Office Space Evolution: How Technology Continues to Change the Furniture Integration Business

Michelle Wille of Marshall Furniture spoke with CI about how furniture has evolved to become personalized and the focal point of office spaces.

Tom LeBlanc

The demand for furniture integration has continued to increase as technology evolves, but with the size of technology changing, the footprint of furniture has decreased significantly. 

Marshall Furniture, with 30 years of AV-centric furniture manufacturing under its belt, has continued to evolve its furniture solutions as technology and customers’ demands have changed over time.

Smaller footprints thanks to more discreet technology is a good thing, according to VP of sales and marketing Michelle Wille. She chats with CI editor Tom LeBlanc about how far office furniture has come.

Tom LeBlanc: Of course, office furniture has been evolving over the past 30 years, not just since collaboration became a buzz-term.

Michelle Wille: We started business in 1986 so we’ve been doing this for 30 years. We started out building really robust solid-wood carts for really large 37-inch Mitsubishi data monitors that weighed several hundred pounds.

They were just beasts … The early 2000s is when we’d really see technology, furniture [integration] and demand for it was actually at an all-time high.

Hear more of what Michelle Wille has to say about how furniture integration has changed over the years.

Seeing all this happen over the past 30 years we’ve seen conference room and meeting rooms turn into collaboration spaces or video conferencing rooms. The footprint of the furniture has decreased significantly, thankfully, to the size of tech-nology changing.

We’ve seen customization being required to be built on a mass production scale. But now more than ever we’ve really seen furniture being personalized and becoming the focal point of the room.

Related: AV and Furniture Integration: Why Integrators Should Pay Attention to Aesthetics

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