Koala WFH Desk

Covid 19 changed the way Australians worked and will have an impact on flexible workspace arrangements for years. Furniture retailers relied heavily on imported products and faced supply shortages leading to customers looking for online simple solutions. Customers also settled for "second best" options, including the dining table, kitchen bench or other impractical, aesthetically challenged solutions. The focus for this desk was to improve the single most pressing pain point found within existing desks: How to organise and hide cables and devices that are used in an everyday work environment, with easy assembly and aesthetics to fit into a home.

It is accessible to the majority, meeting an immediate and unique need. Through ethnographic research, we identified that desks should be functional but aesthetically pleasing. With so many working from home, it provides an attractive, cost effective, easy to distribute solution that is packed with simple features. The desk fits any room, with no tools or fixings required to put it together, smartly placed cable management slots, a device stand to hold a phone or tablet, and a multi-purpose hanger to hold onto headphones. Through rapid iterative testing we achieved a simple assembly and thoughtful product experience, delivered with ease.

The impact of the desk showed Australians that Koala was willing and able to adapt into a different space in a short period of time to meet people's needs. Known more for mattresses, the team worked around the clock as soon as the announcement came that everybody would have to work from home, and within a few weeks the desk was available. Not only was the design functional, well-made, and aesthetically pleasing, but it was affordable and made locally, supporting an Australian team putting them together and ensuring consumers wouldn't be severely out of pocket during an uncertain time.

The Koala WFH Desk features No Tools Assembly that only takes 4 minutes to set up, making it accessible for anybody to get to work quickly. It also comes with a 5 year warranty and Koala's famous 120 night trial. Designed by the Koala design team and made in Ballarat, it is a quick and easy solution for the current (and uncertain) changes to working from home or studying from home. It features high Quality 18mm ply / Birch Veneer, with storage hooks for bags/headphones/cables, a phone/tablet storage "gutter" and cable management on the rear of the worktop to keep things tidy. The worktop is Anti-Microbial, with a UV stable powder coat finish, VOC Free Powder coated worktop, hand finished and sanded. It's sustainable and durable with a functional desktop size (1200mm x 600mm), more than enough room Sustainability is embedded in our material strategy that embodies using limited processes and materials to support low wastage in production, keeping costs down and then balanced production capability, design language and a logistic profile Vs assembly-ease balance. The kids WFH desk is therefore mainly made from the offcuts of the standard WFH desk.