Ep 71. Creating homes with kindness
In this episode, Michelle is joined by Ben Stammer, co-founder of ReLove, an incredible Sydney charity that takes high quality pre-loved furniture and homewares and gives them a second life, by furnishing homes for families who need them most.
If you’ve ever moved house, you’ll know how quickly furniture decisions come up. Many of our clients donate to friends, Facebook Marketplace or Vinnies, but what if your furniture could help someone starting fresh after a crisis, while also keeping it out of landfill? This is where ReLove comes in.
This is an episode about more than property. It’s about kindness, community, and the power of creating homes that people truly feel safe in.
Here’s what you’ll learn from today’s episode:
How ReLove creates a shopping experience with dignity for people moving into a safe home
The surprising ways corporate office furniture can be transformed into important pieces
The huge environmental impact of keeping thousands of tonnes of furniture out of landfill
How you, or your business, can get involved through donations, volunteering or even team days at the ReLove warehouse
Speakers in today’s episode:
Michelle May - Michelle May Buyers Agents
Ben Stammer - ReLove
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This podcast has been produced and edited by Snappystreet Creative
Please note that any views or opinions presented in this podcast are solely those of the speakers, and do not necessarily represent those of any business. These views and opinions are general in nature, and do not take account of your personal objectives, financial situation and needs. Please consider whether it applies in your circumstances and seek professional advice wherever appropriate.
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Michelle
Hi and welcome to another episode of the Buy Your Side podcast, the property podcast to help you make smarter property buying decisions.
My name is Michelle, I think you know by now that I'm the principal of Michelle May Buyers Agents here in Sydney and I am trying to help you make smarter property buying decisions. But on this little podcast that I have, I'm hoping that I may also influence you a little bit in another direction whilst you are making your property buying decisions, because I'll tell you why.
A lot of people that I work with obviously are living somewhere already, whether it's with their parents or whether they already own a property and obviously they have furniture that they own and love. And sometimes if there's a little bit left in budget, or because of size requirements changing for a sofa or table, they end up buying new furniture.
And that kind of got me to thinking, if a lot of my clients have that thing happen in their life, I'm sure that might be something that comes across in your planning with buying a new property.
So whilst I was thinking about it a lot of clients will end up giving it to friends or Facebook marketplace or, the usual routes, Vinnies etc. I actually was very lucky to stumble across an organisation called ReLove here in Sydney.
And I was very fortunate to go and visit them on their site in Alexandria. And then I met one of the founding members of ReLove, who is Ben Stammer. And as you can see, Ben Stammer is with me today, and I'd love for Ben to share his story with you so that potentially you can put ReLove on your list of charities or organisations that you think about when wanting to move on from your furnitures and pre-loved items, and potentially donate, volunteer and all that kind of stuff. So thank you, Ben. It's such a pleasure to have you here. Thank you for taking the time.
Ben
Thanks, Michelle. Thanks for having me.
Michelle
So Ben, I know we met in Alexandria and gosh, what an operation you have going on there. I was quite overwhelmed. Just to imagine for those listening out there, it's almost like walking into a massive IKEA warehouse space full of furniture and everything that you could possibly want for when you're moving into a new home.
But taking a few steps back, you were already doing great things before you set up ReLove. You were already passing on acts of kindness before you came up with this idea.So tell me how ReLove came about and yeah, tell me everything.
Ben
Yeah, great. Look, thank you. So just firstly to summarise, ReLove is a really simple concept of connecting lots and lots of furniture and homewares that might otherwise be going out to council cleanups or into landfill to people who need it. So for stuff that's really great quality, we're giving things a second life. But as you say, in a really dignified setting that looks a little bit like an IKEA or a department store that we've styled, and we're currently getting around about five clients a day through the door. So we're moving about five families a day, 25 families a week.
So that's the basic model. But prior to starting ReLove, we sort of talk about ourselves a little bit like we're an accidental charity, but now we're doing it, we can't look away. I was working in banking and my co-founder, Ren, was an architect, an artist and a mum. And we had what was called the Run for Good Project. We were a group of runners, 50 or 60 people in the group. And you get a bit of time to talk to each other when you're running. And one of the things that we were talking to each other about was finding some practical ways to give back.
