MNN - Mother Nature Network

Visit the New York showroom of Vivavi, a furniture store that offers elegant options with an eco-focus.

Aron Kressner: So, we have some people who literally just walk in and they say, “Where’s all the green stuff? Like, I like that couch, but you know, where is of your eco stuff?”  

And that was really what Vivavi hit on, I think before most, or I would dare to say before anybody else really did. Was that we brought in that aesthetic that so many green companies, at least then, were lacking.

So, at its most basic level, Vivavi really brings to life two ideas: it brings to life the idea of high design and then obviously this concept of green, or, you know, sustainable. So everything we carry, every product that we sell is truly a green product, truly sustainable.

We work with about fifty different designers, started out mostly here in New York. And now we literally work with people in Austria, New Zealand, you know, we have a number of different designers.

So the couch is actually a great example.  The frame of the couch, or the skeleton of the couch, is all FSC woods. So that means it is wood that is responsibly sourced and it is all third-party-certified.  The fabrics are all organic, they have organic cotton, organic canvases, hemp - you know, a few different options.

And then, the actual guts of the couch- there’s not petroleum–based products in there. There’s no, what we call VOCs, or volatile organic compounds. So it is called off gassing. There are no chemicals being emitted into the atmosphere of your apartment. So you’re actually breathing cleaner air as a result of your green couch.

Even the big box stores are starting to come around to this. And whether their motivation is marketing, or it is some real, genuine ethos for the planet, that is fine. You know, the idea is to make the change happen and to make the change happen now.

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Editor's note: Josh Dorfman, the Lazy Environmentalist, and a columnist for MNN, is the founder and CEO of Vivavi.