“I wasn’t finished yet”: The former office furniture salesman is now finding new life for discarded furniture

It wasn’t planned, but Hardaway, 65, has found a circular nature to his career that he seems more than proud of. In addition, he is far from finished with the work, he says.

Hardaway’s career began in 1984 for one of the leading office furniture brands, Herman Miller. The company, whose name is basically synonymous with the idea of ​​high-quality, modern furniture design, employed designers such as George Nelson, who was for a time lead designer at Herman Miller, and the incomparable Charles and Ray Eames – yes, that Eames.

For some 35 years, Hardaway was tasked with filling offices with the variety of products Herman Miller sold, filling different roles here and there as he rose through the ranks.

“The Herman Miller brand was so well known that it opened many doors. I’m not going to say the product sold itself like no product ever does,” says Hardaway wealth. “I’ve called architects and designers, I’ve called real estate executives, facility managers and people like that; People who made commercial office furniture decisions for these companies.”

The office — and what companies have been drawn to as they seek to manifest productivity or collaboration — has changed drastically over the decades Hardaway has been in business. He sold office furniture to the IRS, Social Security Administration, and helped set up offices in the Judiciary and Executive Branch. He’s had Fortune 500 clients like United Airlines and even held the record for the largest closed account at Herman Miller, he says, which was a $125 million campus outfitting of an entire company.

Hardaway saw the office evolve from the rat-maze-like cubicles of the ’80s, to lower walls meant to encourage collaboration, to open-plan plans, and then to a variety of different spaces for different types of work throughout the day. Meanwhile, Herman Miller supplied everything from the cabin walls and workstations to the now iconic Aeron office chair.

But as the workforce and corporate needs continued to force a change in office design, much of the furniture and products Hardaway sold were discarded.

Office furniture – the main source of furniture waste in landfills – accounts for about 8.5 million tons of the approximately 10 million tons of furniture that ends up in landfills each year.

During his time at Herman Miller, Hardaway and his team went to great lengths to outfit their clients’ offices appropriately. There was a whole design process, he says, to make sure they had everything they wanted and needed to fit the company’s culture.

“Culture doesn’t always happen in the office,” says Hardaway, “but furniture can be a catalyst for that.”

But at the end of the day, companies merged or merged or moved or changed over time, and who was there to get the office chairs no one wanted anymore? “What we have done? We sold solutions. And what we left behind was furniture.”

After enjoying approximately six months of retirement in 2019, during which time he traveled the Nile River in Egypt with his wife, Hardaway started his own consulting firm. Then the pandemic struck and he had to change direction again. He was pondering new options when the CEO of environmentalist and job closure company Green Standards called.

Hardaway was familiar with the company from his time at Herman Miller. In 12 years as an organization, Green Standards has so far kept 100,000 tons of office furniture out of landfill and diverted more than 240,000 tons of carbon emissions.

Green Standards works with companies like Google, Microsoft and United Airlines to develop strategies to resell, recycle and donate office furniture that companies no longer need.

Hardaway never expected to work at the other end of an industry to which he had dedicated most of his professional life. During the pandemic, he says, he realized he wanted to spend the latter part of his career doing something meaningful.

His so-called “aha” moment came in his early days at Green Standards when he looked at a case study they had done with his old client United Airlines. The research was done when United was moving into new offices, and Hardaway was still with Herman Miller at the time, working with the airline to sell them office furniture for the new spaces.

“I’ve been working on the new project, Green Standards is taking out the product I sold in 1998… That’s when it hit me, I’ve come full circle and I can make a difference,” he says. “In sales, our success has always been based on achieving your goal, right? I sold $10 million this year or I did this or that. Today I define success as making a difference. And it’s like I said, I’m not done yet. That’s why I failed when I retired, because I wasn’t done yet.”

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