About Brook Furniture Rental, Chicago, Bob Crawford, and Company history
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Brook Furniture Rental offers a full line of residential and office furnishings for temporary use for individuals and changing corporations in a highly mobile society.
High quality furniture, combined with impeccable service tailored to personal taste, characterize the company in its continuing drive toward 100% customer satisfaction.
Brook Furniture Rental provides service to the following large geographic markets throughout the United States: San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Diego,
Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Atlanta, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, and Philadelphia.
At Brook Furniture Rental, we guarantee 100% customer satisfaction. Confident in our ability to precisely meet your needs, we stand behind 4 key promises:
Furniture: If for any reason you are unhappy with an item you receive, contact us within
1 week of delivery and we will replace the item(s) with furniture of equal value at no charge.
If an issue cannot be mutually resolved, we will pick up the furniture and refund your initial payment.
Customer Service: Any voice message left during normal business hours with our showroom,
customer service, or concierge team will be returned in 4 hours or less.
Schedule: We guarantee delivery on the date promised, and to notify you with a "call ahead" telephone call on
the delivery day. We guarantee to pick up your furniture within 2 business days of the requested date.
Billing: Questions about your bill will be quickly and thoroughly reviewed.
If you have not received your bill or feel it is incorrect we will resolve and correct the issue within 24 hours.
Brook Furniture Rental, Inc. was founded in 1979 when Robert W. Crawford Jr., current Chairman and Chief Executive Officer,
bought the assets of a small troubled Chicago furniture rental company with annual revenue of about $500,000.
At that time, Brook Furniture Rental ranked seventh among the seven Chicago area furniture rental companies.
Mr. Crawford identified an untapped opportunity in the marketplace and
Mr. Crawford's strategy focused on building a strong furniture rental brand targeted to the segment of people who desired higher quality furniture and more responsive service.
During the 1980s, Brook transitioned its product line into higher quality furnishings and developed a culture of dedicated service and unflinching standards of excellence in furniture rental.
This paved the way for significant growth both through acquisitions and entrance into new markets.
By 1985, due to the successful strategies and plans Mr. Crawford put in place, Brook had become the Chicago area's largest furniture rental company.
In 1985, Brook Furniture Rental opened a showroom in the greater Milwaukee area, the first foray into markets outside of Chicago.
In 1990, Brook Furniture Rental purchased the California and Las Vegas Bruener's Furniture Rental operations of California-based John Breuner Co.
This acquisition gave Brook an immediate presence in multiple fast growing California markets.
Also that year, Brook purchased various operations of competitors in Milwaukee and Chicago,
further bolstering the Company's presence in and around its home markets.
Over the next three years, Brook Furniture Rental continued to purchase smaller furniture rental operations of companies in Southern California, integrating these companies into its existing California operations.
In 1999, Brook Furniture Rental entered the Dallas Fort Worth market with the opening of a new showroom and distribution facility.
In the year 2000, Brook Furniture Rental entered the Atlanta area with a showroom and distribution facility.
The year 2000 continued to be a busy year, as Brook purchased the Washington, D.C. residential furniture rental business of ExecuStay by Marriott.
In 2006, to serve the growth of the Washington DC region, Brook Furniture Rental added a new distribution center and showroom in Lanham, MD.
One new showroom in Fairfax, VA was added for a total of 2 showrooms in the greater Washington DC area.
In 2009, Brook Furniture Rental made a few strategic changes to increase its ability to serve its core customer base with increasing levels of service across large, major growth markets.
The company chose to exit the Las Vegas market to focus its resources on larger markets.
The company began to provide furniture rental service to Austin, Texas, and opened up a new distribution center in Houston, Texas
which increased its ability to reach customers in the important Texas market.
And Brook Furniture Rental opened a new downtown Chicago showroom to support the needs of the large, dynamic, and diverse Chicago market.
Today, thirty years after its beginning, Brook Furniture Rental has revenue exceeding $60 million.
The Brook Furniture Rental brand has become synonymous with quality, service, and integrity.
In just 30 years, Brook Furniture Rental has become the second largest company (and the largest privately held company) in the domestic rent-to-rent segment of the U.S. furniture rental industry.
