We are expanding all over the place, so the time came to re-organise the website (again) to reflect what we’re doing.

As well as office furniture, we’re now selling stationery supplies to Leeds and West Yorkshire businesses, and our office supplies department is soon to have its very own section in the website – as you can see from the homepage.

And as you’ll notice, the other new string to our bow is the schools’ swap shop, in which we are trying to make our business a resource for helping local schools share and re-use the furniture they have more effectively between themselves. Getting organised, having a central point of co-ordination, removals and storage are the obstacles to organising such a venture, which is where we realised Re:Work could step in.

As well as the new look, we’ve made a slight change to our URL to reflect the fact that we’ve diversified – so as you’ll see, we’re now www.wearerework.co.uk. Don’t worry if you don’t fancy updating all your bookmarks though, you’ll still be redirected.

The new sites themselves are still in development, but the new information should be up very soon, so remember to check back here in a few weeks to see what’s new. If you follow us on Twitter or Facebook, we’ll keep you posted.

We’d like to invite you to give a warm welcome to Re:Work’s newest member of staff – Jenna Cooper.

Jenna is in our newly-created role of sales co-ordinator. If you deal with Re:Work regularly, in all likelihood you’ll now be dealing with her or Richard, rather than me (Caroline) now.

Having a dedicated sales co-ordinator – and Jenna is most certainly dedicated – is going to allow us to give even more quality attention to our customers, provide a central point of contact and streamline the purchasing process.

What all that means for our customers is that you get your stuff more quickly. And in the unlikely event of any hiccoughs, or if you decide to add any little extras to your order, it will now be dealt with smoothly and effectively by Jenna.

She’s going to be a great addition to the team. We’re in the process of moving Caroline’s office upstairs, to our new extended mezzanine (more details on that soon) so we needed a loudmouth to take Caroline’s place on the ground floor…

She’s going to fit in very well!

So next month we’re co-organising a business conference specially for small businesses in the area, alongside MS Net Solutions.

It will take place at the John Charles Stadium on Wednesday, May 9.

Richard Lucas, our director, came up with the idea after he was invited to go over to the stadium to discuss sponsorship. In his words, he was ‘absolutely blown away’ by the facilities there, and immediately saw the potential for Hunslet businesses and the community.

As well as getting small businesses from the area together for networking and promotion, we thought running an exhibition was an excellent chance to show off the resources the Hawks have on site.

They’ve got excellent meeting spaces and a learning and development centre kitted out with Apple Macs that would be perfect for IT skills or social media training. One of their best resources is their coach, Barry Eaton, who’s fully engaged with the community in Hunslet. He and his colleagues are offering tag rugby, cheerleading courses and general volunteering support to schoolchildren throughout Hunslet.

As Richard said: “It’s an opportunity to help companies see the resources they have on their own doorstep, and make some useful links with one another while they’re at it.

“Their learning and development facilities, and the work Barry and the team are doing in the community with children should be more widely recognised and supported, in my view.”

On the day of the exhibition there will be tours of the grounds conducted by the owners, Leeds City Council.

The exhibition will be staffed by Re’New, a Leeds regeneration charity which works with people from disadvantaged communities. Re’New are also exhibiting – and we can vouch for their work as they’ve supplied many of the people who have successfully worked on placements with Re:Work.

Drop us a line if you’d like more information about the exhibition, or visit the Hunslet Hawks Business Exhibition website.

Re:Work, your favourite collector, recycler and supplier of quality used office furniture, has started to supply stationery.

It’s not just because we love stationery, although that’s a big part of it. And we know you do to. There’s something about the smell of a freshly unwrapped ream of paper, or the satisfying thud of a brand new notebook. It’s not just us, is it?

It’s also because we’ve come to realise our clients like to buy their stuff from us. Office furniture is an occasional purchase, a once-every-few-years investment, then we part company until your next move or re-fit.

But it’s nice to stay in touch with your friendly local social enterprise – and because every notebook, pen, jar of coffee or pack of envelopes you buy from us supports our work in creating local jobs and keeping landfill under control, it’s always an ethical investment.

Oh, and we can match or beat most market prices for stationery, too. Plus there’s free delivery on orders over £30 (delivery on orders under that will cost you a fiver).

If you’d like to make your stationery purchases an ethical investment, email your address over to Re:Work today and request a catalogue.

Or, keep an eye on our website – full details will be appearing online soon.

It’s way out of the Re:Work remit, and not something we can help with. Here’s why:

First of all, it’s a service that is well covered in Leeds – there are plenty of charitable and social organisations already doing a great job in that area.

I started Re:Work because I spotted a significant gap in the market, in which office furniture wasn’t getting picked up and saved from landfill, and businesses weren’t being offered the ethical, good value option of using second-hand furniture.

Furthermore, collecting and recycling used domestic furniture works great when it’s a charitable enterprise, but as a business – however social – it is not a viable model. Lots of second-hand furniture goes to people who are, in one way or another, in need. Often their purchases are subsidised, or they receive some kind of voucher from the council. Without the advantage of regular or bulk sales, it’s the kind of enterprise which can only be run as a charity – and very successful the Leeds ones are too.

