The View from the Office.

I met up with Chris Van de Voorde, the founder of JUUNOO, which makes reusable, modular interior walls for construction, at his office near Union Square. We had coffee and Danishes from Ole & Steen.

The company grew out of a long-term obsession with walls that started when Chris was at university. His thesis focused on the importance of interior walls, a project he titled “mass customization applied to residential buildings.”

It was the early era of online customization when Dell was letting you configure a laptop and Nike would let customers design a shoe. Chris thought the same ideas could apply to buildings and that reusable materials could make projects more sustainable. 

Chris believed buildings should be designed from the inside out by starting with the people and the spaces they need and then building around them. The first layer encasing a person, he knew, would be the interior wall.. 

He went to work at beMatrix, a Belgian company that built the wall systems for booths at trade shows. He joined as a draftsman when the company had €3 million in revenue, taught himself to program and ended up running product development, IT, and procurement. Over six years the company scaled to €50 million, mostly from products the team invented.

Chris left to start his own venture, thinking that the same kind of sustainable technology could be extended into offices, schools, and hospitals. 

JUUNOO started by supplying companies with single-person phone booths to meet the growing demand for private calls in open-floor offices. The company has since extended its product line to include larger units for group meetings. 

Chris explained that demand for larger pods reflects a shift in office culture. Post COVID, he says, people want open space for email and casual, social work, and quiet spaces for deep focus. One layout doesn’t fit everyone.

The company struggled to find market fit at first. One of the key lessons was that people didn’t just want a pod with just walls. They wanted a complete room that had a mix of solid and glass walls, a floor and a ceiling. Once JUUNOO incorporated those ideas, sales took off. 

Along the way he learned to keep things simple. Early on, JUUNOO offered clients a variety of options in terms of colors and carpet. Customers were paralyzed by the choices. He settled on two versions: one in black and one in white. Sales have since jumped. 

Another lesson was to prioritize hiring for sales first, and focus on products the market needs. With the pods, the sales cycle runs about six weeks from pitching to installing and payment. By contrast, traditional wall construction can take two or three years to get approval from architects and contractors which is too slow for a small company that is just starting out.

The pods are a means to a larger end. Chris wants to make building materials profitable to reuse, the way SpaceX makes reusable rockets. The product they invented is called DryClick and Chris calls it “the Falcon 9 of the drywall industry.”

That would be a huge win for the environment and as an example he points to drywall, a $55 billion a year industry that is linked to global CO2 emissions and destined for landfill.

As part of his commitment to long-term sustainability he founded the Circular Value Institute, a non-profit that promotes financially viable businesses that are good for the environment. 

You can connect with Chris via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.