Vari
Repositioning a company named after its own product
Role: Content Writer, Vari (2017–2019)
Scope: Sole full-time writer across web, print, out-of-home, radio, product documentation, and app copy
Vari invented the mainstream desktop converter category. The VariDesk sit-stand converter was the product that made the company, and for a few years being the sit-stand desk company was enough.
Sit-stand was always going to be a finite category. The next phase was a full line of flexible office furniture sold to businesses and to individuals, which meant the company had to learn to talk about itself as something larger than the product it was named after.
I was the only full-time writer through that transition.
75%
of all copy produced at the company, written by me
The flagship problem
Everyone who knew Vari knew it as a desk riser. That recognition was the most valuable thing the company had, but it was also a potential barrier to being able to sell a chair, a file cabinet, or a movable wall.
The conversation between the creative team and marketing leadership went on for weeks. Retire the old name and take the hit to recognition, or keep it and risk the new categories becoming muddy and confusing. What we landed on was keeping VariDesk and changing its job. It stopped being what the company was and became proof of what the company could do: the original flagship and the evidence of the quality standard.
The line the work organized around was Flexible Office Furniture Made Simple. The line running across Vari’s site today, Better Workspaces Made Simple, is a later evolution of it.
Selling the same desk twice
We never traded the consumer audience for the business one. The business side started with education and government rather than a direct run at Steelcase and Herman Miller, because cooperative purchasing made those buyers reachable first.
For a campus or government buyer, the job was removing a procurement obstacle: use the budget you already have, order it without a bid cycle, have it delivered direct. For a person buying one desk for a spare bedroom, the job was justifying a personal expense: real quality at a price that makes sense, assembly you can do yourself, free returns if you don’t love it.
One buyer needed permission to spend money that was already theirs. The other needed permission to spend their own.
What shipped
Product pages, category pages, and industry landing pages. A 35-page lookbook. Print advertising, magazine placements, billboards and other out-of-home, streaming radio. Product instructions. All of the in-app copy for a phone app that let shoppers place Vari furniture in their own rooms before buying, including the interface strings, the setup walkthrough, and the app store listing.
For every piece, I worked with a strategic design partner. Our creative team functioned as an internal agency: briefed, free to execute, reviewed by the creative director.
Still live in 2026
the education industry page runs nearly verbatim as written, seven years and one replatform later
Academic Office Furniture | Vari
Industry landing page, still live
VariDesk Pro Plus 36 | Vari
Product page for the original flagship
Vari Lookbook | Vari
35 pages, shown here in a later revision
The lookbook
Before it there was a product catalog, which is a grid of things you can buy. The creative director wanted something modern and thematic instead and handed me the project. I ran it with a design partner and pitched the concept up to the VP.
Thirty-five pages, working as a sales leave-behind, a trade show piece, and a direct mail drop. Furniture sold as rooms people would want to work in rather than as SKUs with dimensions attached.
Marianne Chrisos 