Turning interior walls into a circular economy business

The scale and urgency of the transformation required to fight climate change has never been more clear. Building hardware and software products, acquiring the funding and creating a diverse community to enhance talent capacity and to drive innovation, is essential to tackling this global environmental crisis. In this podcast, host Silicon Valley Bank (a division of First Citizens Bank) Climate Tech & Sustainability SVP Maggie Wong will be interviewing JUUNOO Founder Chris Van de Voorde to discuss turning interior walls into a circular economy business, scaling a circular economy startup from Belgium to rapid growth in the U.S., and the product design philosophy of relentlessly minimizing components to build simple, great products.

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Show Notes

1. Chris wrote his master’s thesis on interior walls, scaled a wall systems company to fifty million dollars in revenue in six years, and then quit because his bosses were happy and he was not. He founded JUUNOO with a specific personal mission: to make every interior wall in the world modular and reusable, which he estimates could save half a percent of global CO2 emissions. He named the company after his kids, Jules and Lanor, because they are the ones who will ask him what he did about climate change.
2. The problem JUUNOO is solving starts with a shift in commercial real estate. Office lease terms that used to run 10-15 years have compressed to 3-5 years, which means the cycle of building out and demolishing office spaces is happening far more frequently than it used to. The cost of that single-use build and tear-down cycle is now three to five times higher than it was a few decades ago. If you drive through a city, the dumpster trucks loading gypsum board represent roughly $200 per linear foot of material being thrown away.
3. JUUNOO’s answer is a system of modular glass walls, office meeting pods, and clickable drywall designed to be clicked together, clicked apart, and reinstalled somewhere else without generating waste. When a tenant leaves, JUUNOO comes in, takes everything apart, and either moves it to the tenant’s next space, sells it to someone else, or buys it back. The product is never designed to go to a landfill because it is not designed to be single-use.
4. The founding story started in a basement. Chris was alone, prototyping, and way too focused on engineering before a mentor introduced him to the Running Lean framework and told him to stop tinkering and go find out if anyone would actually pay for the product. He went out with a sketch on a piece of paper and sold his first projects from that sketch. Sales-first, customer-demand-first has been the operating principle ever since.
5. When COVID hit and Belgium locked down, Chris did not step back. He made an Excel spreadsheet comparing Paris, London, and New York on factors including product price, competition, and labor costs, and concluded that New York was the right market. The growth rate in America has since been two to three times higher than in Europe, which he attributes partly to the difference in risk tolerance between American and European business culture.
6. JUUNOO’s three company rules, in order: be sustainable, be respectful (no bullying, no asshole behavior), and then sell as much as possible and make clients happy. The order matters. A great salesperson who is not sustainable gets fired. An unsustainable client does not get served. The hierarchy is not a talking point; it is the actual decision-making framework.
7. The communication challenge Chris did not anticipate early enough was what happens when you mix European and American team members and things get tense. He has invested heavily in training his teams in what he calls crucial conversations: the ability to have difficult conversations directly and respectfully across cultural contexts. He considers this one of the things he would have focused on earlier if he were starting over.
8. On diversity, Chris frames it in pure business terms: 99.999% of the smartest people in the world do not work for his company, and that is a fact about every company. If you exclude people on the basis of anything other than their ability to contribute, you are handicapping yourself relative to competitors who do not. The argument for inclusion is not primarily moral, though the moral case also holds; it is competitive.
9. The business model becomes more profitable over time, not less. Because JUUNOO is reselling the same physical product two and three times, gross margins on the second and third sale are roughly 20% higher than on the first. There is less manufacturing complexity, less operational overhead, less stock to manage. The circular economy is not just an environmental argument at JUUNOO; it is a margin story.
10. JUUNOO’s go-to-market insight was to stop chasing architects and developers, whose sales cycles run years, and instead target tenants directly: the Capital Ones, Tiffanys, and fast-growing AI companies like Synthesia and Perplexity who have an office problem right now and need a solution right now. When those tenants outgrow their first space six months later, JUUNOO moves everything to the new office and the tenant realizes they saved a significant amount of money at end of lease. Those stories then open the doors with architects.
11. The core design principle behind JUUNOO is what Chris calls circular valuable design: engineer products so that the residual value at end of life is significantly higher than the cost of reusing them. Every component is designed to click together quickly, come apart quickly, and retain value across multiple use cycles. This is not a retrospective sustainability consideration; it is the starting constraint that shapes every design decision.
12. Chris founded the Circular Value Institute as a nonprofit to teach other companies the same design thinking. The engagement model starts with keynotes and then goes deeper with individual company workshops, where his team works with sustainability and design teams to identify which products in the portfolio are actually worth buying back and reselling. The frame is always economic: find the wins where resale is more profitable than single use, build a case for the CFO, and use that win to unlock more budget.
13. A European retailer with 70 billion dollars in annual revenue is now working toward one billion dollars in resale revenue using the Circular Value Institute framework. The insight that unlocked it was identifying which product categories, bicycles and skis, have high enough residual value and low enough reconditioning costs to make resale more profitable than the original sale. Not every product qualifies, and finding the ones that do is the work.
14. The sustainability opportunity Chris is most excited about is the shift from environmentalists making the case for sustainability to business professionals making it from an economics-first position. He uses a gravity analogy: people wanted to fly for thousands of years and kept failing because they did not understand the physics. Once they understood gravity, flight became a solvable engineering problem. Sustainability is at that same inflection point.
15. The worry that keeps him up at night is that the shift is happening too slowly. The fires in Europe, the resource scarcity, the cost of climate adaptation: these are already compounding. He is clear that he believes in what he is building and that it can scale, and he is simultaneously clear that he is not certain the world is moving fast enough to avoid the worst outcomes.
16. The new product Chris is most excited about is a clickable drywall system he has invented and patented. Traditional drywall requires mudding, taping, sanding, and generates significant dust and waste. The clickable system snaps together like laminate flooring: two boards, one click, ready to paint. It is already rolling out in Germany through partnerships with some of the largest drywall producers in the world, with a goal of reaching 20 countries within the next year to 18 months.
17. The operational challenge keeping him up at night is deglobalization. JUUNOO operates across multiple regions, and increasing supply chain complexity means the company needs to build more independent production capacity in the U.S. rather than relying on European manufacturing. It is solvable but it takes time and focused attention to get right.
18. His advice for anyone who wants to get into sustainability is to be ruthlessly selective about whose advice you take. Go only to people who have successfully done the specific thing you are trying to do. There is so much advice available that the skill is not finding it; it is filtering it. He also recommends reading, specifically Running Lean by Ash Maurya for startup mechanics and Founder Friendly by Charlie O’Donnell for understanding venture dynamics.
19. What makes a great product manager, in his view, is a relentless drive toward fewer components. His engineering team will iterate obsessively on a single metal stamping to reduce the number of manufacturing steps from five to three. Fewer components means less inventory, less complexity, easier automation, and a simpler product that is easier to maintain and improve. He points to the evolution of SpaceX’s Raptor engines as the model: the first version worked but was complex; each iteration stripped it down until the product was clean and simple.
20. The corollary to fewer components is focus. Once you have a great simple product, the temptation is to add product categories and expand scope. Chris’s advice is to resist that. Be excellent at the thing you are doing. If there is a genuinely different problem worth solving, spin out a separate company with its own focus rather than adding complexity to the core. Simplicity and focus compound over time in ways that complexity does not.