Furnish a student apartment – with box spring, mattress, desk, coffee table or even sofa – for “roughly 300 to 350 euros”. This is what the site offers to newcomers from Toulouse
Bobby. Bobby, like “the muscular buddy we call for a move.” If the two friends, Pauline and Paula, who are hiding behind him are rather frail, they have nevertheless adopted a mover look over the past few weeks: jeans and sneakers, loose T-shirt. You need that to leave with the van, the one currently borrowed from Pauline’s father, to deliver the students to downtown Toulouse. Especially since they offer a “delivery to the apartment” option, regardless of the floor.
It was Pauline who had the idea of creating Bobby, joined a few months later by her childhood friend. At 24, and after studying engineering, in Paris for one, Castres for the other, they returned to their parents to devote themselves to this inevitably seasonal foray into the world of second hand.
“We would have needed a Bobby during our studies,” jokes Paula. And not just for financial reasons. “It is really too stupid that the solution is to buy new furniture in large retailers, even if they are not expensive, when there is already a whole pile in circulation in an acceptable state”, explain in chorus the two comrades with the ecological fiber in front of their cave of Ali Baba.
An online quest for orphan furniture
Stacked bed bases, lamps to be screwed on and a number of chairs are piled up in the boxes rented from a logistics company in Saint-Orens. To obtain them, the two girls have a technique of their own: “We scour online sales sites and we identify furniture that remains for a long time,” explains Pauline. Then, they call the seller offering to come and get rid of them. Happy to be relieved in this way, the sellers often agree to donate the merchandise and even add bonus furniture on occasion.
Then, Pauline and Paula, clean, cut the threads which protrude from the fabrics, sometimes bicker over the estimate. Then head for the photo studio, in fact a box with pinned white sheets and a sofa not yet sold, and here is the furniture on the site. As word of mouth has worked during the summer, some donors spontaneously come forward: Toulouse Métropole for office chairs (vintage orange) or Science Po, which is renewing part of its furniture.
In spirit, Bobby’s good deals are only for students. But obviously Pauline and Paula are not “coping” with buyers. They are satisfied with a declaration on their honor. And are delighted to see, for the past two weeks, that the young people who are waiting for the duo’s combi at the foot of their building have good student faces.