In 1979, when Robert W. Crawford Jr. purchased the of Chicago assets of Broyhill Furniture Rental, his first task was to choose a new name for his new company.
He wanted a name that was near to the front of the alphabet, was preferably one syllable, was easy to pronounce, and had positive connotations.
Over a period of days, he literally read the entire dictionary and narrowed down the name to 3 good choices: Crown, Beacon, and Brook.
After reviewing the merits and benefits of these 3 good options, Mr. Crawford came to believe that Brook had great appeal due to its positive connotations and favorable imagery.
The Brook name was shorter and it was a little softer and easier to say.
Today, we are very happy that he made the choice to call our company Brook Furniture Rental!
Our goal at Brook Furniture Rental is to help our customers "Simplify Change." Our customers come to Brook when they are in some sort of life transition.
The family may be relocating in the middle of the school year and the kids want to finish the school year with their friends.
A company is starting a short term project in a new location and needs to have offices and workstations for just a short period of time.
A family may have suffered a house fire and needs a furnished home to live in temporarily.
One spouse may be taking a short term assignment and will be commuting from Monday to Friday for 18 months while the family stays in their current location.
A homeowner wants to sell their vacant home quicker and needs furniture to increase the appeal to prospective buyers.
Our Brook Furniture Rental team members understand and assist our customers in the transitions that they may be experiencing.
We aim to make the process of transition as easy and comfortable as possible.
Whether you go through one of our showrooms or our Concierge service, you will find our team members dedicated to helping you find high quality
rental furniture, and we are committed to making the process easy for you.
Brook Furniture Rental has an extensive furniture assortment serving the needs of homes and offices.
Rental furniture styles can be broadly summarized into three categories:
Contemporary Furnishings
Most often used in urban settings, contemporary furniture is usually defined as being compact in size and visually light in scale.
Shapes are generally sleek, lines are sharp and more pronounced, and design features are minimally decorative.
Wood tones range from very dark to very light. The use of glass, metal, leather, and textured fabrics are common in contemporary furniture.
Traditional Furnishings
Traditional furniture appears more generous in scale, lending itself for use in larger spaces.
Shapes are usually rounded and more ornamental in design. Volumes of pillows frequently appoint upholstered items.
Dining, bedroom, and occasional furniture is generally featured in medium to dark toned wood and trimmed with decorative elements.
Transitional Furnishings
As its name suggests, transitional furniture blends multiple styles.
Traditional and contemporary themes are evident along with elements of Asian and African styles.
Often, a comfortable, neutral toned sofa is complemented with a boldly patterned and brightly colored accent chair.
Dining and bedroom furniture with minimal, simple lines may include a combination of wood tones.
Alternatively, a mix of round and linear forms combine to create a unique piece of furniture.
At Brook Furniture Rental, we work with our furniture manufacturing partners to stay at the leading edge of style in contemporary,
traditional, and transitional furniture. Check out our collections or browse our on-line catalog to view the many types of diverse furniture styles we have!
We have the opportunity at Brook Furniture Rental to work with many different types customers.
We provide customized furniture rental service to international business transferees, professional athletes, visiting professors, real estate agents,
homeowners, and stagers. We rent furniture to people starting businesses who want to preserve cash, government GSA purchasing agents,
and people going through home loss or a marital separation.
We work with individuals who walk into our showrooms or find us through the internet.
We partner with apartment communities who want to rent furnished apartments to prospective tenants.
We rent furniture to large corporate housing companies that work with multinational companies that transfer business people from one market to another.
At Brook Furniture Rental, we rent furniture to CEOs, senior executives who have a staff to coordinate their move,
to small business owners who are moving themselves. We work with people who are elated as they have earned a promotion
and are relocating to start a new job in their career.
We also work with people who have lost their entire homes to a fire or flood. It is both humbling and inspiring to be working with people in these life transitions.
With every customer, we understand that we must help to simplify someone's life, to add comfort to ease the transition that they are going through.
We at Brook Furniture Rental care about serving our customers with "Extreme Service."
We have even trademarked the term "Extreme Service, Today, Tomorrow, and Forever!"™.
This idea guides us and constantly reminds us of the importance of focusing on our customers.
