Garobox | Office for the Garden | Innovation from Münsterland
The home office in your own garden: The Garobox®
© Heinrich Wietholt GmbH
Innovation Story
Garobox®

The home office in your own garden: The Garobox®

Heinrich Wietholt GmbH

Instead of working at home at the kitchen table in the middle of the countryside, you can still enjoy the advantages of a home office: The Garobox® makes it possible. The garden office has everything you need for working from home, from noise protection to power supply.

Find out more about the innovation from Münsterland on this page.

Heinrich Wietholt GmbH, Velen

The company Heinrich Wietholt GmbH from Velen provides advice on all office-related issues, from office supplies to furnishings and technology. With currently over 100 employees, Wietholt is one of the leading trading and service companies in the office sector in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Challenge: Home office, but lack of space

More and more people work regularly in a home office. There is not always enough space in the house or flat for a separate study. But working at the kitchen table, in the basement or in the attic, many lack the peace and space for concentrated work, phone calls and video conferences. When more and more employers sent their employees to work from home at the beginning of the Corona pandemic in 2020, Markus Steinkamp, managing partner of Wietholt, was clear: a sensible alternative to working at the kitchen table was needed, additional space for home office was needed. That was the birth of the Garobox®, a home office in the middle of one's own garden.

Solution approach: An office for the garden

Heinrich Wietholt GmbH from Velen has developed the Garobox®.
© Heinrich Wietholt GmbH

Markus Steinkamp put together a project team that developed the first drawings and plans for the Wietholt Garden Office - Garobox® at many meetings. Only a few weeks later, the first Wietholt garden office was built on the company's premises in Velen in close cooperation with the neighbouring carpentry firm Strotmann. The Garobox® is produced by hand in Münsterland, is made of spruce and larch wood and is equipped with insulated walls and quadruple-glazed sun protection windows.

The power supply has also been thought of. On request, Wietholt can supply the Garobox® including outdoor lighting, an electric motor-driven height-adjustable standing-sitting table, office swivel chair, sideboard and floor lamp. In order to safely set up the Garobox® in the garden, a level, solid surface is required as well as a power connection. A building permit is not required in most municipalities.

Success: High demand, enormous attention

This is what the Garobox® looks like.
© Heinrich Wietholt GmbH

Heinrich Wietholt GmbH has been selling the Garobox® since autumn 2020. It is available for a hire-purchase price with or without equipment and is already in the first gardens. Because home offices are increasingly in demand due to the Corona pandemic, the Garobox® has already attracted enormous attention from the cooperation partners. Wietholt wants to start marketing the Garobox® in spring 2021 and win DIY stores as distribution partners. For Wietholt, the garden office is a unique selling point: because until now, there has been no comparable offer in the office equipment sector anywhere in Germany.

More innovation stories from the region

Enabling Networks Innovation Stories

As a regional joint initiative, Enabling Networks Münsterland supports companies and universities in the Münsterland region in developing innovations, implementing them and finding the right partners for the project. In order to show how innovative and at the same time cooperative Münsterland already is, the project also went in search of innovative cooperation projects from the region. The results are presented on this page. The Enabling Networks Münsterland project is funded by the European Union and the NRW Ministry of Economics as part of the ERDF call "Regio.NRW".

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