Supply chain circularity involves procurement, transportation management, customer tracking and reverse logistics, says Kristin Toth, president and chief operating officer of Fernish.

Furniture rental is about more than just paying a monthly fee for a sofa or some other item. It’s about “creating your home.” A company like Fernish, then, is about taking something that can be a “big pain point, like the buying, managing, assembling, disassembling, storage, moving furniture and getting rid of it” as easy as possible, Toth says.

The “circularity” she speaks of refers to what happens to the furniture after an initial rental (or sale) to a customer. Toth says furniture has “many lives,” and Fernish has to choose the right product and source it in the right way from the get-go. “Number one, let's make sure this product is going to be attractive style-wise for a long time,” she says. “Let's make sure it's really durable. Let's make sure it's modular so that we can refurbish it, and we don't have to throw away an entire sofa if a cushion needs to be replaced. And let's make sure that it's refurbished so that we can actually sand things down, retouch things and make it look like new over and over and over again.”

Toth says the company eventually will have to pick up anything it rents. “We think about circularity on the local logistics side of things. And then we have the whole reverse logistics and refurbishment process that we've had to build out in our network as well. So there's this sort of sourcing, delivering, picking back up, refurbishing and then sending things out again. Then, as something wears and it's no longer like new, what do we do with it? Because it still has a ton of value, we've been developing a secondary used market as well.”