Designer furniture brings joy to brilliant children’s charity

Phil Kenny at Vitsoe in Warwickshire had almost given up on finding a new home for five beautiful desks that he had been trying to give away, when he came across A Good Thing.

Originally Frankfurt-based, Vitsoe is a Belgian designer furniture firm that now has premises in Royal Leamington Spa in Warwickshire. Known for functional, longlasting furniture, Vitsoe has been interested in sustainability and reuse for decades – long before it became as popular as it is now! The firm’s recent Christmas campaign was centred on reuse, and Phil explained to me that the company actually considers recycling to be a defeat:

“We’d always rather reuse. If things are still functional, we’ll continue using them. We even tell customers to keep the packaging. The shelving Vitsoe makes can always be reused and reconfigured, for example when someone moves into a different home, or whatever.”

Made to last forever

The five desks that Phil was rehoming were designed to “last forever”, he told me. They had sat around gathering dust since 2017, and Phil had been trying to give them away for a long time.

Phil admits he was a little sceptical of A Good Thing at first, given how much trouble he had been having rehoming the desks:

“I thought to myself ‘I’ve seen this sort of thing before’… but then got two requests from charities via the platform over the course of one weekend!”

A clever use of eBay

Suresh Dhokia, Online Business Development executive at the children’s charity Barnardo’s, had joined A Good Thing not long before and was delighted when he spotted the expensive Belgian Bulo-branded desks being advertised:

“Barnardo’s has an eBay shop where we sell things to fundraise for the charity. As soon as I saw them, I knew these desks would be perfect for the eBay department. I knew they were worth a lot, and knew we could get a decent price for them.”

Suresh from Barnardo’s explained that the charity works hard to find donated items right across the country:

“The sorts of things we would love are homeware, jewellery, longlasting water bottles, toothbrushes and perfumes – but we will take literally anything. We have drivers right across the country and can collect from virtually anywhere.”

There’s no better cause

Sometimes charities worry that businesses will not be happy with things being resold by charities, but on the whole we don’t find this to be true. Phil told us:

“I loved the Barnardo’s request: it’s all about helping kids, there’s no better cause! I don’t see a barrier with resale, we’re very happy for the desks to be able to sold and used. The last thing we want to see is things going into landfill, things being scrapped.”

Given this was Phil’s first time using the platform, we were keen to know what he thought of the experience:

“It was intuitive and straightforward, really simple. It was almost simpler than using eBay: the fact that there is no bidding. I needed to dig out the original photos of the desks, then upload them – but otherwise things were very easy.”

Two happy customers

His communication with Suresh from Barnardo’s was nice and easy, too:

“I spoke to Suresh, and he already had a driver lined up for the Rugby area. He came to collect the desks within a few days, and they were already flatpacked, so it was all straightforward. I would love to use A Good Thing again in the future if the need arises, but we’re actually do lots of reuse already!”

Suresh was equally happy, and has already been quite active on the A Good Thing platform since this initial match:

“It was a really good experience. It was perfect!”

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