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Neighbor Wants to Help Create Your Living Room, Outdoors
The Detroit-based duo — O’Dell and Hoff — spotted an opportunity to build a next-generation furniture brand with a powerful offering of succinct home goods. “Furniture is a convoluted industry and challenging for the customer to navigate. It’s an industry that lacks a customer-centric approach, slow to change, and is riddled with pain points,” says O’Dell.
“Through a customer-centric approach, we’re solving those pain-points to build the best experience in furniture,” he adds. “Doing this extremely well is a key differentiator in an increasingly digitized world. We aim to build the most loved furniture brand out there.”
Floyd intentionally does not offer the same type of variety as a traditional furniture destination, instead, the brand has just a few product categories - The Shelf, The Bed Frame, The Sofas, The Tables, The Rug, and The Outdoor Set - “each design thoughtfully made to withstand the test of time,” says Hoff.
Up until a few decades ago, furniture was thought of as something you keep and even pass down to future generations. “However, with the growth of a few furniture companies (or just a select one) the cultural norm of how we consume furniture dramatically shifted,” says O’Dell, alluding to the rise of Ikea and disposable furniture. “The EPA estimates 9.8 million tons of furniture waste is thrown into landfills in the US every year. We launched Floyd because we thought that was crazy,” he adds.
“The EPA estimates 9.8 million tons of furniture waste is thrown into landfills in the US every year. We launched Floyd because we thought that was crazy."
O’Dell and Hoff founded Floyd out of frustration with this growing culture of disposability in furniture and home goods. “We know that the average household today isn't keeping their furniture for the long haul - furniture waste in landfills has grown 2.5x the rate of US household growth since 1960,” says Hoff. “From the start, we felt that the most sustainable thing we could do was design products that people will keep. Furniture that won’t deteriorate when moved, or follow trends that go out of style in a few years.”
The support its sustainability goals, Floyd’s furniture is designed to be serviceable, making it easy for customers to replace parts over time if necessary. “Our pieces are just as easy to take apart as they are to put together - for where you live now and where you'll live next. Any part can be easily replaced if it breaks so that entire pieces never have to be tossed,” adds O’Dell.
"Our pieces are just as easy to take apart as they are to put together - for where you live now and where you'll live next."
Floyd also manufactures its sofas, tables, office furniture, shelves, beds and other homegoods in the US, closer to its customers to reduce emissions caused by excess transportation.
The brand has also launched The Floyd Resale and Refurbishment program to extend the useful life of its furniture. “Not only are we able to accept returned Floyd goods and resell them, we're able to offer imperfect products to customers at a discount of up to 50%, making quality design more accessible and lowering the barrier to entry for many,” explains Hoff.
By 2025, Floyd is aiming to ensure 70% of materials come from either recycled or renewable sources and use 100% FSC certified wood across all of its products. It’s also aiming to minimize packing materials and eliminate single-use plastics and recently launched The Sectional, which is delivered blanket-wrapped on a reusable pallet with minimal cardboard packaging.
Every piece Floyd puts to market is developed following a true deep dive into its use cases, current pain points, and more — a process that includes thousands of customer surveys to truly understand the lifestyles of today’s discerning buyer.
“We want to completely change and improve the way people consume, keep, and enjoy their furniture by creating an obsession around thoughtful design and modularity that can adapt to your needs over time,” says O’Dell. “Our homes should be a place to embody the things we love and care about. By marrying timeless design and premium U.S. manufacturing with the modern conveniences of flat-pack delivery and intuitive assembly/disassembly, we’re creating furniture for keeping - not tossing.”
“We want to completely change and improve the way people consume, keep, and enjoy their furniture by creating an obsession around thoughtful design and modularity that can adapt to your needs over time."
Floyd isn’t setting out to be a furniture marketplace offering endless options at cheap prices. “We also don't want to create products that are inaccessible,” says Hoff. “To strike this balance - we go back to one of our founding design principles: accessibility through good design and processes, not by lowering quality.”
Rather than cutting costs on materials, sustainability, or people, Floyd simplifies product design by strategically using redundant parts and materials that allow them to purchase more raw materials that will be used across many products, rather than one. “You'll see this consistency in our table legs made from American steel and wood parts which are made from premium birch plywood. We responsibly source long-lasting materials that we know are quality rather than opting for something that's stereotypically ‘eco-friendly’ but won't last more than a few years,” says Hoff.
“Our mission is to reduce landfill waste by designing furniture that is truly meant to be kept for the long haul. We only introduce products that we will stand behind for 50+ years from now - and we're proud to know that our customers consider Floyd a good investment,” explains Hoff.
Floyd’s succinct product offering has been expanding over the years and it has recently released its first outdoor furniture collection, a new sectional sofa, and The Rug — Floyd’s first venture into textiles. “This is a product category that we deem essential to any room in the house - and we're really proud to be introducing a collection of high-quality textiles that we'll stand by for years to come,” says Hoff.
The Rug is available in five timeless colors and five versatile sizes starting at $195. Check out our review of The Rug here.
