“Help, I broke my space!”
John Stein, president of Kirei, which since 2003 has made ecologically responsible, high-performance interior elements like panels to reduce the din in increasingly open and loud spaces, gets that a lot from potential customers.
Kirei's created beautiful office spaces with high ceilings or spaces with exposed brick designed to attract and retain the latest knowledge worker. Unfortunately, even the smartest worker can't concentrate when the office is as loud as a power lawn mower.
In case you think that is hyperbole, the CDC categorizes lawn mowers at about 65 decibels, the same as some open plan offices, where the noise ranges from 60-65 decibels. According to a report, the German Association of Engineers has set noise standards in its country for various types of work. While 70 decibels is acceptable for simple or mainly transactional office work, 55 decibels is the requirement for what the association terms “mainly intellectual work.” They identify this as work characterized by high complexity and demanding creative thinking, decision-making, solving problems and effectively communicating — precisely the kind of knowledge work that, when performed well, puts leading enterprises ahead.
So yes, many office spaces are broken. That's where Kirei comes in.
Kirei is the Japanese character signifying beautiful. And the company chose the character as its name because of its multiple meanings of beauty, clean, purity and truth to reflect its dedication to the same in an office, educational or health-care environment. The word environment is important to Kirei. Since its inception, it's made it a core promise to represent products that are responsibly sourced, whether tiles made from reclaimed coconut shells, sustainably harvested Kirei Board and bamboo panels or its EchoPanel acoustic material, which has helped rescue more than 80 million plastic bottles from landfills and is recyclable at the end of life.
“I really love that kind of pair of meanings for our materials,” Stein said. “Sustainability has always been an important thing for me personally. As I was introduced to our first product, Kirei Board, I began to get introduced to the design world where green was a concept that people liked as an idea, but not really in the execution. The design materials available that were green were kind of ugly and not functional and expensive. All the negative cliches that had been going around back then. So Kirei Board, which is made from sorghum straw, was our first product. It's a beautiful millwork material that's got a great green story. I also didn't want to name the company Eco-this or Green-that because that also had a lot of connotation, it's almost political connotations to people.”
The company began with its Kirei Board, and the product was in the right place, at the right time and with the right story. Kirei began developing relationships with architects and interior designers. Fast forwarding, the company added more products that had a similar profile — great looking with a great green story. It added products with reclaimed wood, bamboo, hemp panels and wheat board that architects and designers could use to design great commercial spaces.
About seven years ago these professionals began asking for products to help with sound. Open offices began popping up. Though they make excellent use of all available space, architects and designers found they were very loud. Restaurateurs also found open-space designs cool, but diners couldn't hear each other talk. Schools have always faced the problem.
The offices are cool, but the problem is “I can hear about Joey's trip to Cabo, or the sales guys are bothering the coders,” Stein said. “The financial team has no privacy — all the sound and distraction issues that come with open spaces. And also we started seeing this trend toward high ceilings.”
Architects and designers found they had wonderful high ceilings, but they were really echo-y. Stein found EchoPanel, which had been in the Australian market for about 10 years, to be a great looking product. It was unusual in a market that, at the time, was filled with ugly brown fabric-wrapped panels. They were “just a necessary evil if you wanted to calm the space from an acoustic perspective,” Stein said.
EchoPanel, he found, was the opposite. It's got color, it's got definition, and it can be used to either transform a white wall into a white, sound-absorbing wall or to make a neat, design-centered piece or element that becomes an integral part of the décor. At the same time, it is performing what Stein calls a hidden, double duty of absorbing sound. Best, it is made from recycled plastic bottles. EchoPanel has kept about 104 million plastic bottles out of landfills and the ocean.
“It really took off very quickly,” Stein said. “Designers were very open to this idea, the ones that understood acoustics.”
Educating designers on acoustic issues became imperative. A lot of them didn't understand acoustics. Some thought if a space sounds bad, that's just the way it is. The reality is, we can change spaces. We can tune them and fix them to whatever we want, according to Stein.
“We want a loud, active feeling office, we want a quiet library, whatever the case may be,” he said. “Spaces, generally speaking, can be tuned to that, and EchoPanel is one of the tools that can do that. We then embarked on an education program to really help designers who had no idea that you could fix a space.”
After helping the designers understand acoustics, the company turned to the customers. Designers who “got it” had to convince clients to include acoustics in a building's budget. It is part of what Stein calls a three-phase cycle. It begins with the “help, I-broke-my-space” call where a designer might have created a conference room or office space with bad acoustic problems and want help to mitigate it. “Then the designer comes back on their next project and says, 'OK, I know I've got to design acoustically, so let's do that' and 'well … the client (doesn't) want to pay an extra 20 grand to do it,” Stein said. Next, they take it out and are back at the first phase of “we broke the space” and want to know what they can do to retrofit it.
“The third phase is when they realize they need to design acoustically, budget for it and convince the client there's a dollars and cents reason they can spend this money because cost of ownership is going to go down, and occupancy happiness is going to go up,” Stein said. “Tenants are going to stay, and you can raise rent. You can make the money back in significant ways by providing great looking, sounding, healthy spaces. And that's where we kind of stand today.”
It's not been an easy path for Kirei. But it knows it's on to something based on the competition entering the market, both domestically and abroad.
“We were one of the first to bring PET recycled plastic felt into the United States and North American market,” Stein said. “We helped really establish a beachhead for these kinds of products. Now, there is a ton of competition. Luckily people see that this is a great market. Or luckily this is a great market, and people are understanding that they need to fix their spaces. Their spaces don't have to sound terrible. Teleconferencing doesn't have to sound like Charlie Brown's teacher.”
The competition means Kirei has to continue to innovate. Its manufacturing partner, Woven Image of Australia, has repeatedly brought new colors to market to give Kirei a really vibrant, vivid color palette, something the company is complimented on quite a bit.
“Of course, like any product, there's always costs in quality levels,” Stein said. “We've chosen not to go with the lowest cost, lowest quality option, and people do come back to us after they've tried the low quality product, and come back to us because we have high color definition, we have high consistency. We also have great sustainability credentials. We're Red List free, which some people can't say. They use fire retardants that are non-Red List free.”
Kirei is focused completely on architectural products and not interested in going in the furniture direction (i.e. BuzziSpace).
Many opportunities exist, according to Stein. “The ceiling is still an almost unexplored frontier of what can be done there,” he said. “We are trying to find the simple solutions. There's a lot of really great, dynamic things you can do to make these really amazing one-offs. But there is really a nice, fine line between elegant and dynamic ceiling solutions that we've got some ideas for new products. That's what we're concentrating on.”
Flexible design is also incredibly important to Kirei's future plans. Sound-absorbing materials don't have to be static, Stein believes. They should be able to change and move quickly, if that's what the customer desires.
“My sister works at Facebook, and she's been asked to move I think six times in her six-month tenure there,” he said. “Departments change, staffing changes, the space has to change as well. So, can we move this ceiling element, or this wall element to fit the new dynamics of the space? That's a real demand that we've been asked for and are generally speaking able to deliver on.”