So not always hitting people up for sponsorship and money, but to find some ways to connect with some of the community causes that are supporting people all around us.
So we formed the Run For Good project. Our first project was to put the call out for great quality running shoes. People experiencing homelessness are walking on average 28 kilometres a week and people need really sturdy footwear to get to medical appointments, to find shelter, to just to try to navigate moving around each week.
So we put the call out amongst our group and family and friends and we'd raise 600 pairs of running shoes. So that was just one of our projects. Another one of our projects was that we got to know a women's refuge in Sydney. They're supporting around 200 women a night in crisis accommodation and then sort of medium term refuge accommodation plus outreach support as well.
And their support workers were saying how difficult it was to source furniture. So we put the call out, we borrowed a little bit of warehouse space and we tried to mobilise our running community, but also to reach into some of the corporates and hotels and suppliers with excess furniture to try to rehome five women.
That was the initial goal. The very generous corporate who we borrowed the warehouse space from, we said two weeks, just two weeks, just give us the chance to put the call out, and we ended up getting so much great quality furniture, we did overstay our two weeks. But after three or four months, we'd furnished over 35 homes, so we knew that there was a model here.
Up until then, the caseworkers would be trawling Facebook Marketplace. They'd be going on to the council cleanups to drive around, trying to find furniture on behalf of their clients. So we really wanted to sort of challenge that. There are some forms of support from the government, depending on the area of support, but the amounts are really small. The escaping violence payment usually leaves around about $1,500 for furniture. And if you're furnishing a full home like many mums are, $1,500 really doesn't go very far. And that turns up as flat pack furniture as well, so you've then got to construct things yourself. So we were trying to think of a way to provide a better model here. And we've tapped into this huge supply of pre-love furniture that's otherwise often destined for landfill.
Michelle
And incredible stats. I just pulled these off your website, 1,000 plus homes per year that you've been able to furnish. You've got support from corporate partners, community volunteers, 2,500 tons of furniture has been saved from landfill. That's massive.
And $10 million dollars plus of furniture, the value of the furniture that has been re-loved. And if anything else, guys, if you're listening to this, go and follow ReLove on their social media pages because one post that I really loved, and we spoke about it when we were in your warehouse, is the repurposing of the corporate furniture into actual functional things within the home. So talk me through that, Ben, what you guys are doing with stuff that doesn't necessarily work in a normal household.
Ben
Yeah, we're trying to think really creatively about what's coming from a corporate setting and what can be repurposed into a home setting. Corporate furniture is usually depreciated over five to seven years. 95% of furniture from offices is single use and destined for landfill. And the whole process where corporates are doing a de-fit, the demo trucks turn up, it's just over $500 for landfill in New South Wales per tonne. It's way too easy. So we're trying to step in the middle of this and think really creatively about what we can get from an office. So one example, Michelle, is a small meeting room table that can be round or or square or even rectangular are perfect for dining tables within smaller social housing settings. A lot of the homes that we're moving people into tend to be smaller apartments, although some to fit families are larger.
So those small meeting room tables are gold for us in terms of being small small dining tables.
We've taken, for example, tambours, which lots of the younger listeners wouldn't know what a tambour is, but it's basically a filing cabinet that we used to put our paper-based files into.
Those tambours have little doors and they can be used as storage. They can be used as bookshelves. We've recently worked with a technology company who was doing quite a large office de-fit, about 360 people in their office, and they had a whole lot of workstations with the workstation top being ready to be donated, they're very, very difficult to reuse. They're fixed, they're weird shapes, they're purpose built. But we worked with a furniture company called AWM who came up jointly with the design to turn a workstation top into a bed base.
So we're providing around 40 to 50 beds a week. We need the bed bases. And so just thinking through what we can take from an office and repurpose into a home setting.