The only thing we have in common with those organisations is that we sell furniture. Dealing in office furniture means our market, our suppliers, and our customers are completely different. The closest we get to people’s domestic situations is fitting out their home offices – and we’re more than happy to do that.

So if you have some good quality domestic furniture you’d like to divert from landfill and send to a good home, our best advice to you is that you call an organisation like St Vincent de Paul, Emmaus Leeds, SLATE Furniture, and Revive.

And the new brand design got everywhere – on our signage, the van’s livery, letterheads, email signatures, mugs, mousemats, sweatshirts, decorations, folders – by the time we’d finished it was on the back of our eyelids when we went to sleep at night, too.

Since the rebrand, we’ve had some excellent feedback from customers and visitors to the store and the website.

To be fair, most of them look at our decorations and say ‘oooh, that’s good’. It’s a good job really, because it really has spread everywhere. We are well aware now that green is a popular colour.

So, thanks for the feedback so far – now we’d like you to tell us a bit more about what else you’d like to see at Re:Work.

Do you need more information about the business? Are the catalogues and online information detailed enough? What more can we do to make the website more useful?

Don’t be shy now – we’d love to know. Drop us a line or leave a comment below.

Our director, Richard Lucas, had the brainwave of supplying a furniture service to local schools which goes beyond simple selling.

When a group of schools get together, it soon becomes apparent that some of them need items that others need to get rid of. There’s an obvious solution to get schools the furniture they need, save money and unneccesary waste going to landfill. However, there’s no centralised co-ordinator to organise it all.

Enter Re:Work.

Last week Richard met up with 10 schools from the Wakefield District to try the idea out on them – and they like it. The next step is to figure out the logistics and create a database to hold and organise details of what items are where.

And what’s really exciting about this scheme is that if it gets going, the revenue Re:Work makes from it will create one more job in Hunslet. And that’s got to be worth working for.

Watch this space.

If you’ve got any similar ideas or requirements for supplying, swapping or moving furniture in a way that saves money and the environment, we’d love to hear them. Leave us a comment or drop us a line.

It’s a partnership that takes in Leeds City Council, St Vincent de Paul, Emmaus Leeds, SLATE Furniture, and the new kids on the block, Revive.

It mainly deals with domestic furniture, with the aim of getting people to think beyond taking bulky household items to the local tip, or leaving it out for the council to collect.

Rather than sending household rubbish to the dump, there are organisations out there who can give our old sofas or cookers a new home, or at the very least break them down and ensure its materials get reused.

It’s a vital service which, again, is helping reduce the amount of rubbish going to landfill.

We learn a lot from the charities there, not least valuable hints and tips on their stock systems – which have to be very rigorous due to the stringent records they have to keep to be eligible for the council’s recycling credits.

We like to think we help to bring a business angle to the meetings, by giving the necessary advice and helping people make the sorts of sound decisions that enable them to stay sustainable.

So that’s our little shout out for the Leeds Furniture Reuse Group, who help make a difference in Leeds.

Social Footprints, an organisation set up to inspire young people to start their own social enterprises, made some videos to challenge them to give something back to society.

Re:Work starred in one of them. It tells the story of how Re:Work was born through Caroline’s frustration at the amount of office furniture going to waste.

It also outlines our stringent customer service standards – delivering good furniture on time, and installing it as well. And listen out for the total amount of office furniture we’ve actually diverted from the landfill over the years – it’s a nice big number.

How do you like the line – ‘we’re a dating agency for office furniture’? We’re rather proud of that one.

We’re also proud to be held up as a model for inspiring future social entrepreneurs alongside organisations like Baraka Coffee House, and despite our chief executive’s blushes, it was a great project to be part of.

We’re working alongside CO2 sense – a new organisation which exists to help businesses cut their energy costs and protect the planet.

It’s a brilliant way of confirming we’re living up to our eco-principles and walking the talk.

CO2 sense carried out an audit of how everything we’re doing has any kind of impact on the environment. We’re grateful to consultant Barry Paschali of Greener Working Solutions for doing a lot of the legwork for us on that!

The overall aim is to limit even further the impact our business operations have on the environment. We know our business does this, now we’re working on greening our own offices and warehouse even more.

The verdict was good – our levels of waste are very low in terms of energy, utilities and office supplies, and our use of transport is very efficient too.

The next job for us is to develop the environmental management system in accordance with ISO 14001 Environmental Management Standard, in which we’ll be developing all sorts of policies and procedures geared towards improving our effect on the environment.

One very nice upshot of this is the new plan to install FILON rooflights at the Re:Work warehouse, to replace the gungy, painted-over, worn out skylights you can just about make out in the ceiling right now. The new lights will provide around 90% more natural light to the premises – which will cut our electricity bills no end!

I can highly recommend following the CO2 Sense process to any company, private or third sector organisation or social enterprise, who may wish to improve their environmental friendliness, strengthen and reinforce their green message and save money by running more efficiently.