The past year has been both gratifying and challenging for Furniture Reuse Solutions. The growing variety of clients, projects, and charities led to many new opportunities. Pandemic-induced logistic impediments made some of our projects especially tricky. But thanks to the effective collaboration among our partners, clients, and charitable recipients, we have many success stories to tell.
Highlights
FRS ran projects across the board, including K-12 schools, colleges, corporations, and healthcare organizations. Most projects covered multiple sites and were centrally managed by FRS.
The increasing diversity of our charitable partner network is another highlight of 2021. Although beleaguered by backlogs at the ports, international charities rallied to ship more than in 2020. Even more explosive was the growth in our network of domestic nonprofits. With so many people working from home, reuse stores saw an unprecedented demand for office furniture.
Diversity can also describe the inventories we handled. In addition to the typical inventories of classroom, dormitory, and office furniture, we handled inventories such as those for 15,000 power strips, 18,000 waste/recycling receptacles, and auditorium seating for 400.
Challenges
Like so many others with logistics at the core of their business, we experienced the supply chain blues, with shortages of shipping containers, trucking, and labor. The key to surmounting these challenges was strong relationships with partners, clients, and charities. Working together, we saw projects through to successful conclusions.
Then there was the weather. The Texas ice storm in February caused delays due to power outages and road conditions. On the west coast, movers had to work through adverse conditions caused by wildfire smoke.
Destinations
In 2021, about a third of all FRS shipments went to international destinations in Africa, Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean. Domestic shipments went to ten US states.
Outlook
Although we expect supply chain disruptions to continue into 2022, we see the situation easing slightly. We will continue to build proactive relationships and resiliency in our practices so that we have more options in place to plan for the unexpected. In the bigger picture, we see sustainability becoming an increasingly important goal of organizations of all types.