Knoll + Muuto Work from Home brings together proven performance and new perspectives on Scandinavian design like the Rockwell Unscripted Easy Table and the Muuto Fiber Chair, ideal for consumers and corporate WFH programs.
Andrew Cogan has served in management positions at Knoll since 2001, when he became the Chief Executive Officer after serving as Chief Operating Officer. In this position, Mr. Cogan received $5.2 million in total compensation for 2019 according to SEC records.
Since joining Knoll 1989, Cogan has held several positions in design and marketing including Executive Vice President, Marketing and Product Development. He’s always loved working with creative people and is passionate about protecting the brand identity by encouraging experimentation and investing in the Knoll team.
What are your biggest business concerns surrounding COVID-19?
We operate in countries all over the world, with associates in offices and manufacturing facilities across North America, Europe, and Asia. From the outset, we’ve learned a lot about keeping our people safe. Our team pivoted pretty quickly to remote work and kept our principal manufacturing operations open in most locations with enhanced health and safety standards, including best practices for site procedures, health measures, and social distancing.
What is your current business strategy for dealing with the situation?
With respect to home office workstyles, I’ve been spending a lot of time on our strategy to grow Knoll’s work-from-home solutions and ecommerce capabilities, honing a range of our most popular product that ships in 1–3 days, like our ReGeneration Chair, Hipso Desk, and Muuto Cover Chair. Demand for work-from-home solutions has skyrocketed in the last few months as people look for the comfortable and ergonomic products they left behind at the office. We were moving aggressively in this direction before the pandemic—we acquired Fully.com, an ecommerce brand devoted to home office design. In the second quarter of this year, Fully saw a more than 200% jump in traffic to its Fully.com web site and a 148% increase in e-commerce orders as consumers moved quickly to set up ergonomic home offices with height adjustable desks and chairs.
I am also very excited about the launch of Knoll + Muuto Work From Home earlier in July on knoll.com. Now consumers can create a home office that pairs the proven performance of our most popular workplace furniture with new perspectives in Scandinavian design from our Muuto brand. Muuto complements the Knoll reach and has a huge following for its simple and elegant home office, living and dining designs in Europe, which we expect to play well for contemporary U.S. lifestyles.
How do you think things will look in your industry a year from now?
I expect design-driven businesses like ours that continue to invest in innovation, design, and technology will thrive. With respect to our principal markets—the workplace and the home— we see a lot of opportunity coming out of this pandemic. In speaking with our clients, our dealers and the design community, we’re hearing that people crave the community, connectivity, and creativity of the office. At the same time, organizations seem to be acknowledging that for many people, workstyles will evolve to for a mix of workplace and home office activity. At the same time, consumers will be spending more time at home than on travel or entertainment.
The workplace is not going away. The benefits of the mix of community, connectivity, and spontaneity you get in the workplace are simply irreplaceable. We’re hearing from our own people and from our clients across all industries that they want to come back to the office. Our workstyles and the spaces that support work are undoubtedly going to change coming out of this pandemic, but inspiring spaces where people can do their best work remain vitally important to the ingenuity and creativity of individuals and teams. This has created lots of opportunities for our clients and the design community to retrofit, redesign and reimagine workplaces, including open meeting areas created with soft architecture like our Rockwell Unscripted Creative Wall.
What have you learned from other difficult times in the past?
My first year as CEO of Knoll started with the dotcom crash and ended with 9/11, so it was trial by fire. At the time, we were heavily dependent on the office business for the vast majority of our sales and profits. I knew we never wanted to be that dependent on any single category again, and so we began the journey to diversify into residential/consumer segments and e-commerce. Flash forward to today and that strategy has continued to serve us well through the financial crisis and now the pandemic. That said, each crisis had its own particular challenges, and, while we learned from each, I have wanted to be sure we don’t get complacent just because we made it through the last one.