Michelle
Yeah, that's amazing, isn't it? Just a little bit of ingenuity and boom, it's making someone happy and you're also saving the planet. Your operation has grown quite significantly. I imagine beyond your wildest expectations from what was sprouted an idea, four years ago, and previous to that all the other great things you were doing. Where would you like to see it go from now because you've already got such great engagement I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but corporates and you're helping so many different women's rescues and charities. I mean wayside chapel to name but a few but where do you want to take this next?
Ben
Yeah, look, we have scaled really quickly. So Ren and I co-founded this about four and a half years ago and we're up, we're actually aiming to get to a thousand families this year. So the rough stats, it's a thousand families that we're aiming to get to and we're on track to do that this year. Of those thousand families, we're supporting about 2,200 people. So that's usually a single mum with two or more kids. We support a lot of First Nations clients amongst the mix. So around 40% of our clients are First Nations. And that's not a goal or a target or a requirement, certainly not a goal, but that's that's very much the need in our community.
We have scaled very quickly with the support primarily to date from foundations and donors. I'd sort of characterise the corporate support as being something we really need some help with. We really need more help for corporates to get on board and help us sustain and scale this model of support.
But we've done this really with the help of the community. So we started this as two people. We've now got an amazing army of volunteers. So community volunteers who come in every day to ReLove, they run the client shopping appointments that we're doing. So it's an hour shopping appointment per client coming in. And that's all run through through community volunteers. We have corporate volunteers coming to help our train delivery and warehouse team do the actual deliveries out to people's homes to build flat pack furniture to help organise the free store.
So really it's been about trying to harness the community to get on board. We can't wait for government support. We actually just have had some support from the New South Wales government, Homes New South Wales, but we need to create the model. We need to get the community on board to really grow this model. To come back to your question about scaling, we have scaled very quickly. We're now all over Greater Sydney. We're going into just about every suburban area in Greater Sydney. And this is a scalable model. We're currently considering and doing some systems work and some consulting work on potentially scaling to the Illawarra, to the Central Coast, to the Hunter Valley so around Sydney, higher density areas with great need in terms of the broad base that we're supporting.
And we're looking at doing that. So because choice is such an important part of our model, we're looking at doing that maybe as an online shopping experience. So we have all the items in our free store, categorised and loaded onto our online system. So if the client with their caseworker from those locations can choose online, we think that would be a really powerful thing. And we're looking for transport partners to help us facilitate the move. It might be a once a week move or once a fortnight move to the Wollongong area, likewise to the Central Coast and Hunter Valley, but we'll need some help in getting that part of the expansion done.
And then further, we're looking to expand this to other cities, which probably would mean some warehouse space, but working with other partners in those cities. But look, that needs to be funded. That's a separate project. Someone recently called us the Oz Harvester Furniture. And we quite liked, certainly it was a great compliment just just given how successful OzHarvest has been in food support, but also stopping food going into landfill as well. OzHarvest has scaled really successfully and there's no reason why we can't too.
Michelle
yeah it strikes me that, gosh, Australia is such a rich country. I'm from the Netherlands originally, very rich country indeed. And yet there's so many people slipping through the cracks and it's not because of people like you and the volunteers that you've managed to get motivated about this and the companies that care that this is actually possible. So I think that's just tremendous, a tremendous thing that you're doing.
My question to you, when i when I came to see you at the warehouse, obviously it's in kind of industrial space, but what really struck me when I walked in there was the the level of care that you clearly have taken into making this a real enjoyable, special experience for the people who are coming to you. The people who are coming to you with their caseworkers, they've obviously come from a very traumatic background. Things have happened to them that have led them to be there on that day. And I thought that was really special. It made it look really special. I could feel that, like even just as a visitor you've set it up beautifully and even the people that were there were warm and friendly and...not in a pity way, it was a real welcoming space.
And the other thing that struck me is that you continue to innovate, there were people there that I think you just received an enormous amount of free fabrics. So it's not just about the nuts and bolts of what people need, right? It's not just, okay, how many beds are you going to need? You need something to sit on. But also what makes a house a home? And I don't know if you can tell, but I love a good knick-knack and it makes a difference between, yes, it's furnished, but plain and it has no emotion versus something, oh, gosh, I really love that extra cushion on the sofa, you know?
