Kitting out a team with Office Essentials
Fitting out a new office or a growing team? How to make the budget go further, where not to cut corners, and what the Office Essentials range covers.
Furnishing a whole team at once is where office budgets get tested. A new unit, a second floor, five starters in the same month: suddenly everyone needs a desk, a chair, storage, screens and power, and the total climbs fast. The answer is not to buy the cheapest of everything. It is to spend where it counts and save where it does not.
Spend on chairs, save elsewhere
If money is tight, put it into the chair each person sits on all day. A desk is a flat surface at a set height, and a plain desk does that job well enough. A chair has to fit a person and adjust to them, and a poor one gets noticed every single day.
So for full-time desk staff, choose a task chair with seat height and back adjustment at the very least. For visitors, meeting rooms and training rooms, where people sit for an hour or two, a simpler chair is fine. Compare the options in task and operator chairs.
What Office Essentials covers
When the budget is tight, start with Office Essentials, our best value range of everyday desks, chairs and storage. It covers most of what a team needs:
- Desks: straight, slimline and crescent desks on panel end or cantilever legs, from 800mm to 1800mm wide, some sold with a fixed or mobile pedestal, plus Air Lite sit-stand desks and a two person back-to-back sit-stand bench.
- Chairs: mesh task chairs with or without arms, posture and executive chairs, leather-look executive chairs, cantilever visitor chairs, stacking and folding chairs, and bistro stools.
- Storage: mobile pedestals in wood or steel, wooden cupboards and bookcases, and steel stationery cupboards, tambour cupboards, filing cabinets and lockers.
- The extras: desk screens, cable trays and spines, desktop and under-desk power, and anti-fatigue mats.
Because it is built from pieces that go together, it is easy to give a whole team the same desk, pedestal and chair. The office looks tidier for it, and adding a new starter is simple. Browse Office Essentials.
Pick a standard and stick to it
Choose one desk width, one finish and one or two chairs, and use them wherever you can. It is cheaper to plan, quicker to order and easier to add to: when the next person joins, you order one more of the same. Any chair then works at any desk, which helps when people move around.
For most desk work, a 1200mm or 1400mm desk is a sensible default. The size guide matches desk widths to screens and paperwork, and lists the space to leave behind each chair.
Count everything, not only desks and chairs
Budgets usually go wrong on the small items nobody wrote down. For each desk position, list:
- the desk, the chair and a pedestal
- a screen, if desks face each other
- a cable tray and power: where will each person plug in?
- a monitor arm or laptop stand, if needed
- a share of team storage: cupboards, filing and lockers
Then add the shared spaces: chairs for the meeting room, a table for the kitchen, a couple of seats for visitors. One complete list, priced up front, saves a second smaller order later.
Bundles and stacking chairs
Ready-made bundles put a desk, a pedestal and a chair together as one product, or a boardroom table with a set of executive chairs. Stacking chairs for training rooms and canteens also come in bundles of 30. See office bundles.
One thing to know about stacking chairs: some carry a small-order delivery charge when you buy fewer than four, and the checkout shows it. If you only need two or three, check the delivery line before you pay. Browse stacking chairs.
Order in one go, and use the VAT switch
Orders over £30 to a UK mainland address get free standard delivery, so one order for the whole team is simpler than several small ones. On many products you can add installation at checkout if you would rather not build the desks yourselves.
If your business is VAT registered, switch the prices to ex. VAT. You can then compare them against your budget like for like, without working the VAT out of every price.
Bigger fit-outs
For a larger job, whether that is a new unit on a West Lothian industrial estate or a full floor somewhere else in the UK, send us the list through request a quote, or call us in Bathgate, and we will price the whole lot.