This idea also helps us to anticipate how our customers are going to change in the future, so we can be committed to higher levels of customer partnership.
We at Brook Furniture Rental believe that we are in a business that can benefit the environment.
We seek to be on the leading edge of recycling furnishings, and we refurbish and remanufacture our furniture as often as possible.
At every opportunity, we recycle furniture and minimize the amount of wasteful discarding of furniture.
We aim to meet customers' high quality standards for furniture while also being able to recycle furniture, which benefits the environment.
Additionally, at Brook Furniture Rental, we operate our distribution centers with environmentally oriented objectives in mind and
implement many processes that seek to improve our results as it relates to how we treat our natural resources. Please read more about our environmental plans here.
In contrast to other furniture rental companies that have branched out into other adjacent categories like corporate housing or apartment search,
Brook Furniture Rental remains committed solely to the furniture rental industry.
We believe that there is great potential in simply being the best in the furniture rental industry.
Being involved in other business segments of the marketplace diverts focus on our customers, and we remain committed to our customers
and to the furniture rental industry.
We call our people who work at Brook Furniture Rental "team members." In each region, we have a distribution center, a clearance center, and team members who call on customers. Each of the seven Brook Furniture Rental regions has a General Manager that is responsible for leading the teams to meet and exceed customer expectations, and to lead the team in Perfect Execution.
At Brook Furniture Rental headquarters, called the Brook Support Center, there are people who lead the company's efforts in the following areas:
Merchandising: these team members are responsible for identifying the furniture suppliers we partner with and developing deep collaborative relationships with those suppliers.
Finance: these team members are responsible for the financial functions of analyzing the business, reporting in a timely manner, and in managing company assets.
Customer Service: these team members are responsible for collaborating with customers on questions they may have on billing or on service.
Operations: these team members are responsible for identifying best practices and working with individual distribution centers to continuously improve our operations.
IT: these team members are responsible for keeping our business processes running smoothly, efficiently, and accurately.
We pride ourselves on collaborative relationships between our field and headquarter functions. We make it a priority to have people in headquarters who know the local furniture rental markets.
Robert W. Crawford III joined Brook as Executive Vice President in February 2007. In March 2009, the Board of Directors appointed him President of the company.
He currently leads our marketing, finance, merchandising, concierge sales, IT, customer service, and operations efforts.
Mr. Crawford III came to Brook from The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta, GA, where he was Director of Marketing for the company's largest segment of the Foodservice Division.
Prior to the Coca-Cola Company, Mr. Crawford III was a brand manager at The Quaker Oats Company in Chicago.
During his high school and college years, Mr. Crawford III held various jobs at Brook. He held office jobs, worked in the Chicago area distribution center and spent a summer as a Chicago truck driver.
Mr. Crawford III earned a BA from Carleton College, a Masters degree in from the London School of Economics and an MBA in both Marketing and Finance from the University of Chicago, Booth Graduate School of Business.
Mr. Crawford founded Brook Furniture Rental, Inc. in 1979 and serves as Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, overseeing all operational functions of the Company.
Prior to founding Brook, Mr. Crawford was in sales, marketing and sales management at The Procter & Gamble Company, and a Vice President and General Manager at two privately held firms in the Midwest.
He has served as the Chairman and President of the Board of Directors of the International Furniture Rental Association and has also served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce.
He is on the Board of Trustees of the Field Museum and has served on the Advisory Council on Agriculture, Labor and Business to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
Additionally, Mr. Crawford serves as Chairman of the Chicago Regional Panel President's Commission on White House Fellowships.
Mr. Crawford is a Trustee and past President of the Board of Trustees for the National Recreation Foundation.
Mr. Crawford earned a B.S. in physics from Dickinson College and an M.B.A from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Brook Furniture Rental is the only furniture rental company listed as a Veteran Owned Small Business (VOSB) on the General Services Administration (GSA) schedule. Mr. Crawford's military service began when he enrolled in the ROTC program at Dickinson College. Upon his graduation, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army. He was a United States Army Reserve Officer from 1960 - 1968, and earned an honorable discharge in 1968. He received infantry officer basic training at Fort Benning, GA, and was on active duty at Fort Dix, NJ, and Fort Irwin, CA.
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