One of your co-people who was there on that day, Mimi, told me that it was kind of surprising to see what people gravitate towards. A gentleman picked something that reminded him of his grandmother, and and most people would have just walked straight past it, because they may have thought it was old-fashioned or whatever, but to him it meant something, okay, this could be part of my new journey, which makes it really special and different from other places that do amazing work but potentially don't make that human connection? Would I be right in saying that?
Ben
Yes, look, choice is just such an important part of our model. And the client experience is a very important part of our model. So we do a lot of work internally, really about thinking and improving the customer experience, just as many businesses would do exactly the same. The clients that we're supporting are varied and and while 75% of our clients are women, that includes youth at risk, women as young as as sort of older teens, through to mums with as we said, two, six, seven children, through to probably our largest growing cohort of women are are women experiencing homelessness who are over 50.
But also, to your point earlier, we support a lot of men who are experiencing homelessness older men, youth at risk, gender fluid people as well. So people from our LGBTQI + community, a lot of youth are at risk there. So the range of people that we're supporting is varied, but so is choice. Choice is such a personal thing. So we've set up the warehouse in a way where our biggest focus is on making sure that pre-love donations are really good quality. We're absolutely focused on quality. We never want to be ungrateful if we're turning something away because it's got cat scratches or whatever, but we just don't want that stuff. We're not really staffed to upscaling things. But we're quite happy to say no if we feel that it won't feel really good in the hands of the recipient. So quality is everything.
But what we've learned over time is not to put our personal lens on style. Style is such a personal subjective choice thing that to your example, we take Nana's flowery couch and because it's gonna appeal to someone and remind them of something.
Michelle
We saw that together, didn't we? Yes. and you were like, I didn't know people like this. And I was like, I love it!
Ben
Yeah, and look in the homeware section too, so as we walk through the client journey, you start with the big stuff with the sofa and the armchair and the coffee table and the TV unit.
You go through to the dining table section, past the beds, and storage. And then once you've made those big decisions and we come back into the homeware section, which we've styled as a really lovely homeware section, and that's really where the choice kicks in.
Your home is different to my home, it is different to so many people's homes, and that's important. What we're trying to do is to give people the choice to set up the home in the way that they want. Being long-term sort of experiencing homelessness or maybe being incarcerated or being through a violent relationship and through some very, very intensive care and support can mean that when you're moving house and you're moving into a safe space, but that might be in social housing. It might be away from where your family and other support has been.
You might've had to have moved the kids into a new school. It's feeling very different and foreign. And if you're, firstly, if you're sleeping on the floor waiting for assistance, then that's not a good outcome because for a woman potentially who's escaped violence, it's a real time of risk of potentially choosing to go back to a perpetrator, choosing effectively violence over living in poverty. So we're trying to counter that by timing the move, timing the shopping appointment around when people have got the keys and then we move them the next day to fully set up their home.
But the choice is also a really important part of that stage because if you can feel good in your home, if you can want to go home and want that to be a safe space, I think a really good example, young people who have been experiencing homelessness getting them into a home is actually a challenge. We think it's the answer. We think it's the perfect thing. It's a safe space, a roof over their head. But if you've been sleeping rough for a while, you're probably more comfortable sleeping on the streets.
So to move people into a home that's chosen by them, all the furniture and homewares are chosen by them. It's a really important step towards making that restart a real success.
Michelle
I think a lot of people can never imagine what that must be like. I mean, I think some people… A lot of us got a little bit of a hint of it with COVID hitting and I've noticed it with my clients, how much more emphasis there is on the home being so special to people and this is where they come down and feel safe and all that kind of stuff. But if you've been through so much trauma, starting again, having a safe space to come home to that you have chosen so many things for is a good starting point, right? It's a good foundation.
And the fact that you are able to deliver the goods that they've chosen, the things they've chosen the next day is amazing, right? They don't have to wait. The excitement is still there, hopefully. And again, if you can follow ReLove on social media because they have so many amazing success stories. And I believe you were with Rose Jackson only the other day, furnishing new homes that are hopefully being built soon, were they small, tiny homes or things like that?
