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Customer Story • Furniture & Space Design
The Alice Aycock Poe Center for Health Education • Raleigh, NC • celebrating 35 years
Old school. In the best way.
How Kennedy refreshed the Poe Center's senior offices on a nonprofit's budget and timeline, and made the install matter as much as the furniture.
After: a senior director's office, refreshed in American Elm
Customer
The Poe Center
Sector
Nonprofit • Health education
Location
Raleigh, NC
With Kennedy
10+ years
Project
Senior director, directors', and back offices
Furniture
Executive desk, L-desk, wall storage
Finishes
American Elm & Designer White laminate, Silver metal
Installation
Completed in one day
The Challenge
The setup wasn't working anymore.
The Poe Center had reshuffled its offices and moved all of its senior directors into one area. The furniture that came with them was old and, as Dan Peterson put it, "not real functional" for the work the team does every day.
The Poe Center for Health Education is a nonprofit. It has brought health education to people of all ages in 97 of North Carolina's 100 counties since 1991, and every dollar is spoken for. The directors needed better furniture without overspending, on a timeline that could move with the Center's funding.
The Solution
One team that met them where they were.
Sarah Troxell handled the measuring. Then she and account rep Sarah Clayton put together a recommendation built around function and budget: good furniture at a fair price. They kept the budget front of mind the whole way, and never made the Poe Center feel bad for needing to watch it.
The project stretched out. Funding came and went, priorities shifted, and the work paused more than once. Kennedy never pushed. When the Poe Center was ready to pick it back up, the team was right there. And when the scope grew to add wall storage in two more offices, they measured the new spaces and worked them into the plan.
"They basically just met us wherever we needed to be."
On install day, two Kennedy installers finished the whole job in a single day. Sarah Clayton stayed on-site the entire time, working as the point of contact between the crew and Dan, so he never had to run the installation himself.
When something wasn't right
The desktops with the matching flaw.
Two of the new desktops arrived with a small nick in the exact same spot, almost certainly a manufacturing defect. Kennedy is the one who caught it. Before the end of the day they had placed a replacement order, and about a week later they were back to swap the tops out.
"I didn't have to re-coordinate any of that. It was just very easy, really good customer service."
"It's an old-school experience, and I mean that in the best way possible. Customer service is such a unicorn now."
Dan PetersonFacility Senior Specialist • The Poe CenterThe Results
Offices people are proud to walk into.
Spaces that used to be "cobbled together" now look the part. One senior director's L-shaped desk made her workspace more functional, and the new wall storage cut the clutter and gave the team room to get organized.
"As people come in and look around, they go, 'wow, what happened? This looks great.' Everyone took more pride in how the office looked."
"The installation was, to me, as important as the furniture itself. There were so many pieces that the way it looked could have been all over the map. It wasn't."
"It's not just a transaction. They actually care about people."
The Space
See it for yourself.
The same senior office, before and after. Photos provided by the Poe Center.
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