Room is making $10 million a year selling portable soundproof boxes

Room

• Room is a new company that’s created private,
  semi-soundproof phone booths for noisy, crowded
  offices.
• Already, the company has snagged high profile clients
  like NASA, Salesforce, and Nike. 
• Room says they’re on track to sell $10 million worth of
  product in their first year of business.

If you work in an open office, it’s likely that you’ve ducked
into a hallway, a closet, or even the bathroom to get a few
moments of quiet to make a phone call. 

With the move to the open office and the collective banishment of
cubicles, finding a quiet, private place can sometimes be close
to impossible.

The scarcity of distraction-free zones in the modern workplace is
all too familiar to Morten Meisner-Jensen, co-founder
of Room, a New York-based startup. 

While Room was originally born to accommodate the
ever-changing, scrappy dynamic of the startup office environment,
in the company’s first few months of operation, they’ve snagged
some bigger clients as well. NASA, Nike, and Salesforce are
all among Room’s first clients. Already, says Meisner-Jensen,
Room is on track to sell $10 million worth of phone booths by
mid-2019, at about $3,500 a pop.

It’s already something of a soundproofed success. But it
started from relatively humble origins.

Building a better phone booth

 While working at a Denmark-based advertising company,
Meisner-Jensen once constructed a small, cramped phone booth in
his office so that his team could have a secluded place to take
conference calls. 

“We had huge issues with noise in our office so we tried to
fix it ourselves,” said Meisner-Jensen.

But building a decent phone booth turned out to be harder
than it looked.

“It was much more difficult and expensive to build than we
expected,” said Meisner-Jensen. Once the booth was constructed,
Meisner-Jensen realized there was one fatal flaw within its
design: While private and relatively quiet, it was also extremely
hot inside.

“It didn’t ventilate properly,” said Meisner-Jensen. “So it
became known as ‘the sweatbox.'”

Meisner-Jensen soon realized that his office wasn’t
the only one that was in dire need of a small, quiet space for
making a quick phone call:
Noise and a lack of privacy are a common complaint within the
modern workplace, where open communication is often
encouraged.  

Along with his co-founder Brian Chen, Meisner-Jensen
founded
Room, a company that  makes sleek, transportable phone
booths to provide an elegant solution for noisy, crowded office
spaces.

Room

The booths are assembled upon delivery within a matter of
hours. They’re made from a blend of recyclable materials
including a padding of plastic water bottles inside the walls
themselves. At 10 square feet, they’re snug, but not
cramped.

Meisner-Jensen and Chen have designed the booths with
crowded office spaces in mind: They’re insulated with
noise-canceling materials to keep out unnecessary sound and
sealed by a magnetic door. Ample provisions have also been made
to moderate the space’s airflow: vents in the floor and ceiling
keep the temperature moderate, and a small ceiling fan prevents
against over-heating.

Room’s booths are expressly designed to accommodate video
conferencing and phone calls. To discourage longterm use,
Meisner-Jensen and Chen incorporated a stool to sit on, rather
than more comfortable options like a bench or a chair, which
might encourage people to camp out for hours. However,
Meisner-Jensen points out that just about everything about the
booth’s design can be customized for larger orders.

Room’s
booths are designed for short term use to accommodate video
conference calls and private phone conversations.

For now, the company is struggling to keep up with the
overwhelming demand for their buzzy new product: Meisner-Jensen
said it can take about 2 months for an order to be delivered from
Room’s furniture production facility in Portugal.  However,
he stresses that production time will decrease dramatically in
the upcoming months: Soon, Room hopes to deliver its product in
about three weeks flat. 

The booths, said Meisner-Jensen, are only the beginning of Room’s
plans for the future of the office space. 

“We have a lot of demand at the
moment for larger rooms, for four-person meeting calls, or single
person offices that are larger and intended for a full day of
work,” said Meisner-Jensen. “The most important thing for us is
to create an affordable solution for what people need.”

Meisner-Jensen envisions Room’s
ambitions as closer to that of mattress delivery company Casper
than furniture giant Ikea: Room wants to position itself as a
direct-to-consumer solution for office spaces and provide
easy-to-assemble furniture for affordable rates. 

“We’re surrounded by these amazing startups in the consumer world
that have a one-hour delivery window,” said Meisner-Jensen.
“There’s all of these amazing consumer platforms, but when I come
to the business-to-business space, there’s a disconnect. We want
to cut out the middle man when it comes to selling office
furniture. Keep the price point low, and deliver on consumer
experience and quality.”