Ben
No, look, this is actually quite a sizable home. It's a kit of parts, two bedroom apartment. So the kit of parts is under what's called modern methods of construction research, where they're building these effectively kit apartments that can then stack vertically and sort of horizontally. They're a really beautiful space. There's room for a study. There's room to play for kids. And, yeah, the New South Wales government and Homes New South Wales are taking this really seriously to invest in this sort of research. They've got some amazing research partners along as well called Building 4.0 CRC, which is all university-based research, some really smart, practical people involved.
And ReLove furnished this particular, so example home, just as an example of what we can do as well. So all pre-loved furniture, excess furniture and homewares we fitted out this space in a really beautiful and dignified way.
Michelle
So now everybody knows what ReLove is about. You guys are based in Alexandria. This is where the exciting bit, if you're listening and you want to get involved, how can people get involved? How can companies get involved and help ReLove really take it to the next level?
Ben
So we need community partners, we need corporate partners. If we focus maybe on sort of people, community first people can get involved in so many ways. As you mentioned, we're always looking for great quality donations of furniture. Moving house, downsizing, potentially deceased estates are all really good examples of when people are coming up with furniture that they no longer need.
We need it to be in great condition. We do ask for photos if possible, just so we can check the size and the condition. And the other thing that we ask is that we have two trucks and a van who are basically delivering to people every day, like right across Greater Sydney. So if you think about five large scale home moves a day, that's what we're supporting each and every day. So we just don't have the funding or the resources to be collecting furniture all around Sydney at this stage. So we really ask people, try to join us and be part of the community and if it's possible to get the furniture to us in Alexandria, we've got some wonderful removal partners, some air tasker partners both on a large and small scale that we ask people to get it to us. But we need donations.
Chest of drawers, we're always running low on. Our coffee tables, we're always running low on. Currently, we're low on bedside tables. Great, great quality beds. We do take mattresses, but they've just got to be completely stain and mark free. So we're always looking for grapes for great quality things that can be rehomed.
Also with the community, we were looking for volunteers. So this organisation, we're typically getting around 10 to 15 community volunteers a day. People come into the warehouse in Alexandria or our new ReStory Social Enterprise, which hopefully we can also talk about as well in Surry Hills. And so much of what we do at ReLove is supported by community volunteers. So our community volunteers are coordinating the client's shopping experience. They greet the client with their caseworker. They spend a bit of time just to make sure that the client's aware that it's a safe space, that we're going to be supporting them through this process, and then just go through some of the logistics of what we'll be doing.
Make them aware too that the ethos is to take what you need. So we're not working on a list or we're not sort of saying no unreasonably to requests. It's very much take what you need. And then those community volunteers are also helping with getting the items ready to load up for the next day when our team will pack them into the truck.
There's no pressure to lift heavy items at all. We've got the teams to do that and we've got a whole range and ages of our community volunteers from 20 to 80, so really sort of anyone can get involved in that.
For community volunteers too, I think we'd love to put the word out just to help us spread the word. We don't have a marketing team, we don't have a budget to spread the word. We've got our annual dinner coming up in May next year. We're going to do an activation in November, December for the UN 16 days of activism against gender based violence. So we're really looking for a community to be involved in that might be volunteering or it might be as a guest. So lots and lots of ways for the community to get involved.
And then corporates, we're really looking for sort of broader relationships. So, furniture donations from your offices, thinking about furniture suppliers with end-of-season stock, with stuff that maybe the boxes are damaged or it's last season's fashion, et cetera. And this is right across homewares as well, It doesn't just have to be furniture.
Corporates, we're also just looking to work with people on a partnership basis. So that partnership might be transport partners, might be corporate volunteering, it might be warehouse sort of overflow storage. So please think creatively about how we can work together to make this change happen.
Michelle
Yeah, amazing. So the corporate days that you do, you basically have teams from different companies come and they help you work through the list of that day. It's a great team building exercise.
