Signing the lease on your first office space is an exciting time. But then someone has to fill the place, and in most startups, that someone is the founder. There’s no procurement team, no office manager, and no spare afternoon to ring around for quotes. The order still has to be right, because the team will use those desks and chairs every day for years.
The way to get through it quickly is to make the decisions in a set order and to only buy from suppliers who make the job easy. So let’s walk through that order, starting with the one number that decides everything else.
Start With Headcount, Not Chairs
Count the people you’ll have in twelve months, not the people you have today. If you’re eight now and hiring four more by summer, you should buy for twelve, because adding mismatched desks later always looks worse and usually costs more. Add a couple of visitor chairs and enough seats for your biggest regular meeting.
Then decide how the office will actually be used. If half the team works from home on any given day, you can plan shared desks and cut the order significantly, while keeping a few spare desks for busy days when more people come in. Settle this before you measure anything, because it changes how much furniture the room needs to hold.
Measure the Space Before You Buy Anything
Get the floor plan from your landlord or measure the room yourself, then work out what fits. A standard desk runs 120cm to 160cm wide, and each person needs roughly a metre of clearance behind their chair to get in and out without a squeeze. Walkways, radiators, columns and door swings all eat into the plan faster than you’d expect.
Sketch it on paper or in a free planning tool before you commit. A layout that looks generous in your head will often turn out cramped on the floor, and returning twenty desks because they don’t fit is a week you won’t get back.
Desks First, Then Seating, Then Storage
Desks set the layout, so choose them first. Bench desks save money and space for teams that work side by side, while height-adjustable desks cost more but earn their keep if people spend all day at them. Pick one range and stick to it, so the office still looks coherent when you reorder.
Chairs come next, and this is where the spec matters most. A chair rated for 6-hour use will not survive a team that works 9 to 7, so look for 8-hour usage ratings and check the weight capacity, which typically runs from 110kg to 150kg. Those two numbers will tell you what a chair is actually built for far better than the product photos will.
Storage comes last: a pedestal per desk, lockers if people are hot-desking, and a cupboard or two for the stuff every office accumulates. Storage is the easiest thing to add as you go, so it’s not a huge priority at the start.
What a Listing Should Tell You Before You Spend
Where you buy matters as much as what you buy, because the supplier decides how much of your week this order swallows. The office furniture suppliers worth a startup’s time will put every spec, price and lead time on the listing itself, so the whole order can be planned and placed in one afternoon.
If a site hides prices behind a quote form, it’s planning to negotiate with you, and negotiation is a game you don’t have time to learn. Before you add anything to a basket, check the listing shows:
- The full price, with VAT handled clearly, and the same figure whether you order two desks or twenty.
- Who handles assembly and installation, stated clearly on the site. You don’t want to be expecting ready-to-use chairs and receive boxes of parts and tools instead.
- Usage ratings and weight capacities on every chair.
- A guarantee of five to ten years stated up front, not buried in post-purchase small print.
- The lead time, in days.
Any supplier that publishes all five clearly has nothing to hide. And a supplier that publishes none of them is asking you to find out the hard way.
The Conveniences That Will Save You a Week
A few newer services will cut the job down further, and they cost nothing to use. 3D product viewers let you spin a chair or desk around on screen, which can replace the showroom trip entirely. Some suppliers will also plan your space free of charge, turning your floor plan into a layout before you order a single item, which certainly beats sketching it yourself.
Published lead times will keep your move-in date safe, because you’ll know before paying whether the desks arrive in two days or twenty-one. And free standard delivery with assembly or installation available at checkout means nobody on your team will have to spend a Friday afternoon holding an Allen key unless they want to.
The Second Order Is the Real Test
Your first office furniture order will set the template for every order after it. When you hire the next ten people, you’ll want matching desks in the same finish, delivered at the same price, without digging through old emails for a quote reference.
So keep a record of exactly what you bought, in what colour and size, and buy from somewhere you can reorder from in minutes. The startups that get this right never think about furniture again, which is precisely the point.
