life are wary of traditional advertising; they are creative and want to be treated as the contributor to society that they are. So we ended up upgrading our space and creating a beautiful space and then we invited the community to participate in a critical thought process of our products and how we can best interact with the Second Life Community. We even had a Design Exhibition where many designers showed off their design skills in our promenade. We culminated this Design Exhibition with a 2 hour town hall meeting where designers, marketers, and a whole host of people from Steelcase interacted with people all over the globe in Second Life. It was a wonderful event, providing an opportunity for the citizens of Second Life to learn more about Steelcase and vice versa. Get your avatar free and check it out…..click here to have your eyes opened to the new reality. 2008-10-21T12:48:00-05:00 http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/a-smashing-business-idea/ http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/a-smashing-business-idea/#When:12:43:00Z Have you ever had one of those frusterating days where you just needed to scream or had the overwhelming urge to break something? Who hasn’t, right? Well, now you can at Sarah’s Smash Shack in San Diego. You can break 15 plates in 15 minutes in your sound proof room listening to music from your ipod. Sarah’s Smash Shack is an interesting new business that, because of their uniqueness, had to pave their own way when setting up shop. Check out this quick read from Fortune for Small Business and inject some entertainment to your day. Enjoy! 2008-10-17T12:43:00-05:00 http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/credit-crunch-for-small-business/ http://store.steelcase.com/go/blog/read/credit-crunch-for-small-business/#When:00:03:00Z We’ve all been bombarded by news reports of the world-wide credit crunch. Rather than focus on the doom and gloom articles, I wanted to share a recent article in the Wall Street Journal that piqued my interest. The article profiles a company called On Deck that processes loans for the small business world, with a few twists. First, On Deck has created an algorithm that allows them to assess the overall health of a company instead of merely taking a snapshot like most lenders do. They look at a company’s daily business activity including number of customers, sags and surges, and (get this) number of complaints a company has. Compare this to the average lender which basically looks at last year’s tax returns. Second, instead of sending an invoice out every month (like my mortgage statement) saying that Joe’s Pizza owes $300 this month and has an outstanding balance of $40,000 and is paying an interest rate of 30%, On Deck basically takes $100 out of your bank account EVERY DAY. That is pretty out of the box. I think everyone could take this as a lesson in life. If Morgan Stanley would just take $10 out of my checking account every day, I’d probably save a lot more money than I do now when I have to scratch a $300 check every month. This approach means that On Deck’s loans will be paid back in about a year. Third, the interest rate of 18% to 36% got an initial reaction from me of “wow, my credit card interest rate is less than that.” As I progressed in my research however, I found the article saying that the interest rate for small businesses can be up to 200%. So 18% to 36% looks pretty good. It must be…so far On deck has lent out over $10 Million since it began in May and is growing at a 35% clip. Also of note….in the article, some of the ‘big name players’ voice that this takes away from the experience of loans because you miss out on the ‘personal banking experience.’ I’m thinking that most people I know don’t have much good to say regarding that experience of loans and they are fine interfacing with a computer who will at least evaluate them fairly. 2008-10-15T00:03:00-05:00