Ben
Yeah, that's right. So, yeah, so it's a great team building exercise, as you say. We have corporates of anywhere from 10 people to 20 is probably our sweet spot, but we have hosted groups as large as 100. And we usually divide up the teams. In the smaller teams we'll divide them up into equal numbers and some will go out on the truck or so alongside our train delivery and equipment, so our train a delivery and removals team to help people move in. We'll have teams walking alongside the shopping appointments and and we'll have teams helping to organise the free store.
A really good team building exercise is to make flat pack furniture. So we often have the flat pack furniture challenge and it's so interesting seeing how people approach those days. But look, it's a direct way to give back. There is nothing token about our team team volunteering days. And it's a really important way, I think, just for corporations and for people working there to engage and to be part of this growing community.
Michelle
Yeah, it's a great way to help as a company if you don't necessarily have huge amounts of money to donate or goods, you don't work in that service. You mentioned ReStory. Talk me through that.
Ben
Yes, so ReStory is our new social enterprise. We get so much great quality furniture and homewares donated to ReLove that we have started selling some items. It will never take away from what we're providing to clients as part of the free store, but we have excess, often designer pieces, where we can sell to to help fund this change, to help fund the cost of the warehouse rent, to help fund out our trained warehouse and delivery staff to do what we do.
The rough metric is that when we sell, say a chair for $500 within ReStory, and we have some beautiful curated items, that chair or something worth $500 is furnishing a full home for someone. It's all in our costs for furnishing a home, including the delivery to set up the home. And we're typically providing $10,000 to $15,000 worth of furniture to people for free.
So it's a really powerful leveraged impact. So a contribution in terms of buying some beautifully curated pre-loved items. We've got chairs from Herman Miller, from Living Edge, from Space, Coco Republic, some really lovely furniture, some more vintage styles as well, but very much curated for our store. And this is where we're hoping is a sustainable way that we can help fund the growth in ReLove. We've currently got a pop-up space, which is really worth having a look at. It's a beautiful space, The Kirk Church in Surry Hills. The Kirk is on Cleveland Street in Surry Hills. It's 322 Cleveland Street. It's just opposite the new Wonderlic Lane development, which has the Olympus Restaurant and some great bars and other venues there. And the Kirk was built, we think, in the 19th century, and it's been there for a very, very long time. And it was owned by a wonderful Sydney character called Madam Lash. Madam Lash used to have some some really wild parties there, which have included, for example…
Michelle
With a main name like that, sure!
Ben
Exactly. She is amazing. And she actually came in recently. We have a great photo, I think from the late 70s, early 80s, of Madame Lash with the high boots on, sort of standing up by the door leaning against the front door. And now Madame Lash looks equally amazing and she came and posed for exactly the same photo. This space has been wonderfully donated by the Toga Group. They're getting ready to develop it at some stage. They're going to, we understand, turn it into a restaurant but keep the Church facade. And so it's going to be developed at some stage. But what a great link now to ReLove using this beautiful old space with so much history and colour to it with our process of rehoming people in a sustainable way.
Michelle
So if you're listening to this and you have just bought, this is the first place you need to go shopping, if nothing else, because it sounds like not only will you be finding amazing pieces, but you'll be doing great, amazing work towards kindness and helping a world that is getting harsher and more intolerant in many ways.
So thank you so much, Ben, for coming on and giving me your time to talk about ReLove.
ReLove, if you are looking for the website, it is relove.org.au. Please check out the website. Please check out how you can donate your high quality goods alright, no rubbish they don't want any rubbish.
But think of it as an alternative if perhaps you're previously thinking about vinnies or otherwise and think about donating your time, think about your business, how can your business help free love because I tell you what, we can all help each other a little bit more in this world. And I think re-love is one of those places you need to go if you want to do that.
Thank you, Ben, again, for your time. I loved having you on and I will certainly be back, either helping you sew some cushions or bringing my team along for a corporate day.
Thank you everyone for listening. If you have any questions for me or for Ben, of course, drop me a line at hello@buyyourside.com.au
Thank you for listening and until next time.